Chapter 40 - Robert the Robot
I came back a few days following the dragon expedition. When I ascended the spiral staircase from the old room, Lila was the first thing I saw. She was on the couch, hunched over, elbows on knees, head cradled in the cup made up of her hands.
“Hey,” I said. She did not shift at my voice, which felt strange. When I came up, she was motionless. I hesitantly put a hand on her shoulder, and watched as her body crumbled into sand before my eyes. Was this the Rahin’s doing? Did I somehow bring them over with me when I teleported from dragon form? I sat down on the couch in shock.
“Jack,” I heard a familiar voice, and turned to find Lila, very much alive. She sat down on the couch, then threw her legs over my lap to recline.
“Holy crap, I thought they erased you or something,” I said.
“My bad,” she said. “I’ve been leaving these stress remnants everywhere. Let me guess, you guys don’t have stress remnants in your reality.”
“No idea what those are,” I said.
“Like, when you are feeling stressed out about something, so your body shakes it off with dead skin, creating a sort of ghost of exasperation that crumbles by itself eventually, or can be touched to collapse the structure.”
“Yeah, we don’t have that,” I said.
“How does your body deal with stress?”
“We sweat, I guess,” I said. “As an involuntary response at least. There are ways of dealing with stress, but when put in a stressful situation, we heat up and sweat water out through our pores, holes in our skin.”
“So kinda like my kind,” Lila said. “We sort of expel stuff, too. Why water though? Isn’t that kinda rare?” I laughed.
“My body is eighty percent water,” I said. “We’re pretty much walking bubbles of water.” Lila looked concerned.
“That’s crazy,” she said. “I can’t even imagine being so… fluid. My world… I mean the people I’ve— you know. We are only thirty four percent water. We do have various oils plentiful in our bodies though. The womb for example is lubricated in oils, and babies are in a certain sense ‘cooked’ to birth.”
“Oil-based human,” I said, running a hand over Lila’s thigh. I felt beast give off a low growl of interest, and met Lila’s eyes. “Interesting.” Her eyes hovered in question, but I waited for her to tell me that she was with Kara.
“I would,” she said. “I would like to, but Kara’s not really into open relationships. You should hear what she did to James when he accidentally had sex with some creatures he met in a strange world. Sorry, Jack, beast. I could— do a handy, if you’d be up for that.” She slipped her hand between my thighs to find beast already prepared. I tilted my head back while she played with it connected directly to beast. In just a few minutes of it, it was over. I buttoned up my pants and closed the zipper she opened.
“So, how’s adjusting to adult Tarne?” I asked.
“Well, for one thing,” Lila said. “She won’t stop masturbating out in the open. I don’t get it. I mean I DO get it, but it’s her mom’s mostly that will see it, so there should be some degree of restraint, right?”
“Hey, don’t ask me,” I said. “My shame and such has been ingrained in my mind from very young. I guess it was taught like— like gospel, I guess. That’s what that was. Quiet and private is what it is for me, but beast always wants to scream out at climax, cheer at the explosion of pleasure. I suppose that’s how it’s meant to feel, but society makes you feel bad about it and keep your pleasure private. It’s weird.”
“Other than that, I can’t even tell her what works best,” Lila said. “I mean, I’m not like her. She’s got your bubble of water body, not my oil-based masterpiece.”
“Wow, high opinion of yourself there,” I said with a smile.
“I say masterpiece, but then again the oils in our bodies make us quite flammable, so maybe it’s not that great.” I imagined her blowing up a building and every oil-based person lighting on fire in sequence. It would suck to be that flammable. Humans were partially flammable too, coated in hair, and creating oils on the surface of their skin, not to mention the creation of methane from ingested food.
“Maybe you should make a boyfriend for Tarne,” I suggested. “Or girlfriend. It could be like a robot with basic functions based upon some human being.”
“You think that will make her more private with the jerking off?” Lila asked.
“You could make him bind to her bedroom,” I said. “But she’d be doing more than going solo with him. I’m talking full on intercourse, with moaning and everything. You can easily alleviate that with some sound-proofing though.”
“Yup,” Lila said. “I’ve done that for our bedroom, so that Kara and I can go full beast on each other.” I felt the rattling at beast cage, and smiled.
“Just— don’t make the robot too…” I started.
“Sentient?” Lila completed.
“Yeah, I guess,” I said. I wanted to say “important for Tarne”, but it felt like a stupid thing to say. “I hope it works out, and remember to find time for yourself and Kara, ‘cause sex does help relieve stress.” Lila was about to say something, but gave up on it. I had a notion of what she wanted to say.
“Thanks,” she said. “I guess this is at an end, huh?”
“Yeah,” I said. “We’re just waiting for the collapse of the universe now.”
“We never did get to have fun like back in the day, did we?”
“We will,” I said. “For now, a blast from the past. Here is a story I don’t think I’ve given to you yet. It’s about me. I don’t know if you’ll find it interesting, I know most people wouldn’t, but there is an element of fantasy to it, with my past. I figured you should know it if we end up separated. I don’t want this book in untethered space, though, so burn it after you read it.” I tapped my forehead three times and brought Finnelgamin into existence.
“Got it.” With the book in her hands, I sank into the couch to exit.
break
I came back after a lazy Saturday and a productive Sunday. Summer arrived with a war cry of a stuffy ninety Fahrenheit sunny day. Though true measured summer was still a few weeks away, this weekend was a taste of what was to come. I entered the library to see how Lila fared with Finnelgamin’s story, exposing the start that made our meeting possible. It was insanity unbound, and would probably never be published for the public eye (psych!), but it held a special place in my heart. Weirdly enough, so did she.
Lila was not there. I entered through the front door again, to an empty hall of shelves that should have had books on them, but the tomes on the shelves were only stand-in blanks. I thought back to Rebecca’s time when the books contained my whole mind for her learning. That was a mistake. At the beginning of this, those books were filled with stories Lila read and completed. Some ending up spanning multiple parts. I remembered Garavand expanding to something wild. They were now lost in the darkness of untethered space, possibly interacting with the void leeches and creating past troubles for Kara and the Order of the Keir. The records that Lila put onto the laptop on the other hand, were atomized while letting Rebecca go, leaving the library pretty barren.
“Hey,” I heard above me, and turned to find Kara leaning on the railing above.
“Hey, Kara,” I said. “Lila around?” She remained silent for a moment, while looking over the library from above.
“How long do you think until the Rahin come back and erase all this?”
“I honestly thought I’d just come back and all of it would be gone,” I said, then teleported up to her side and leaned over the rail just like her.
“That might still happen,” she said.
“The Rahin don’t seem to have a concept of time,” I said.
“It’s kinda… wobbly,” Kara said. “But they do have progression of time. It’s not like they’re the Nth Goni. That Nth Infinity is a class act of timelessness. Within it, you get to scroll around time AND alternate universes. It’s their X and Y axis. The claws do everything else, portals in space and shifting between dimensions.”
“Those molten eyes are the strangest thing about them, I’d say,” I said. “I once wrote a story about one and it cried gold.” Kara scoffed.
“Remember,” she said. “Other places don’t value gold as highly as you. It has some nice properties, but when you realize there are better things to accomplish what gold does, it becomes just another metal. The stranger thing is the gemstone eyes. They grow out of their eyes, and they have to trim them! They have a gem-cutter make them workable again. They need polishing to actually see through them.”
“So it’s like a haircut for their eyes,” I said. “We use lasers for that, but it’s a permanent fix to eyesight. Well, eventually eyesight dies out anyway. That’s just life.”
“Yeah,” Kara said. “Life is that because it ends. That momentary twitch of emotion between the exasperated cry of being born, to the whimper of final breaths. I’ll probably die eventually, too.”
“But, hey, you’ll at least get to see James again,” I said. “And… I guess tell him about how you moved on by raising a child with another woman.”
“Knowing him, he’d find that pretty hot,” Kara said, smiling with tears welling in her eyes. I watched them build to an escape, but they never fell. Kara opened her eyes wide, absorbing them back into the eye socket. “I guess I miss the idiot. Him, my little Johnny, and Danielle.” I wanted to ask about Akier Vil Moredo again, but did not want to spoil the mood. The last time she denied knowing anything about it, and I had a thought that the person in question got erased from the minds of most thanks to a certain poison. I probably still remembered him only because of the chaotic nature of accessing the Infinity Void and interactions with it.
Instead of asking, I nudged Kara to let her know I was there. In turn, she shoved me back with a smile. It became a play of trading blows until a roundhouse kick pushed me over the railing. I flashed Kara the “O.K.” Sign on the way down and vanished right before hitting the ground.
break
I came back the next day, hoping to see Lila and get her take on Finnelgamin. It was a Tuesday, tie day, and I already affixed my tie for the day with a rose gold tie clip I got from my brother as yesterday’s birthday present. Because I did not really celebrate it at all, JJ was being extra today. He made me buy a light-up yo-yo the very first thing, and I went along with it because I did not have my morning caffeine yet. Now, I sat with a green yo-yo that lit up red as it spun, and regretted buying it.
I entered the library through the spiral staircase this time, just in time to hear a door slam upstairs. Kara was alone in the library, sitting at the desk while looking up the stairs. Lila showed up at the railing above, and shrugged. When her sight shifted to me, her expression blew up into happiness. In that rush, she vaulted the railing above and drifted gracefully down into a hug.
“Tarne troubles?” I asked. Lila grimaced, then bounced still holding onto me as we went sailing in the air of the library. “Did you guys try making her a robot boyfriend?”
“Sorta,” Lila said. “Kara can explain.”
“We made her a sex toy,” Kara said. “A person she can’t take outside her bed. Naturally, after enough sex with it, Tarne wanted to have the robot around her at any time. Lila saw nothing wrong with that, being generally happy that she stopped masturbating out in the open. Then the obvious happened.”
“The obvious?” I asked, letting beast run pictures of Tarne getting railed in all sorts of positions and areas of the library.
“She started having sex all around the house,” Lila said. “You can never quite get the sounds out of your head if it’s someone you’d rather not hear doing that. And they did that, a lot. All until I had to take Robert away.”
“Rob the robot?” I asked, smiling.
“Yes, yes, har har,” Kara said. “It was like every corner you turned, there was Tarne, getting pounded, or grinding on her toy.”
“Stop,” Lila said.
“Seconded,” I said. “I can feel beast about to burst his cage.”
“It’s a natural thing,” Kara said. “I honestly don’t get the hesitation, but I guess I’m not related to Tarne. I can still remember when she was a child though, so that’s the weird bit. Typically it takes years of weird stuff, then years of masturbation, then it gets to sex. It’s much easier to get accustomed to it that way, but not doing it in public. I guess nobody ever taught Tarne to feel shame.”
“And she shouldn’t,” I chimed in. “I guess it’s just weird for Lila, being her mother, and me… being… I don’t know what I am to her to be honest. I’m sure if I was in her position, I’d love it just as much. If there is no danger of diseases, and if she’s flexible enough to try different things, she’d want to try them. Maybe program the next robot to be shy. Could also give it a slightly larger penis so it feels like an upgrade.”
“I don’t know if she— Yeah, I don’t think she deserves that kind of reward right now,” Lila said. “I want to punish her for the unease I’m feeling, but your idea is sound.” I felt beast tear through his cage and take over my mouth for a moment.
“I’d love to watch them go at it sometimes,” I said, then threw a hand over my mouth. “That— That wasn’t me. It was beast. Sorry.” Lila drifted down until both of us landed. Lila patted my shoulder, then looked over at Kara as if to explain that she would be into it if she was not with Kara.
“It’s ok,” Lila said. “By the way, I read Finnelgamin. It is a fun read later on, and plenty of nudity and sex stuff. I saw where you got the flavored spunk from now.” She leaned close to whisper. “I’ve gotten off to it quite a few times.” The shiver ran through me electric, making beast’s fur stand on end. He grew ten times his size and donned a hairy erection, right before I threw him into a tar pit.
“Well, now you’re just playing with fire,” I said.
“Always,” she replied, smirking.
“I guess we’re still waiting on Rahin, right?” I asked.
“At a certain point, I don’t know if they’d even want Tarne the way she is now,” Kara remarked. “A girl with no home was one thing, but a horny woman that can’t stop fucking whatever she sees is quite another thing.”
“Then I guess it’s up to us to make Tarne a bit more modest,” I said, and rubbed my hands together. “Imagine I said that without looking like a supervillain.”
“Trying, Jack, really trying,” Kara said. “Then again, maybe it doesn’t matter whether she is modest. Once she’s in the Nth Infinity, there won’t be anything for her to have sex with.”
“Well…” I said. “Don’t count out the human ingenuity to get off. There is always a way.” Kara sighed, but nodded.
“I wish I could experience your humanity,” Lila said. “It feels so— unrelenting.”
“Unrelenting? Huh.”
“More like annoying,” Kara said. “Like James. I did love the guy though.”
“Well, my keyboard is dying,” I said. “So I have to go.”
“Thanks for stopping by,” Lila said.
I waved a hand to Kara, and kissed Lila on the cheek, before falling to the ground and breaking into a million tiny pebbles that disintegrated into sand, then into nothing. Exiting in various ways has been fun thanks to creationism.
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