Resurrection (1)

She doesn’t get a chance to understand before it kills her.

A month later, when her latest iteration wakes inside her latest descendant-clone, she’s already cursing when she comes out of the nutrient broth. Technician-dolls cringe away from her fury, unpleasantly aware of how it distorts their witchwork hearts.

“—I should have had it that time! What went wrong? Which of you fucking rags lost hold of their wards?” None of them reply, of course. “Give me the damn readouts, useless things, I’ll figure this out myself …”

The path from the resurrection suite to her office is among the longest and least scenic on the ship, deep below stairs, full of all the unsightly necessities that keep lights on and bellies full. Even so, there’s still slimy nutrient residue clinging to her by the end of it, slick-drying-to-sticky. Dolls hurry to clean the trail she left behind.

Her office is cleaner than she left it, a fresh pot of tea waiting on the sideboard. Her own custom blend. It’s the best she can do out here in the uneasy void, and her best is very good indeed. Each sip coats her throat with hot honey and drenches her tongue in delicate, creamy flowers. By the end of her third cup it becomes clear that her failure has no easy culprit.

The mass of potential her ship is anchored to, the scar on the void, simply popped her existence like an unwanted pimple. Possibly this was in response to something she did—she’s missing the final thirty seconds of telemetry and memory—but if so it would mean that her last iteration went off script. There’s no trace of anything else.

She groans in frustration.

As if in response, there is a knock at the door. Tentative, uneasy. No wonder; her foul mood is palpable. “M-mistress?”

“Come in.”

The door’s hinges don’t creak. They used to, in the old house she plucked it from, but somehow that was lost in transition. Perhaps in her absence the dolls have grown over-eager to oil them.

The face that peeks through is one she knows well; after all, she is responsible for most of its more distinctive features. The delicate scarification around its seven eyes, two sets of three packed close together and the last above, splitting its forehead into two smooth panels; the seams where she taught its lips to part further than it ever thought they could. And, most satisfyingly of all, the involuntary flush that creeps into its cheeks when it sees her. Her secretary.

Its body is no less pleasing to her, even hidden under space-ready overalls and behind a large manila folder. Her eyes linger; her crotch twitches. It takes her a moment to focus on what her secretary is saying—her new body’s hormone balance must be off. Something to look into.

“… lost one substrate tank to a micrometeorite strike while You were away, but otherwise resource consumption was minimal. Hydroponic and solar arrays are both running at full efficiency, so that’s good. The bad news is the ram-scoop malfunction, which this one already mentioned, and contamination in the soul-farm. Not urgent, but attrition will be a problem until it’s fixed. Other than that,” it trails off, “there’s … miss …?”

It drifted closer to her desk while it was talking, its many-branched legs twitching almost involuntarily. It always moves like this: incidental, distracted, torso held perfectly steady. In low gravity, its hair slowly drifting around it, the effect is mesmerizing. Heat runs through her body, hundreds of strings plucked and vibrating, converging, focusing. The choice to stand is not wholly her own.

She prefers to be taller than her secretary, though not by much. Standing, its eyes are level with her collarbones; kneeling, its complex legs partially folded under it, it looks up at her from waist-height. She admires its eyes, lidded and dilated; its choice to kneel owes more to rigorous conditioning than conscious thought.

“… miss?”

She steps towards it, the flush in its cheeks deepening as her body’s heat and scent envelop it—the chemical-sweet nutrient broth, the milky-sour undertones of fresh-grown flesh, her own tangy musk slowly building as her body makes its needs known. Her secretary’s lips part.

“Good. Now, keep your mouth open for me …”

She takes full advantage of how wide its mouth opens.

Later—much later—she’s scrubbing her resurrection’s last vestiges out of her hair, massaging the shampoo into her scalp with the same precision she’ll soon apply to building a new exploration-craft. Putting her new hands through their motions. Her secretary lies on the tile floor, its body leaking, swollen, and utterly insensate.

This is her fourth attempt to get clean. It’s entirely her own fault that her secretary looks so delicious every time it stirs back to life, just as it’s entirely her own fault that they have had an intermittent audience of off-duty technician-dolls: when she designed her ship she didn’t think to give herself a private bath suite, and the dolls weren’t grown with enough sense to give their mistress her privacy.

Probably that’s going to cause cultural problems down the line, if she doesn’t remember to do something about it.

Another technician-doll freezes in the entrance to the baths, its soft curves already half-freed from its shapelessly utilitarian uniform. Its eyes flicker between her and her secretary; she can feel the way its gaze travels down her body, snapping to her breasts, the curve of her stomach, and her crotch, flushed and oversensitive and demanding no matter how hard she tries to calm it.

The doll’s nose twitches; its cheeks flush; and she yells “get out, idiot!” at it just before it’s too late. Her entire body twitches with predatory need as she watches it flee; an utterly inappropriate way to feel about a thing that is already hers, that exists only to serve her purposes, that would happily let her break it apart—and why shouldn’t she? She vibrates with need, her body taking a single step before she swings back towards her secretary, so perfectly shaped to her desires—

She is starting to think that something went seriously, fundamentally wrong with her resurrection.

She’s going to have to figure out how to fix it, soon.

But maybe not yet. Not with her secretary’s body right there. She can afford to wear herself out first, just as a precaution. It’s fine. And, as she picks up her secretary’s limp body, she’s careful not to acknowledge that she’s not sure if she can stop herself.