To your surprise you wake up alone. It’s not your bed but that was expected. It’s still and dark outside, the person who’s bed your in once explained, “If New York is the city that never sleeps, Boston is the one that goes to bed at a reasonable hour.” Last-call at 01:00? Who ever heard of anything so ridiculous? One is supposed to be crawling home just as the sun is coming up. The way God had intended it. Judging from the silent street three floors below it must be (Massachusetts) late. Well shit, so much for your classy date night. You’d made dinner reservations and everything, almost like a real adult. You could’ve sworn you’d set an alarm. Of course you fucked it all up again.
Your beautiful lover is no where to be seen. Or heard. The door to the bathroom is ajar, but the light is off. Not in there. She’s probably in her workshop. You slowly shoo Schrodinger, her reluctant cat, off the dress pants you were going to wear. A good thing about having black cats is that you don’t have to worry as much about getting hairs all over your clothes. As you stagger through the dark towards her workroom you hear, and smell, her before you see her. Bzzzzzzt. Buzz. Bzzzzt.
Sure enough there she is, sitting at her workbench. The pale flashes and sound of electricity, then the smell of solder and silicone in the air. She is wearing a shoulder-length light brown wig, which you know to be her natural color. It suits her, but then again she has just about every color and somehow they all look natural on her, even the psychedelic-purple. She’d once joked that if she still had a natural color, she couldn’t remember what it was. The sight of her in only her wig still knocks the wind out of you and makes your heart wanna bust out of its cage.
It wasn’t only a staunch dedication to wigs that kept her hair so close to her scalp; she also liked looking like a Buddhist monk, and she knew all too well how hair could become a handle while sparring. Sure she sometimes missed her lovers amorously tugging on her natural locks but, overall, the pluses outweighed the minuses.
You sneak up to peek at what she’s creating this time. Buzzz. Flash, flash, spark. Bzzzzzzt. Smoke spirals up from her project.
It takes your eyes and brain a few moments to agree on what they are seeing. In front of her is a set of huge mechanical wings, one almost completed, the other just over half done. They’re obviously made out of whatever she’d been able to find – whether purchased, donated, thrown away, or stolen. The feathers are thin and shiny like from cut up beer cans. They blow slightly in the rhythmic breeze from the oscillating fan who’s job it is to scare away the toxic smoke. The wings have gears and hydraulics and look as if they’ll really flap and might even be big enough to support her slender frame. You’re sure she’s done her math. You look around at all the circuit boards, and wires, and wireless this and thats, and just listen to the whole place hum and buzz with electronics.
Your eyes catch her favorite thick metal neckless resting on the table between the wings, a perfect circle, now glowing like a halo. She is, of course, making her own home-made make-shift divinity out of the things that others miss the value in. You’re not surprised, that sounds exactly like her.
“Deus ex machina.” you mumble, half-proud that you know a Latin phrase.
She startles a bit and turns to look at you with those big eyes and her smirk that feels like changing seasons. Never a full solstice, more like the half balance of an equinox. Like a hot day with a chance of frost at night – or freezing with a promise of a merciful thaw. Lips you might not always understand, but ones you don’t always need to either.
As you look at her your mind puzzles as it tries to piece together all the information it’s taking in. Something is off. It must just be the shadows from the sickly blue/white light. Or your eyes adjusting. It must be…
It can’t be…
Her body looks perfectly the same – but running down the entire length of the center of her back is a laced together slit. There are even eyelets reinforcing the skin so it won’t tear. She shakes her ‘hair’ back and smiles again as if everything’s normal, but as she does you see all the machinery the wig had been hiding. There’s the breast and back of the ‘corset,’ and long skin-like gloves that go all the way up to her shoulders, and her mask-face, but between all of that is exposed devises, and mechanisms, and workings that your brain just refuses to understand. Even between the lacing down her center you see metal.
As she stands to face you all the blood drains from your head. You can’t help but notice the flesh colored garter-belt holding up her skin thigh-highs – and how they framed the always shaved smooth cleft that you knew so well. Now it’s obvious that she’s stepped into it and pulled it up like underwear. It all clings so tight and it looks almost exactly as when you’d last been staring at her naked.
“Oops.” she… The cybernatrix says in her same usual teasing tone as she puts a leg up on her chair. She straightens out her ‘stockings,’ and re-clasped one of the unfastened garters. Even her ass looks very much the same, at least where it’s covered with the small flesh-panties. The thing smiles affectionately at you. It’s the look you’ve seen on her a lot lately, the one you thought meant that she was falling hopelessly in love with you too.
You don’t feel scared, though much of you wants to. But you feel as if you know her well enough to be reasonably confident that it’s probably only pleather human skin. She’s practically a vegetarian after all. Right?
Cyborg, cycles. Android, androgynous. Pleather, pleasure. Contraption, contraception. Device, divine. An Electrogasm in the shape of a girl. Your brain spins and spins and chases itself in circles along a Mobius Strip in a hall of mirrors hurtling through infinity. You can feel it beginning to short circuit. Bzzzzt Buzzzt Bzzzzz. Buzzzz.
Far too slowly you begin to realize that the awful mechanical sound you hear is your alarm. You feel the weight of yourself sinking into the bed. Tangled in covers. Nap time must be over. To your surprise you wake up alone. It’s not your bed but that was expected. You sit up and look around. Your lover is standing in front of her full length mirror getting ready for your big night out. She’s only wearing black thigh-high stockings, shoulder-length gloves, garter-belt, and matching waist-cincture. She does always like to tease.
“Cyborgasm – Wannabe.” Gibberish wearing a thick cloak of groggy fear bolts from your mouth.
She slowly starts to walk towards the bed and with a smile (only) as predictable as the weather says simply, “Every-body wants to be something.”
