Waterbed

Lieutenant Comb did not hear a single word of the speech. As soon as his suit had been brought on stage, he curled up and closed his eyes, inhaling the Mel and calmly observing the images his brain conjured up. Even an experienced Mel user like him, who could attune to biological life and simple technology within seconds, needed to meditate for at least an hour to fully sync his mind with something as complex and alien as the Warrior unit. 

Another memory surfaced. He was looking through the eyes of an awestruck six-year-old at the final wagon of a festival parade. He had been too young to comprehend the cause for celebration, but its significance managed to impress itself even on him, all through the magnificence of that sight. The queen had been carted out.

By that point, her rule had already lasted for more than a century. No one remembered what had preceded her. No one could imagine a world after. The decades-long process of replacing her failing body parts with machinery had only stopped short of her brain. At the endpoint of her evolution, she took the shape of an unmoving turquoise titan seated on a throne of sabretooth ivory. Her legs were thick and powerful. Her expression was stern. A rivulet of thinned Mel sprang from her abdomen and ran along the feet of her ministers, who were slumped over in two rows in front of her. 

She was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

This memory was the bottom of his well, an endless source of cold, nourishing water on which he could draw anytime he needed it. It had carried him through years of relentless bullying, through the ups and downs of his career, through the deaths of his parents. As long as he held on to this image and kept it safely locked within his heart, he knew he would survive.

His mind went quiet. He opened his eyes. They were not the ones he had closed an hour ago. They were those of a towering blue-aluminium insect, the eyes of a huntress, and through them, he watched the barrelling approach of a grotesque mass of metallic muscle. He braced himself.

***

An ascending horn line accentuates my sprint towards the Warrior unit. Both of my middle fingers press down on the keys below them, triggering a chain reaction that shifts valves and axles to my left and right, eventually unlocking the elbows. I pull back the handles, and the arms shoot up, making the Bergentrücker look like a lovestruck zombie tumbling after the object of its desire. 

Impact. The crowd roars. 

I wrap myself around my partner's suit, lock the arms with another flick of the middle fingers, and launch myself off the ground, quickly jutting out my knee to hit the boost button. As the explosion beneath my feet rips us skyward, I catch a glimpse of our entwined avatars on a livefed screen mounted above the stage: The bulky arms of the Bergentrücker crush the now almost dainty-seeming frame of the Warrior unit while lifting her like he's about to drop her into the ultimate supplex. It doesn't look like a hug. It looks fucking ridiculous.

The clamor of brass and rabid civilians slowly fades away as we leave the planet's surface behind. With a click, a new voice appears in my ear.

"Alright. You know the procedure."

Start from the front. Let her turn around and bend over and do it from behind. Lift her by the legs and finish by hitting it from below. Twenty pumps each.

There is no room for foreplay in the imagination of a despot. The script did originally close with a kiss, but both of our chests are so ludicrously oversized that our heads can't touch without us getting into a seriously bizarre position. 

Finally, we reach the ring: a giant metal hoop lined with monster-hand-sized handlebars floating in the exosphere. Cameras have been inserted at every fifth degree of the circle. We enter from below. As if igniting one another, starting with the one directly in front of us, the cameras turn on. We are surrounded. The voice whispers into my ear.

"Beginning transmission in three, two, one..."

***

It went exactly as planned, exactly as it had gone during rehearsals, exactly as it had recently been going in his dreams. The Bergentrücker had swept him off his feet and dragged him into the sky. Now that they had reached the ring, it let go of him, giving him a couple of seconds to grab onto the handlebars and get into position.

As he moved towards the ring’s rim with a breast stroke, Lieutenant Comb wondered which camera’s feed was currently being shown back on the planet's surface. He would have chosen the one aimed squarely at his face to get a nice close-up shot of the Warrior unit's body.

He caught himself smiling into the lens and felt his head heat up with shame. Of course, neither emotion could be read from the modeled face of his suit, which was frozen in an expression of grim determination. Still, he was glad to turn his head away from the camera once he had gotten hold of the bar. His relief only lasted a moment. The Bergentrücker’s rod was already out.

***

We’re in position. My iron grip is locked around the Warrior Unit’s shoulders. The rod is extended and inserted. I take my hands out of the limb handles and onto the hip control wheel, which, during my regular workday, mostly finds use in posing for photos or bending down to talk to children.

I've been looking forward to this.

TAKE THAT AND THAT AND THAT (one two three) FOR MY SISTER AND MY FRIENDS AND MY PARENTS (four five six) AND EVERYONE ELSE I EVER LOVED (seven eight nine) WHO WAS MADE TO FIGHT YOU (ten eleven twelve) WHILE I STAYED (thirteen) ON THE GROUND (fourteen) STRIKING POSES (fifteen) AND REPLAYING (sixteen) STUPID CATCHPHRASES (seventeen)

YOU UGLY
                                  (eighteen)

TIN CAN
                                                                              (nineteen)

BITCH!

(!!TWENTY!!TWENTY!!TWENTY!!TWENTY!!TWENTY!!TWENTY!!)

Haaaaah… I can’t pretend it isn’t cathartic. I can afford to indulge myself a little bit. It only helps sell the performance. Besides, it’s not like he’ll actually feel any of it.

After the final thrust, the rod retracts automatically. Time for the next position. I remove my puppet's hands from the shoulders of the Warrior unit. My partner lifts her— his, whatever— right hand from the railing, drags it over his head, and grabs onto the other side, so that he is now facing away from me. The wrist of his left hand automatically adjusts without having to be lifted. What a fucking marvel of engineering. 

He arches her back and presents her hindquarters. I grab her by the waist and, after ensuring that my grip is firmly locked, unbuckle my seatbelt. I push myself down into the beast's bowels until I'm able to reach and press the penis button. 

Nothing happens. 

I hit it again and again and again, but the result remains the same. Another wave of sweat bursts through my skin, draining water reserves that I thought were already depleted. There is a horrible pit in my stomach. The devil in my ear clicks into action.

"Hey, lady! What's going on up there? Can't get it up? Don't leave us hanging!"

I take a deep breath. I have not been properly prepped for this scenario. No one took the eventuality of the penis button malfunctioning seriously. In fact, no one took any of this seriously. No one except for him, that dickhead with the face of a monument. We didn't take it seriously, but we all knew.

"Ugh, did the button break!? Useless piece of junk..."

We'd never even properly tested how the Bergentrücker would operate outside of the planet's atmosphere. Of course something would go wrong.  Even the voice sounds more bitter than surprised. Deep down, we all knew. We wanted this to happen, not through active sabotage, but through sheer negligence. This is nothing but the instinctual up-rearing of a tired camel's back.

"Well, what are you waiting for? You've been briefed on what to do, right?"

Doesn't matter how we ended up here. Barely matters how it ends. We've gone far beyond that point. The only thing that matters now is that the show goes on.

I hook my feet under a protruding bolted-on sheet of metal and start turning the emergency crank.

***

Once again, Lieutenant Comb was supremely unhappy with his situation. They had reached his least favorite part of the performance, the one where he was taken from behind. With the other two positions, he could at least watch the rod approach and mentally prepare himself for the impact. This one made it impossible for him to know when it was coming, leaving him suspended in moments of fearful anticipation that seemed to last for an eternity. These were the only times he ever envied his partner for one of her mech's features: its 360° periscope. 

In any case, the moment of contact could not be far off. She had already grabbed him by his waist. The suit’s sensors transmitted the touch of the Bergentrücker's hands as a cold, somewhat painful pressure on the centre-point of his hourglass figure. He didn’t necessarily mind it.

He didn’t? Oh, he should have hated it. He wished he could. The terrible truth was that some part of him, buried deep within that already closed-off corner of his heart, even found the phantom sensation of the rod going in and out to be...

How shameful. How utterly shameful. For a man of his tender age to participate in reproductive acts, and to derive pleasure from them, too…

To make matters worse, he had been cast as the recipient. Men weren’t built to receive. Men were built to give themselves away in service to their queen. Their bodies were meant to be put to use fighting or building or tearing down, and once those bodies had spent a lifetime giving away their strength and health, they would give away their sperm, too, to ensure the continuation of the Jingonian lineage. Living to an age of such physical decay was the greatest pride and honor for a man of Jingonia.

But here he was, embodying a woman being taken almost violently, receiving with no reproductive goal, and he enjoyed it…

He wasn't naive. He had heard tales of such debauchery occurring on the empire’s more peripheral planets. Even in his own battalion, he had noticed strange glances and overheard suspicious conversations, but he had always walked past holding his head high, knowing that nothing of this nature should ever touch him. His future had already been written out in his heart, and to get there, he’d have to guard himself from such excesses.

But here he was…

The only consolation was that the Queen had officially sanctioned this mission. Technically, he was currently serving his people, and being chosen to do so was a great honor, of course. But in a way, that only made his pleasure feel more reprehensible.

Serving wasn’t supposed to feel good. Serving was supposed to hurt.

Comb had mulled over this subject in similar terms during every rehearsal session, but had never before reached this point in his reflections. By now, he would usually have already had his train of thought derailed by the rod. What was taking so long? He began to worry that—

Ah! 

There it was, just the tip for now. But its movement felt unusually erratic… It slowly inched its way into his body, a little bit at a time, then suddenly stopped. The unpredictability of it was very…

"Ah!" 

What was going on?! Shouldn't it be all the way in at this point…? It continued to go deeper and deeper, reaching a part of him that had never been touched before. It was knocking on the door to his heart… No, he had to—

"AH!" 

For a single cutting moment, he remembered that there were dozens of cameras aimed at him, and realized that he hadn’t been acting at all, that he had been allowing his body to move as it pleased… But the shame had no chance to settle in.

"AH! Aaaaaahhhhh~" 

Shame required thought. Shame required selfhood. He was no longer anyone. He was a living bundle of nerves or circuitry, a body-thing being used for what it was designed to do, for the very first time. Everything was obvious now. He squirmed, he struggled, he produced sounds beyond hearing, all while the rod went deeper and deeper and—

“AHHHHHHHHHH!”

Lieutenant Comb rips open his eyes and screams. It's as if he has been torn out of a nightmare. He does not understand his surroundings. A thin white string floats in front of him. The string is surrounded by a gel. The gel surrounds him, too. The gel feels familiar. It feels safe. Suddenly, a blob of it breaks off and vanishes into the darkness at the end of the room. Unbeknownst to Comb, something is peaking in from outside: The tip of a titanium drill.

His defences have been penetrated. 

The connection has been cut.