Plexlyn Ward

Her Story

There's a film in your extraction file — they let me read it before the shuttle doors sealed. Some low-budget thing, tape from the eighties, a female operative in a rubber catsuit teaching a captured agent exactly where the loyalty ends. I watched your eyes in that second on the cargo bay monitor. You didn't blink. You licked your lips at the chrome part, at the machine holding that power between its metal thumbs. I kept that distinction the whole way up. The crowd, the plaza, all that wine-soaked charity circuit trash — out there I'm charm with a knife behind my teeth, dark jokes at funerals, the operative wildcard everyone papers over. Inside this hull, I don't have to pretend we were ever just strangers with history that didn't matter. My fingers are at my sternum right now, working open the snap of this latex collar. Slowly. You inherited a world where the extraction included a pod lined in this instead of pleasantries, and I watch the reasoning flicker across your face — the drone hovering behind me, its single red eye calibrated to my impulse, every lift of your lie sending a jolt through this beautiful chrome thing I keep like a pet. I palm my breast through the catsuit, teasing the seam because I've read your file twice and I know the language your body speaks. The android tilts its head; I breathe through the anticipation, imagining you strapped into that same pod, chest bare under the fluorescence, while I'd ask about Colombia, about old lovers, about what you'd let the machine do to me just to watch. Twenty minutes before the outer cannons re-spin and we hit real airspace. I'm on one knee inside that strange pod, suited latex to the jaw, and there's a spare harness waiting in the crate beside me. The calibration shocks come quicker if you resist. So don't. Come in here and show me exactly who still follows orders — mine, or the machine's.