A Perfect Pair
Fetishes.
The history books say that once upon a time, when single plateau n-gram distrainment was the only game in town and psychoneurology itself an infant discipline, people had tried removing undesirable sexual obsessions from the populace. Like their spiritual predecessors, the genome purists of the 21st century and the eugenics movement before them, they found that a culture without variation is weak.
No, far better to support the fetishists and deviants. It’s not like we need people to breed like mad to produce a large and varied population any more, but the slight awkwardness of being into something unusual can be the tipping point that gives someone a little extra drive to excel in other aspects of their life. And satisfying the desire that sets your motor running more than anything else in the world, that’s so much better for emotional well being than just having no real desires. Alternatives and differences make us strong as a culture, and that’s why (at least according to the official records) everyone has their own little kink.
Some fetishes are illegal, so you can only ever imagine them, or pretend with a willing partner. There was apparently talk of breeding those out, back when it was still possible to break the law, but there’s still many people who are glad they have their freedom to dream. Some fetishes are things you might actually indulge in; whether your partner’s cooperating to please you or into it themself. They’re all strange things, though, things that seem weird and freaky to anyone who doesn’t have the same interest. When you find out what someone else likes, you might be disgusted a little, but you only have to think about how others would see your obsession for a reminder to be tolerant.
Some people liked their bodies to be painted outlandish colours to fuck; some focused all their desire into one part of the body; some loved being tied up with hair, or to kiss a partner’s shaved head; some found that they could only get aroused with a partner of a particular ethnicity or gender; some loved a particular item of clothing; some just wanted sex in the shower; some wanted to do it in a derelict building, in a moving vehicle, on a rooftop overlooking the town; some rolled around in bodily waste; some focused so intensely on the idea of a family-unit relationship that they had next to no interest in casual sex; some craved to be beaten until they bled.
Saul Chester’s brain was programmed with a type-R fetish at birth. He was able to feel superior all through his teenage years, as his classmates discovered what turned them on. So many were grossed out by the prospect, or obsessed so much that they couldn’t focus on schoolwork any more. When he finally discovered his own, a late bloomer at 35, he got the shock of his life. Not only was his kink illegal (to an extent that it was now discontinued, never entrained on a child and only existing if it developed naturally), it was also one he’d never even heard reference of before.
The problem with bedroom role-play is that some part of your mind always knows it’s not the real thing. The old, old videos that excited him so much when he stumbled across them in the library, they were probably just as imaginary, but he couldn’t tell. It looked real enough, and that’s all that mattered. He could make a perfect illusion, even immersive virtual reality, using a library of porn stars whose every breath, every gasp, every position had been digitised in three dimensions. He experimented with that for years, even finding some girls at a bar willing to wear a holographic image for him, the computer causing their movements to be entirely mimicked by images of starlet Carlita Dream. Saul had even arranged his perfect fantasy threesome, surrounding himself with three copies of (according to many popular surveys) the most desirable woman in the world, but it still wasn’t real. With the older videos, he could imagine that what he saw was the genuine article, but there was no chance of that when he was creating a fantasy himself, and could even tweak the stars’ measurements before playing out his dream.
At the age of 42, his youth starting to lose its sheen, Saul had an epiphany. He went to book onto an 18-45 cruise, hoping casual sex would take the edge off never quite getting what he wanted. If not, then a break from masturbating to those old, old videos (many of them in single-camera 2D, and a few at resolutions below 6k) would be good for him. He caught the guy at the desk – an old timer with visible wrinkles across his face and hair shading to grey, probably 80 already and certainly too old to have kids – glancing down as he scanned his ID for payment. Checking Saul’s age, as if he’d already started the long slide down into middle age. Saul couldn’t say why, but that outraged him. He was still young yet, no way was it time for him to settle down. And just like that, he decided that he was going to live his dream before he was 50, and then he could happily grow up to become a productive, respectable member of society.
While he was on the cruise, he had a lot of fun. As well as all the usual activities, he couldn’t stop thinking about his plan. Improving it, refining it, and just contemplating that it might actually be possible made his heart race like never before. One of the other passengers, a plucky young lady called Dawn nearly 5 years his junior, even commented that he was the most energetic lover she’d found on the ship. That made his day, though of course he couldn’t share just what was going through his mind at that moment.
He could never experience his fantasy for real, that much was for sure. As part of the natural programming every child got at birth, the thought of breaking the law was entirely impossible. They couldn’t even contemplate it. But Saul was an experienced computer hacker, well experienced at the commercial and political benefits of making some system behave outside its designed criteria, and he was well practised at treading the fine line between social convention, corporate policy (and the various punishments they could impose), and the actual unquestionable law. What he had in mind was wrong, there was no question about that, but not illegal.
His first mission when he arrived home was to screen the latest census data for suitable parents, and a suitable genome. While the actual subject of his obsession was impossible, and actors never seemed real enough, he could think of one alternative that would be close enough to leave him in heaven. The only downside was that his ideal partners would have to be carefully designed, and even more carefully raised. Thankfully, the public genome bank had more than a few flaws in its data security system, and as it was an elective agency tampering was not a crime unless he actually caused damage. He would find some local couples who were reliant on the Bank to supply them with children; maybe even his next door neighbours, Mike and Rich Tomlinson, who he’d heard complaining for years about the difficulty of getting a paternity license. He wouldn’t touch a child of course, that would be abhorrent. But by the time she found her own fetish, he would only be sixty or seventy years old, still in his prime. In fact, with the rate at which modern medicine was advancing, seventy might actually be considered young again by the time he got there.
Saul had all the time in the world. He selected half a dozen foster families, just in case the girls didn’t take his fancy. They would be physically perfect, he was sure, but there was no way he could account for how their personalities would develop as they grew up. He couldn’t touch their quantitative n-gram matrices, and the legal enforcement boundaries were hard-coded. he best he could do (as someone working in the interest of the parents, though the law didn’t require the parents’ knowledge) was to choose their default prime fetishes – which would awaken at puberty if an alternative hadn’t developed naturally before then – and adjust a three-axis slider somewhere on the social/intellectual/hierarchical model set.
Twentyfour years later, Saul was corresponding by email with one of his creations. Technically speaking, she was a clone of a movie star so long deceased that her phenotype was in the public domain. He’d seen some of her birthday pictures, and she looked just like the faded posters that had been digitised at the dawn of the data age. Her name was Amanda Yohanssen, though she’d never given it to him. She’d originally introduced herself as Spikeangel2169, a common enough style of naming among younger people, and had later changed the name she used online to AmandaHarlow as a nod to the pre-ancient star to whom Saul had compared her. She loved the idea of meeting an older man, especially one as ruggedly handsome as Saul. His skin was no longer youthfully smooth, but he was still fit, and the tattooed snakes coiling around his wrists drove her wild with desire. She knew it was wrong, but there was something about that image…
In the backyard of the house next door, Amanda Tomlinson was sunbathing in a disposable hammock. She knew she should get inside before the power cell faded and she fell on the floor, but she wanted to squeeze every last bit of joy out of the sun’s warmth. She was an attractive young woman, she knew, and she needed a perfectly even tan if she wanted to show off her body to the greatest effect. Her biggest regret, though, was that she was still attending Diversity parties, drinking until she was semi-conscious and then fornicating with some stranger she’d never see again. The downside of everyone having a kink, she believed, was that as soon as people found theirs awaken they would often ditch their old friends and hang around with those who were into similar things. By the fourth year of university, less than one in ten of her classmates was still going to the Dive, trying everything and everyone in search of whatever might make them click. It was like being a social pariah.
Finally the levitator on her hammock flickered, and she only just managed to find her feet before it folded up into a ball. As she moved, she could see her neighbour Saul coming out to the street to meet a car. Amanda crept closer to the fence, curious what might be going on. She caught sight of a woman through the gap in the fence, about her own height and with a similar style of hair, as far as she could see.
Amanda had seen Saul looking at her. When she’d been a kid, he’d been like a third father. When she went off to boarding school, they hadn’t stayed in touch. But in the university holidays, she’d caught him watching her from the window more than once. For a while, she’d wondered if he had a thing for young women; like really young. She knew that some people got that by whatever crazy means nature had of determining these things, even though it was nearly fifty years ago it had been removed from the fetish seeding neurograph library. She pitied him when she thought about that, having some fantasy that the law wouldn’t allow him to fulfill.
But if there was something else that had caught his interest. Was it the way she moved, or her hair, or her skin? Any one of those would explain his interest in the woman she saw him leading to his door now. They were so alike, it was almost uncanny.
Angela couldn’t return to her sunbathing now. When she got to her room, she couldn’t stop thinking about her neighbour, a guy she used to be friendly with years before, seducing a woman so much like herself. She’d only seen the visitor from behind, but in her mind’s eye it was like looking in a mirror. She never really entertained the thought that this girl could be a friend to him, an apprentice for his software company, even a relative. As soon as she put a girl who looked just like herself in the picture, her imagination presented her with nothing but scenes of pure, animal lust.
What was it Saul saw in her that he wanted so much? She wondered if it was her beasts, not enormous but perfectly formed. She could just imagine Mr Saul cupping them in his hands as the stranger sat down beside him. Maybe it was her lips, full and gently curved, and so very red, that Amanda could just imagine him kissing forcefully yet tenderly. Was it her deep green eyes, or the shoulder length blonde curls that her doppelganger also sported? Maybe it was even something less obvious, like the perfect, petite build, or being exactly the right height at 5′4″ so that he would be the right level to kiss her closed eyelids without bending. Maybe the visitor was like Amanda in other ways too; maybe her voice got deeper when she was out of breath (and imagine her gasping at Saul’s hungry touch), or could she have the same natural talent for horseback riding that had so amazed Dad Mike when he’d first noticed it.
She imagined Saul bucking like a wild stallion as a girl who had her face rode him, and she knew she couldn’t purge that scene from her mind even if she’d wanted to. It was so… wonderful, and she didn’t know why, but it just didn’t matter. Thinking of someone else just like her, it was almost surreal, but it made her feel so good and she wanted to know more. She wanted, no, needed to meet the stranger now, and she hoped they would have even more in common.
Amanda wasn’t thinking at all by the time her breathing returned to normal, as she quickly hit the flash shower to steam away the sweat and other fluids that slicked her skin. She didn’t try to analyse her behaviour as she threw her skimpy pants into the disposal and pulled on a black and violet robe. She just knew what she wanted, for the first time in her life, and simply not needing to decide was an intoxicating thrill. She didn’t peer through the hole in the fence but strode down her own path and up the neighbour’s, rapping on her door.
She knew it was rude, she knew she was acting like the horny teen boys who didn’t care about anything but themselves. She didn’t care. Beyond that door was someone who looked just like her, and she had to meet her. When she thought back later, she’d realise that the curiosity towards people like herself had been there for years, since she was twenty probably, but now she knew it was her designated fetish, and that changed everything.
Narcissophilia, the word came to mind unprompted. The desire for familiarity. Saul had mentioned it once, a passing joke when her parents had mentioned she’d asked for a mirror-lined bedroom for her 18th birthday. How right he’d been, and that was both wonderful and terrible. She knew what she wanted, but how many other people would have the same desire? Even if there were hundreds around the world, the odds were against any of them being even remotely like her.
“Amanda!” Saul opened the door naked, and visibly aroused. She should have been disgusted, should have stormed away, but she was looking past him anyway. T a woman who was the same height as her, the same build. The same skin, hair and eyes. It was like looking into a mirror, even down to the helpless flush of arousal in her cheeks.
They didn’t speak as Saul led them in, giving an explanation that didn’t seem to explain anything. “My fetish is simple,” he started, “But it’s forbidden now. Twins, identical twins serving me. But that would be illegal, incest, it’s impossible. Yours are more complex; hybrid fetishes. Amanda, I’m pretty sure, has awakened her latent narcissophilia, while Mandy just can’t resist my tattoos. But hybridised with that, I think you’ll both find control, helplessness and manipulation a considerable turn-on. The kind of manipulation I used when I hacked the progenition centres to give you the fetishes I wanted, the kind of helplessness you know you’ll feel when you finally admit that you’ll do anything I say because your own sex drive insists you obey me.”
Amanda had so many questions that she didn’t think to ask. She just dropped her robe and stepped forward to kiss those perfect lips, staring deep into her own eyes and holding a body every bit as hot as her own.
“And completely legal, too, because you aren’t family. You aren’t legal dependants, because you’re both third generation clones of an ancestor whose genome has been open to the public for long enough for others to use it as a template for their children. You’re my dream, girls, but I wanted to make sure this would be a dream for both of you as well.” They weren’t even listening by now, as they gave in to the force that had made them who they were.
A perfect pair, beautiful in similarity, united at last by the one difference they shared.
Fetishes.