Cyborg Merman Read online

  “This is horrible,” I choke out.

  C’vest looks like he genuinely agrees with me. “You are correct. And it isn’t right. But we can make the best of your options.”

  Hollowly, I share, “I loved him.”

  “I… know.” And C’vest does look sorry. He looks as sorry as an aquatic species of alien-turned-man can.

  “I don’t love you,” I protest.

  “I know that too.”

  “I can’t do this!” I cry, boiling to my feet.

  C’vest surges up too. To my shock, he takes me by my upper arms. His face is more animated than I’ve ever seen it. He’s scowling but not angry. He’s determined and everything in his face and posture is urgency. “Stella, you have to. You need to make a definitive decision, and you’re out of time to decide what that decision will be. Do you want to return to your home planet?”

  “To my parents?” I’ve never been this close to C’vest before. For some reason, I always expected to catch the scent of fish on him, but it’s fresh ocean waves that hit me instead. He smells almost as good as sunning in the ocean breeze, feeling cool damp sand squeeze between my toes as I bury my feet to keep them from burning.

  “If you like.”

  I blink, thinking of my parents, who are back on Earth. Overcrowded, rioting Earth. Things have gone to hell there, making this place look like—if not paradise, then at least freer. I don’t want to go back—I tried to get my parents here. Where there’s space and quiet and opportunities to change yourself. No matter what my parents think, it’s not so bad here… as long as you aren’t a woman, that is. Maybe I should go home. But it’s going to cost a small fortune for the transport fare. Unfortunately, Baron never kept that sort of credit cache sitting around. Most of our money is on four hooves and moos. And sadly, I can’t just drive a herd of cattle up to the gate of the shuttleport and trade them for a ticket home. “I could try to sell what I have here, liquidate what I can.”

  “Yes.”

  And I would face the same problem: who here is going to pay me for anything when they can just take it?

  “Damn it,” I whimper raggedly. I don’t want to go back to Earth, and even if I did, it’s doubtful I can make it happen. Nobody is going to help me when I’m the ticket for giving them what they want. My eyes pin C’vest’s. “I’m beginning to hate men.”

  “I’ve never been so grateful not to have been born female,” he agrees, I think. His gaze plays over me in a way I’ve never seen before. It tightens the hairs on the back of my neck. It makes me wary.

  I start to pull away from him. His grip slides from my arms… to my wrists. “Choose.”

  I try to yank free of him, and can’t. He’s too strong. My heart begins to beat faster. “No.”

  “No, what?”

  “Just…” I can’t think!

  C’vest’s eyes darken to full black. “I’ve decided for you. Don’t fight me and I’ll do my best to make this good for you, Stella.”

  CHAPTER 2

  C’VEST

  Stella’s wild eyes widen further, and her breath gasps from her parted lips. She thrashes to free herself, but I keep her pinned at her wrists, transferring both of hers to one of my hands so I can work the tongue free of my belt.

  Being that my belt holds my multi-chambered revolving cylinder pistol, which is six pounds of steel and carbon fiber, it’s swift in hitting the floor. The way Stella growls, I know that if she escapes now, it will be a race to stop her from wielding those six pounds and shooting me.

  “NO!” Stella begins to shout. Blistering curses follow.

  While she vents her displeasure and attempts to escape the upcoming event, I manage to loosen the row of button fastenings that free my organ enough for the purpose it’s about to be used for.

  I’ve never partaken in coital relations before. Prior to this marriage-sealing encounter, I’ve never needed to, and never felt compelled to explore any interest.

  As a Yonderin, I’m a species who rears the next generation in underwater laboratories. My kind doesn’t breed; we reproduce through samples of genetic material being combined in petri dishes. I don’t know any of my kind who copulate like humans. At one time we must have though. And for Stella, I’m going to have to rely on whatever early-ancestral instincts I possess.

  So far, my organ is not responding, which I expected. It has never responded, not to any stimuli. Which has always been fine by me. However, circumstances have changed, and I must needs adapt.

  I possess electroreceptors, a throwback characteristic for capturing prey in my natural environment. I can detect electrical fields, and find, say, starfish hidden in the sand.

  I can also look at a wall and see the energy field of another man on the other side.

  I can see into a man’s brain, and watch his segments activate. It’s a useful tool, for hunting men, for avoiding men. And as far as brain-viewing goes, it’s particularly advantageous to watch a skull’s activity. There’s been more than one deal Baron and I walked away from when a man would make one statement, but the lobe for the opposite function in his brain fired up.

  Stella’s skull is alight with panic. But I believe I can access the chamber of her brain responsible for excitatory neural activity. By accident and some trial and much error, I’ve learned I can use a sort of extrasensory force to tap parts of the human cerebrum and beyond. I’m hoping to tap the right spot on hers, to trigger her switch, if you will. I want to engineer the most palatable outcome: I want her to orgasm. Although there is no simple one-step press of a button to make that happen, I am certain I can affect her in positive ways to best accomplish our goals. And although she’s not in the right mindset at the moment, they are our goals. What I’m proposing is the best solution for her circumstances.

  Regrettably, I can’t rely on her to see these things with sound reasoning at the moment.

  Despite this, I want her to experience the rush of chemicals that will make her body most receptive to invasion, and I want to soften her feelings of intense fear. I don’t want to change what she’s thinking; I simply don’t want her to suffer as this is happening.

  From my time spent in saloons, I’ve had the opportunity to study couples’ brains during coitus. For females, if they achieve orgasm, activity in their amygdala is subdued. This region of the brain is what helps a human perceive fear. Controlling the levels there would be very useful in this scenario that Stella and I are about to play out. Another area I’ve observed changes to is the orbitofrontal cortex. This is altered during orgasm, and this affects a woman’s impulse control. I’m hoping attention there will help Stella relax, if even marginally.

  I begin pulsing around her skull’s contents. It’s much more difficult than I anticipated.

  “YOU STU—ooo eeerk,” Stella starts off screaming but ends up slurring.

  “That is the wrong area of the brain,” I murmur to myself and back away from electrically probing that spot.

  Stella returns to her cursing of me, and I find I’m relieved. I welcome her to continue, listening for important changes to her speech. When I hit her septal region, she gasps.

  I freeze, holding my mental gloved hands aloft.

  Across her brain, I watch a burst hit. And then it’s like the zone lights up. Purple wires crisscrossing and heating up and creating more and more and more activity.

  That’s her pleasure center.

  I stimulate the neurons with electrical pulses, causing her to sag in my grip at her wrists.

  Feeling time ticking at my shoulder blades like an itchy wool coat, I reach for the fastenings on her own trousers.

  Weakly, she tries to dodge me, but I keep mentally massaging what I believe I’ve identified as her nucleus accumbens. I’ve seen it light up for everything from men partaking in addictive substances to children laughing with genuine happiness. It’s an interesting section of the human brain mostly devoted to rewards. I get a mental flash of Stella eating a thickly coated frosted chocolate cake.


  Surprised, I stare at the image. Perhaps it’s because I’m touching her and I don’t touch people—I’ve never touched anyone while in their mind—but I’m seeing her scene. An actual scene inside of her head. It’s in her perspective. I’m watching Stella eat a cake she either imagines to be delicious or this is some sort of spectral memory, but that delight and rush she experiences when she partakes in such a confection is actively being triggered. And because it’s making her brain thrill with reward chemicals, I keep triggering it.

  When I succeed in getting her pants far enough down her thighs that I can access her underwear, she starts to make strange grunting noises. They sound upset, but the comfort food reaction is still playing in the pathways of her mind, and she’s struggling to fight against the barrage of those pleasant feelings as I’m forcing her clothing aside.

  Finding it difficult to access what I seek, I slip her garment down her legs until she’s wearing her clothing around her knees. I locate her clitoris, which is a search more difficult than any diving I’ve ever done in a brain. My first pass over her organ makes her jump. My second pass I know better what I’ve encountered, and if she weren’t fighting me so hard, I’d get down on my knees to best see the area I need to stimulate. But I’m not going to gamble that she can’t manage to kick me in the face even if she is being forced to feel blissfully happy while she does it.

  When I succeed in the right combination of strokes to bring her to culmination, the climax causes fireworks inside of her skull contents in nearly three dozen areas. Dopamine and oxytocin will be flooding through her now, and I wonder what effect the happiness and bonding chemicals will have in this situation where I’m forcing our closeness.

  Her responses are fascinating to observe, and even with as clinically remote as my own mind is, watching her brain’s activity brings about a physical response in my own body. Without physical stimulus of any kind, my sexual organ achieves full rigidity.

  I keep mentally tapping the areas in her head that will ensure she’s as comfortable and comforted as possible, and because I believe the position will allow me the simplest access, I fold her over the arm of the sofa, keep her hands pinned under one of mine, close her hips in, and fit myself to her opening.

  Carefully, I press my organ’s swollen glans to her arousal-oozing slit. I apply gentle but firm pressure until my glans pops past her tight, slickening walls.

  As her hot sheath closes wetly around the head of my shaft, my ability to do anything but take in the sensation of entering her is obliterated. My hips sink against the mounds of her posterior and from outside-in, I’m cushioned and welcomed by softness. I can’t electroscan my own brain, but all I can imagine is the inside of my skull splattering with white. For a moment, my eyes don’t work; I’m blinded by a pleasure so intense I forget myself.

  Stella rears up under me and slams me in the abdomen with her sharp elbow.

  “Ooof!” I drop over her and struggle to catch her arm before she can strike me with it again. I grab her other one too, and use them to hold her in place as I very slowly draw my hips back, and…

  Dear Creator of the Underwater. I had no idea sex felt like this.

  Clutching both of her elbows in one of my hands is trickier than her wrists, but I do it and wedge my hand under her body, attempting to locate and arouse her sexual organ’s receptors as I begin a slow, rhythmic pattern of motions inside her gripping channel.

  I control her brain’s responses as best as I’m able. My own responses—and unanticipated desire—shocks me. I stimulate us both, gaining efficiency at arousing her as I stroke myself into her heated grip.

  With our mechanical systems being stimulated, chemicals flood us. I direct as much attention as I’m able to the positive workings in her head as my fingers work her externally, and we both achieve an explosive plateau as our critical thresholds are surpassed.

  Stella cries out, and I myself make a grunting sort of growl as I ejaculate with enough force to shove her forward. As my hips smack against her rear, her body jiggles in all sorts of places, drawing my eyes as I pin her body with mine, and seed never before implanted in a human floods her receptive channel.

  With a final caress over the lit-up areas of her mind, I enjoy a last amazed thrust between her trembling legs.

  When I pull back, my cock is shining, wet from her excited juices. Immediately, I want to shove it back inside of her and begin pounding at her welcoming core, but I’m caught staring at the flood of blue fluid that follows my retreat, exiting her tender pink opening. She’s glistening and swollen, and our leavings are thick and smell like a unique blend of her and me.

  I wasn’t sure how I would feel, having Stella for a wife. I wasn’t sure if I would like a wife at all. But very suddenly, I’m anticipating more of this, as soon as she’ll have me again.

  Still facing the sofa’s cushions, Stella draws back her foot and kicks me.

  CHAPTER 3

  C’VEST

  We’re wed within the hour. During the entire event—not specifically the recognition of our legal binding, but the entire trip (by carriage, so that I could keep her seated beside me, gently nudging areas of her brain, hoping to keep the worst of her unpleasant feelings from overwhelming her) and the meeting of the officiate and signing the proper documents—Stella’s expression is… nonexistent. If I could not manipulate areas of her mind, if I couldn’t see inside of it to have a guess at what areas are humming with activity, I wouldn’t know what she was experiencing. Because outwardly, she’s not observable. She’s using active suppression so effectively for her outward expressions that she looks… blank. Everything outward about her is neutralized.

  Taking her hand (and because that is limp, steadying her by the bend at her arm), I assist her up the carriage steps after we exit the office with our paperwork. “Would you like to return home or… shall you move to mine?”

  At first, Stella only gives me a dull shrug, as if she’s in a numb state. But then I watch a hind area of her brain light up with what looks like a firefight.

  “What are you thinking?” I ask, because I can only see the activity. I can’t guess at the cause.

  Her graceful jaws clench. Her eyes, turning hard, stare straight ahead between our horses’ ears. “I was going to say it didn’t matter. You’ve already defiled Baron’s… everything.” Her gaze cuts to mine. Tries to cut mine. “But I don’t want to be in your house.”

  I dip my chin. “Understandable.”

  “And,” Stella continues, gaze sharper than any knife, trying to slice me with her fury, “Baron’s ranch hands were looking awfully hungry for his house. Maybe if you move in there, you’ll come to some gruesome accident. Let’s say the more and more I’m thinking on it, the more I like the idea of going back home.”

  Ah. So the rear spot of a human’s skullbasket is where they hatch their bloodthirsty thoughts. I’ll be sure to watch her closely when I see activity here in her mind again.

  Walking into Baron’s house is no easier than the last time I entered it, with the intentions that I had. And Stella’s word-choice of defiled for what I’ve done—to her, to the union she had already lost with Baron, to their home where his ghost has dogged her day after day since his death—I don’t feel at peace with this.

  But now Stella is as safe as she can be. She gets to keep her home and she can do anything she did before and anything she feels fit to do from now on. I won’t bridle her. She didn’t remove Baron’s ring from her finger at the ceremony, but she did let me slip on the one I purchased from the officiant. It’s this-world’s version of the nearly nonreactive, ductile metal her people love: gold. But here, the precious commodity being mined is called jeren, and it is ruby red and beautiful.

  I wear its larger twin on my own finger. The first and last piece of jewelry I intend to ever put on. I experienced the strangest swell of feelings as I slid it down my left finger until it rested behind my knuckle joint.

  Married.

  To Baron’s Stella.
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  I never saw this coming. Obviously Stella would never have imagined it either. As she told me earlier, she loved Baron and it was plain to everybody who saw them that this was so. And whats more, Baron cherished his wife. It was easy to see why. She’s a handsome woman and a gentle lady and she’s capable and supportive and from everything I saw, the ideal partner for a human’s other half.

  Now she’s a Yonderin’s other half. Stella is my other half.

  If I could see into my own brain now, I imagine all of the sectors that would be buzzing with astonishment. That have been buzzing since the morning I knocked on Baron’s door, irked with my strange alien friend for not arriving to our meeting with Alvert Galensten. Briefly, I wondered if he was breeding on his wife again, a frequent enough cause of his being late. The mating habits of humans often left me confused. Why do they let themselves touch each other if they know they have other commitments to make? Timed commitments they shouldn’t be late for, let alone ones they shouldn’t miss altogether.

  I knocked on the door of their ranch-style home, with its wide porch, complete with a covered swing that overlooks a section of their river. I expected Baron to open the door with his eyes smiling, his lips pursed in his sheepish expression, and all the areas of his brain turned bright with his heightened activation. His mind would be an Independence Day tradition of fireworks compared to the scans I’ve made of men during coitus in the saloon. I always attributed the difference to him being a married man, with bonding chemicals traveling strongly in his pathways, against men who only partake in the most casual of encounters.

  Now that I’ve personally coupled with Stella, I don’t believe for a moment that my own brain was experiencing a mere casual-lit activity cloud. It had to be its own sort of Stella-storm in my mind.

  But instead of finding a ruefully contrite Baron missing his meeting and a suspiciously disheveled Stella, I found a distraught Stella.