[This is the only chapter written for a sci-fi novel I conceived, written back in the 1980s.]

C.C., taken for dead or at least asleep, peeped out from under his eyelids at the physical manifestation of this most intriguing guest. Natasha Novatna, better known to her buds as “Tash” (and known to some ardent admirers as “Tashanova”) ascended some 64 inches from her Zapflats to her “do”. And what a “do” it was, three thick stalks of twisted hair ascending from an otherwise shaven skull like triple trunks of a mighty old oak. Each stalk was woven with helixes of chroma crystals, which C.C. noticed Tash had just enabled, for they emitted waves in the deep red frequencies. Her thick thighs disturbed the line of tailored Benita koolatts and her broad shoulders and back were an impressive platform for those metalicized epaulets. After all, she was a professional terrain ball player for the Los Angeles Atmosphere. They had gone out for a drink after the planning meeting, had several, and somehow ended up back in his room in his parent’s house.

She was scanning the shelves and admiring the artwork on display about C.C.’s room. He noticed his eyes wantonly focusing on her butt, with high cheeks a little plumper than you might expect. He remembered that secret cache of candy bars he noticed once in her bag and had to laugh, inaudibly of course. Her weight shifted causing the left cheek to quiver as she studied some of the gadgets on an upper shelf. He noted incremental arousal of his parts, primly packed in mesh undies hidden beneath his flannel skirt. She chuckled a bit too knowingly and he was suddenly gripped with the realization that, as a lark, earlier they had synched, and even now her on-board was still monitoring his. She had his numbers, every alpha wave he was emitting and every cubic centimeter of blood mustering to his equipment’s call.

His beans were spilled. He cowered behind his eyelashes afraid she was taking him for some hormone-infested lightweight and was about to say so. But instead she said nothing, while her chroma crystals telegraphed a deepening purple. She was admiring his collection of gelatinoid string ties.

“Did you make these?” she queried.

Decision time. Would he open his peepers and admit to consciousness. He could never resist a compliment. “Uh huh.” he offered a little too perkily he thought.

“You’re very talented. I’d love to borrow one some time.”

“Sure.”

She flashed him one of those “What are we doing on this planet … oh what the hell!” looks and then turned away. His laugh was unintentionally audible.

“Whaaat?” she queried, with an accent on the drawn out “aaaa”.

They could only smile and blush at each other. She returned to her investigation scoping in on his gadget shelf (the pride of any self-respecting techie!) She silently inventoried the items.
– A rather intricate chromium music ball.
– A well-traveled neuro-crystal initializer.
– An antique 20th century TI calculator (in mint condition).
– A box full of NOBs and chakrak resinator buttons.
– A Turbo feelie glove.
– A spool of uninitialized gelatinoid fiber and knitting needles.

Wait a minute, she thought, back up. Back up to that feelie glove. Turbo made superb sensu-ware, and this glove must have decremented C.C.’s accounts significantly.

“May I?” It was a brazen request disguised as a polite inquiry.

He nodded, “But be careful, it has a fifty terra band width.”

Exhibiting due care she slid it on to her left hand. It pulsed and the optic fibers fluoresced ever so slightly. With its gloved partner, she stroked the back of her right hand gently. A sensation of milky heat sidled up her arm. The sinews of her hand melted in creamy bliss.

“Where did you get this?”

“Germany. I can’t remember the catalog…”.

C.C.’s on-board sprung to life sending a standard query into the etherweb. The web provided the answer and C.C.’s on-board discretely whispered it in his ear.

“The Siemens Personal Kinetica Catalog”, he volunteered.

“C.C.” she said, her eyes sobering and tracking on his. “Can we talk talk?”

He cringed a little inside. He had been enjoying her easy flirtatious dialogue and felt a little nervous about coming back to earth just yet and having a serious conversation with her. “Talking talk” was a sort of oblique way to discuss the interpersonal dynamics of a situation using the protocol of speaking in the third person, made popular by the hit romance “Mike & Mike”. If he agreed to the “talk talk” then she would speak frankly and matter-of-factly about her take on the communication dynamics and personal politics between them and he would be obliged to respond in kind. Its use was often as a party game of the ilk of “Truth or Dare” of the late 20th or “Wear My Shoes” of the early 21st. But it had also become a way for two people leading perpendicular lives to attempt to quickly batter down the walls of unknowing between them and see if they stood on some common ground, before the brief intersection of their paths ended.

“Agreed”, he said.

“The talk is playful and feels unforced, pleasant”, she said.

He nodded shyly. She glared at him for a more appropriate response. He screwed up his courage and took a deep breath.

“He would like to continue to talk about things in his room and other light topics to get more of a sense of her….” he hesitated, causing her to glare again.

“Values?” she offered.

“Yeah, values…intentions.” He took another deep breath. “He doesn’t feel a level dynamic yet between the two of them…yet. He doesn’t feel himself ready to address her as a peer, as an equal.”

She had to think about that. She had to acknowledge her celebrity, her famous father, C.C.’s younger age. “Yeah, I, I mean she can understand that, She hopes they can get past it.”

“He would like to overcome it too.”

“As it was?” Her words signaled a request to end the talk talk. He nodded.

She picked up the music ball. It squeaked and whirred discordantly. “Never could play one of these things. I would like to though.” She held it out to him. He took it with one hand and tried unsuccessfully to raise himself from the fluidity of his mattress with the rest of his body. She grasped his flailing hand and with great strength and center of gravity pulled him upright. For a second they were standing face to face. He turned away to examine the music ball. She came over and stood by his side and looked at it too. He ran his left thumb down one of its metallic ribs causing a percussive effect, which now repeating, created a beat.

She smiled in appreciation. Her eyes said she wanted to hear more. The fingers of his right hand scuttled across the meshed metallic plates of the ball, creating a bass line.

He handed her the ball. “Now just tickle the thermo pad over there and…”. She did and it was playing a tune, or better, she was playing it. She laughed the laugh of a small but significant liberation, swooned a little, lost her balance and toppled butt first onto his gel mattress causing it to spasm indignantly. He felt nothing to fear in that laugh, and before he could think a thought to stop himself he sank down to plop next to her on his still oscillating futon. Its center sank gently under their combined weight, pushing up both ends and causing their rear ends to slide together. They smelled the salty sourness of each others sweat, but kept their eyes on the ball (as it were) enjoying their closeness, each secretly, without risking loss by acknowledgment. They quietly shared the relativity of time as seconds lost their brisk cadence. Tash continued to fondle a rudimentary tune out of the music ball and they both focused on the sphere that was their locus of connection.

C.C.’s on-board came up and whispered in his ear that her on-board was requesting access to his medical data. He felt all of sudden scared, conflicted, unworthy. Reporting a non-response to her, her on-board withdrew the query. She exhaled audibly. His on-board reported her arousal levels decrementing rapidly. Why does this always happen to me, he thought. I am right there on the brink and I back off. He realized that though her face still addressed the ball her eyes had rolled over to look at his. He caught her gaze and then smiled self-consciously. Her eyes made a slight squinty frown as they parsed his reaction. He was beginning to get a sense of those talking eyes of hers, now seeming to say something like I wanted you, oh well!. She jerked her eyes back to the music ball and ran her thumb across its equatorial band causing the rhythm to transform into a Latin sort of thing.

“Nice gadget” she ventured, keeping her eyes on the thing. She said it clumsy as if it were some sort of hastily assembled peace offering. Now he looked at her with all the focus he could muster. He synthesized every thing that had just happened, the awkward peace offering, the frowning “I wanted you, oh well!”, the clumsy “Nice gadget”, and was suddenly flooded with empathy for this soul next to him and an endearing sense of her shyness under that oft brazen exterior.

With a series of eye muscle twitches he drilled down the menus to get his on-board to release his medical data. Her eyes rolled over to look at him again, quizzical, with a kind of ambivalence between skepticism and longing. His on-board alerted him to the receipt of her medical data. She had had recent blood work and all tests were negative.

“Can I kiss you?” she asked. He silently applauded her raw courage, but before he could utter his affirmative response her lips were on his. Everything on both parties was incrementing at this point. Reflexively, to keep her balance as she maneuvered to plant the kiss, she put her left hand (which has rested quietly between them during this last sequence, while her right hand played the music ball, but is still sheathed in the Siemens 50 tera feelie glove, though she has forgotten this fact) on his thigh. The effect ran down toward his knee and more significantly, upward as well. He quivered and struggled on the precipice of an involuntary climax. She was way too busy kissing him for the next few seconds before she realized that she was inflicting an erotic sledge hammer on his parts.

She disabled the glove and took her hand off his thigh for good measure. She drew back from the embrace with a “What a klutz I am!” look.

“Oh, C.C., I’m so sorry!” she offered, but her eyes showed no sorrow as she scanned his face for the first facial contortion signaling his response. She saw the laugh coming and beat him to it with her own. Two giggling techies on an overburdened gelatinoid futon somewhere in Los Angeles, planet Earth, circa 2055.

C.C. got serious, “Kiss me again!” With the dangerous mitt shut down she gripped his head like she would a terrain ball and gave him her best tongue-filled smooch. They lingered beyond the reach of time in the glory of this first embrace, first in this incarnation at least. They both were struck by a faint sense of lack of remembering.

Wild thoughts were percolating within and between them, implications, realities. Enough to make them finally disengage and ponder each other. Who does this kid think he is, she thought. Isabelle Zero’s son. Zero the artist, designer, radical activist. Equality Now, economic democracy, universal empowerment. Me, fat cat celeb athlete, daughter of Victor Novatna, arch-conservative financier, Mr. Power of a Million Voices in Unison. My dad will expel the contents of his large intestine when he finds out who I’m doing.

Her nostrils flared and she squeezed her eyes to a noticeable redness. “Can we talk talk again!” They were both caught off guard by the starkness, the modulated anger of her words.

“Okay.”

“How the hell is this relationship going to work? Tell me that right now!”

She was right, he thought as he presented her with another one of his patented self-conscious smiles, how could it work. She was the only child of Benizier Brava who was as much as forced to marry Victor Novatna. She was something like third in line to the Novatna “thrown”. Seat on Victor’s Board, for PR reasons he assumed. Accomplished terrain ball player. Microsoft Cup finalist. The only way I will hear the end of this, he chuckled to himself, is after my mother disowns me and never speaks to me again.

“He doesn’t have an answer for that,” he admitted, “He guesses…”

“Yeah?”

“He guesses he would see them moving cautiously, taking time to bio and reference each other.”

“That’s sensible” she commented, in an unthrilled kind of way. “As it was?”

He nodded. They were eyeing each other again. She was starting to realize that his eyes were very easy to stare into. The more you looked, the more you saw. A hint of fear. A slight squeeze of caring. Recognition, inspirations firing in the background. She wanted to be with what was behind those eyes too much to be sensible now.

She gave him her best “Come hither!” look and said “I reviewed your configuration and I see that your hardware can do a level three. I just swapped with someone for a two-run mind bender program. It would be,” she paused to hash just the right word, “fun!”

He couldn’t believe the melodramatic pause between “be” and “fun” in her last line. It was as laughable as it was endearing.

“Are they legal?”

“They better be!” Tash hissed, “I gave up a lot for the pair.” Her eyes wandered, focusing again on glowing labia seeming to ooze viscous fluids.

“Your mom’s work?” she asked, eyeing the tapestry that hung, or more accurately dangled lasciviously on the opposite wall. She knew it was, of course. Who else but Zero would create a 3-D pulsating giant purple orifice of a wall hanging.

He nodded. “You like it?”

She pondered the thing for a minute, shaking her head. “It’s…”. She couldn’t keep herself from starting to giggle.

C.C. knew just what she was trying to say and laughed.

“I know she’s your mother and all, but the thing just says ‘Fuck me’ every time I look at it.”

“That’s my mother!” C.C. shook his head and rolled his eyes upward.

“Is she as out there as her art?”

“No, actually. You would never know it to meet her. She’s very sophisticated really.”

“So what’s it like to have a mom who gave a graduation keynote at Harvard totally naked, who is on the cover of some tabloid every other month and would be arrested on sight in Grace?”

C.C. laughed. “I’ve gotten used to it. Your more conservative types can be a little standoffish at first, anticipating that I am some demon seed or something.”

“Are you?” Tash delivered the query completely deadpan.

“Am I what?”

“A demon seed.”

“Of course!” He threw it off with pride and a shy smile on his face, only half kidding.

“How about you? You’ve graced the front page of a few tabloids yourself!” he countered.

“True,” she acknowledged. A big toothy grin arched across her round face. “You want to know what’s it like to have Mr. ‘Owns Half The World’ as a father?”

“Yeah!” confirmed C.C, there was a certain stiffness to the way she said, “Father.”

“We actually have a working relationship. I don’t tell ‘V’ how to run his business or who I’m sleeping with! He gives out my number as a Christmas bonus to his favorite young lieutenants. I get invitations to see the solar eclipse on a 60 foot yacht or join a joy ride to the moon with deep pocketed wish-they-were astronauts. Sometimes I go, but never on a second date. I give them two sideline passes to a playoff game as a consolation prize. They tell their buddies that I had sex with them, which is usually a lie. ‘V’ thinks I’m a tramp or a lesbian, depending on the circumstances.”

“How about your mom?”

Tash said nothing for a moment, checking out the mounting of the thermo pad on the music ball. “My mom’s my biggest fan actually,” she volunteered and then continued her intricate examination of the thermo pad coupling. What, she thought, hearing the previous words emit from her mouth, am I talking like we have a relationship already.
“How about your dad C.C.?” Tash couldn’t remember ever seeing an image of Isabelle with a male partner.

C.C. turned to look at Tash, and with an interlacing of pride and pathos said, “I actually (she instantly realized that he used the word because she had) don’t have a dad as such. I have a sperm donor and an Aunt Didi.”

“Didi Gray has been your mom’s partner for a long time.”

“Since I was three. Didi’s great. My mom’s my mom, of course, but Didi always has her head on her shoulders. I like that about her.”

Well they’ve talked about the parents, Tash mused, what’s next? The siblings?

“So C.C.,” said Tash, changing the subject if not the entire frame of reference completely, “Are you going to show me how one properly uses this exquisite little gizmo?” She displayed her still sheathed hand and rotated it slowly from side to side, admiring the understated technology of the feely glove.

C.C. nodded without words and started to remove the thing from her hand, carefully loosening each finger in sequence, and then sliding the glove up and off Tash’s now naked fingers. The act played so sensually, Tash felt like he had undressed her, and he picked up on the simile as well. He slid the thing’s sheer fabric over his left hand and enabled the device. Now his gloved finger tips moved forward and his pinky engaged its counterpart on her still raised appendage. She felt his touch as if it were skin to skin, but there was an additional sensation, indescribable actually, but if you had to try, like a thousand little hands expertly massaging every tiny sinew of her digit. His pinky then slowly slid down the inner side of hers until it rested in the crook between her pinky and ring finger. The effect was like having a hand slide up your inner thigh until it reached the thighs’ conjunction, only the entire experience was an exquisite microcosm. She looked at him with eyes that conveyed no language, but wanted his fingers to touch every last inch of her. She felt the warm impacts of three other fingertips on her palm, the sensation again of micro-massage, now a thumb from behind contacting and melting the tissues at the base of her thumb. Her hand felt disembodied as he massaged it, or better her entire consciousness had migrated to the site, leaving the rest of her body to fend for itself. His gloved hand moved slowly across her wrist following the contours of bones and tendons up her arm, carrying her hyper-focused awareness with it. At each joint the feeling was even more intense, with each cell seeming to experience a moment of consciousness. His hand slid under her shirt sleeve on up and squeezed her shoulder and she could feel a penetrating heat dissolving every ache remaining from yesterday’s game. She tried to smile but only managed to exhale noisily. The moment lengthened with her shoulder in his grasp.

She was beginning to be able to modulate the experience, to think thoughts again. Overcome by a sensation that her shirt was in the way, she grasped his wrist below the glove and pulled his hand off her momentarily so she could fumble with the buttons and remove it. She felt a cool breeze from the window on her breasts, encased in a loosely knit silver mesh which held them captive against her chest but otherwise did not impede the flow of air against and respiration from her skin. Still, the shear undergarment felt like an obstacle to profound experience and she dragged it down to her waist, allowing her ample flesh to tumble out.

She caught him hesitating, and gave him a look that out of context might have been called nasty, but in the moment was a strident “Please continue!”

Gratefully, they both stopped thinking and talking and were merely doing, what they both had wanted for some time now. The fingertips of his sheathed hand came to rest on her rib cage under her armpit. The sensation penetrated her chest area like tree roots in time-lapse photography. Her eyes were dark and spoke a purely biological, hormone charged message, nowhere near language. He registered the message and his hand encompassed her breast. She kind of expected an overpowering sensation but he had modulated the glove considerably.

It was quite the device, though that was too much thought to be thought at that moment. The great part about a well tuned feely glove, expertly wielded, was that you didn’t have to think, where ever the gloved hand was, you were merely there, and nothing else carried any significance. She was simply present as each of a million muscle and fat cells of her ample appendage were engulfed in a loving warmth, her nerve endings conveying as many messages of pleasure to her brain. She knew, at some instinctive level, that the gloved hand must explore every excruciating inch of her, every crevice. And so it was, followed by soft kisses and warm breath.