‘Yes, Ishbel, your young man looks very fine,’ the slim young man who had sampled the Emperor said spitefully. ‘Can we get on with business please?
‘Jealousy doesn’t become you, Justinian,’ Elbert, laughed. ‘Both young men are excellent proof of the high standard of my breeding program.’
‘Indeed,’ said Alice, with a hint of lust. ‘Which makes it a shame to have to go back to the old lottery of natural breeding.’
‘It may not be as bad as you imagine,’ Elbert replied. ‘You saw the excellent proportions and health of the Freemen who demonstrated NumbaCruncha for us. Centuries of careful breeding and genetic manipulation have ensured all Vassals and Freemen now look like that, so there will be no monsters.’
‘Too late to worry, anyway,’ a female Mage stated irritably. ‘We need NumbaCruncha to prevent transport catastrophe, so let’s all get used to it because we’ll be using it more than anyone when the new city is populated.’
Murmurs of nervous agreement.
‘You’re sure we can’t just disappear and never be reconstituted—or whatever it does?’ asked the potbellied young man.
‘Getting nervous, Melvyn?’ Laughed the quiet woman.
‘Aren’t you, Angie?’ asked a thin man who hadn’t spoken before.
‘I find it hard to believe there’s no sensation whatsoever,’ Fabien said. ‘I’ll try it.’
‘You just want to make us jealous,’ the thin man remarked dryly.
‘We’re all going to do it, so hold out your wrists!’ Ishbel snapped, out of patience with her subordinates.
When everyone had been given a number and an implant, and had remarked that it didn’t hurt even a bit, Fabien stepped onto the pad, whispered the number and pressed. A pile of glittering garments fell to the floor and a tall, scrawny fellow appeared on a pad at the edge of the circle, six metres distant. He was smiling, naked, hairless and sprouting an alarmingly thick, but average length erection with a large fist-like knob. ‘Come on Xanthippe! Join me,’ he called, stepping off the mat. ‘I’m desperate for a fuck.’
Giggling like a schoolgirl, Xanthippe arrived on the mat beside her lover, so thin it would seem impossible for an instrument as vast as Fabien’s to find space inside, yet within seconds they were locked in feral rutting, Fabien’s grunts only outdone by Xanthippe’s yowls of pleasure. When they came up for air both laughed easily. The eleven other Mages suddenly found the courage, stepped onto their mats and, discarding all inhibitions along with their clothes, joined the developing orgy of carnal lust. Peteru and Uretep didn’t know whether to laugh, cry or be sick.
The men were shoving their appendages into any available orifice or fold of flesh. Augur and Justinian were noisily slurping, having buried their faces in each other’s groins.
Not one of the Mages was physically attractive. Men and women alike were almost transparently pale and either flabby and obese, or scrawny with dry, sickly skin. When dressed, their faces had given no hint of the body’s decrepitude, instead suggesting agelessness, something akin to youth. Stripped of its robes, Ishbel’s blue-veined blubber bulged like a soft elastic bag of fat that bounced, sagged, flowed and quivered. Her tiny half-circle of chin dissolved in concentric rings of fat into her neck, and massive breasts capped by distended nipples hung diagonally to each side of the gigantic belly whose navel was as large as a saucer.
As with the Freemen, the men were soon exhausted while the women kept demanding more. Having thrown Melvyn off, Ishbel was sprawled lewdly on her back, legs apart, thrusting a red velvet slipper into her voracious vulva while bellowing for more cock. Ethel, still managing to look neat, was tugging at Elbert’s flaccid manhood while attempting to insert the poor man’s foot into her orifice. The other women were no more decorous in their attempts to achieve satisfaction.
‘You were right, Peteru,’ Ishbel said with incongruous hauteur, abandoning the effort at masturbation, rolling onto her belly and heaving herself onto all fours. ‘I could easily have decided not to be screwed, but then I thought, why not? It’s perfectly natural. And there’s no embarrassment whatever.’ With a hoot of laughter she crawled around grabbing at the wilting penises of the six depleted men as they staggered back across the soiled carpet to their thrones where they sat with idiot grins watching seven sweaty women writhing over each other; fingers, tongues, toes searching for sensitive places to stimulate.
Peteru and Uretep turned away to conceal their disgust. These people were repellent; pale unhealthy maggots that looked and smelled unwashed. Yet they clearly considered themselves the cream of humanity. The rightful rulers of the world.
‘It’s true what they say,’ Peteru whispered. ‘Scum floats to the top.’
‘I feel sick,’ Uretep whispered. ‘It’s the stench! They smell like rotting carcasses! I’m sure that scrawny one has dags! The stench is…’ He raced to the edge of the chamber, concealed himself behind a curtain and vomited.
After what seemed an eternity the rutting, sucking and slurping ceased and the most powerful people on the planet—thirteen sweaty, smelly and exhausted representatives of the gods—replaced their clothes and sagged onto their thrones. After a short minute of respite Ishbel recovered and imperiously summoned the two young men.
‘Your gadgets and demonstrations are persuasive. The Mages will now confer and decide on the next step.’ She picked up the enseemat from the carpet in front of her throne. ‘You called this your ‘home’ mat. I’ll take it up to my apartment with me now. Tomorrow morning you will be summoned to complete our investigation and learn of our plans for the future. Access to the Mage accommodations is shielded, guarded, and blocked to outsiders. You have never been to my apartment and don’t know where I live, so the final proof of NumbaCruncha will be when you both arrive there after travelling through more than forty fused granite floors and ceilings.’ She nodded coolly, led her flagging entourage to a negrav chute and disappeared heavenward.
‘Gadgets! She called NumbaCruncha a gadget! I could throttle the sow.’
‘You’d never get your hands round her throat. She’s a fuckwit…they all are. Whether they acknowledge it or not they’re physically, and probably intellectually, inferior to just about every other human in Oasis, so they bolster their egos by putting everyone else down. Remember the way the head scientist used to rubbish everything we did when we first started working in the main lab? Yet they’re still using our techniques because they’re better than anything they could think of. Their egos had to be salvaged by rubbishing ours.’
‘You’re right, as usual.’ Peteru pecked his friend on the cheek. ‘OK, let’s get going.’
Having, as always, refused the use of Vassals, they repacked their clothes, jewellery, mats and control box in the trolley, then dropped to their apartment where they carefully checked and stored everything safely.
After scanning their rooms for bugs, a precaution they’d begun taking when another scientist seemed to know more than she should about their activities, they meditated for twenty minutes then discussed the events of the afternoon.
‘Who’d have guessed?’ Uretep shook his head in disbelief. ‘Rutting like rats. Mad as hatters the lot of them and ugly to boot. I can’t believe these are the crème de la crème—the rulers by divine edict of all humanity.’
‘Not only ugly, but decadent as well. Did you feel their emptiness? The pathetic sense of ennui?’
‘I know what you mean. They don’t seem to care about anything except keeping their cushy lifestyle. Those poor Freemen who volunteered to demonstrate NumbaCruncha! I feel as if I’ve murdered them!’
‘They want us to move up to their quarters,’
‘So they can keep an eye on us.’
‘As if we’d want to be honorary Mages! Complicit in their degradation!’
‘Only until they’ve drained our brains,’
‘Exactly! Then it’ll be dishonourable Mages. Goodbye Uretep and Peteru, you’re past your use-by date. The algae beds need fertilising.’
‘You’re right—we already know far too much about them.’
‘So what’s the plan?’
‘First a swim and a hard workout at the gym; I feel filthy by association.’
‘Me too. And then?’
‘A meal, bed and a cuddle with the sexiest man on the planet, to flush this afternoon out of my head. Then to sleep.’
‘Yes indeed...sleep. We have to remain alert, watch our backs and be smarter than them.’
‘The last won’t be too difficult.’
‘Never underestimate the cunning of people with no moral sense. We’re at a disadvantage because we’re decent.’
As usual they had the Scientific Research Level gymnasium to themselves. Mirror-lined walls made the already generous space seem four times as large. Loose shorts and t-shirt were the regulation attire, but having exercised naked since their first visit aged four, Peteru and Uretep had continued to do so—another source of animosity from their peers.
The centrepiece was a hundred-metre-long, freeform swimming pool surrounded by artificial grass and warmed by sunlamps. A jogging track hugged the mirrored walls and every possible type of fitness equipment was attractively arranged in separate areas screened by hedge-like algal growth.
After a more than usually hard workout of all the major muscles, the young men swam ten lengths then relaxed on the side of the pool, the lamps relaxing tired muscles while replenishing vitamin D.
As they were about to leave, Vero, the Chief Scientist, sidled up and demanded to know why Augur had been in their apartment and where they’d been all afternoon. They deflected the questions with vague explanations that not only failed to convince but also fed suspicions.
Annoyed by the secrecy about NumbaCruncha that was already making their lives difficult, they returned to their apartment, wondering who’d been spying and why the Mages were keeping the Aristocratic Heads of Industry in the dark. After all, Ishbel’s engineers would have to organise the making and distribution of all the computers, enseemats and implant chips, and pot-bellied Melvyn’s Aristocratic underlings would be dealing with propaganda and other social issues arising from public nudity… They’d have to ask the Mages in the morning.
Before sleeping they analysed the days events and decided to pretend ignorance about everything in Oasis, and keep inventing reasons for the Mages to need them until they had an escape plan.
‘They’re as thick as the granite blocks this place is made of so it shouldn’t be too difficult to stymie them,’ Peteru said sourly. ‘What beats me is how those scum became the rulers of Oasis! Until today I was proud to be a citizen, now...’
‘I agree. It’s made me realise how smart you were in refusing to use Freemen technicians and Vassals. I reckon you’ve a sixth sense.’
‘I have—and a seventh yet to be discovered. But what if they ask to see all our detailed plans and specifications?’
‘We’ll say we’re upgrading them in the light of new knowledge, and drip-feed them the information as and when needed. We can leave a few disconnected formulae and calculations, working drawings for apparatus and so on lying around. They’ll mean nothing to anyone.’
‘Good one, but for sanity’s sake don’t let on you’ve been deciphering old records! And we’re not making any more virtual trips into the archives till this is over. I don’t trust that fat tart Ishbel or scrawny Xanthippe. We have to keep our wits about us, stay ahead of the game and convince them we’re not revolutionaries; we’re model citizens still believing the crap we were taught as kids.’
‘Right. So if either of us seems to be putting our foot in it, the other will interrupt and head things off.’
‘Absolutely! And we’d better get an official pass to visit every place in the Oasis complex—apartments, social centres, work places, warehouses, shops…you name it, and meet as many Vassals, Freemen and Aristocrats as possible to ensure the NumbaCruncha network is complete and functional.’
‘And we’ll refuse to move up to live on the Mage’s level, saying we can only work from here. I’m not having them breathing over my shoulder all the time.’
‘And we’ll put a lock on our apartment door and never let each other out of our sight!’
‘Definitely! Where one goes the other goes too, so they can’t use us against each other. I can’t get the image out of my head of those brave Freemen being thrown down the chute into the algal beds.’
‘I reckon their suffering would be nothing compared to the misery of being a Mage’s Vassal.’
They kissed to seal their bond, gazed into eyes that registered love and trust, then, after a refreshing tumble on top of the bed, fell into dreamless slumber.