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Category: Erotica/Erotic Science Fiction/Science Fiction
Description: [Warning: Explicit Sex.] Now available in ebook for the first time, 18 short stories of crackling erotic futures by the master of erotic voice, M. Christian. Men, women, hackers, derelicts, enforcers, hustlers, and whores in every combination inhabit the streets and beds and back alleys of Christian's imagination. This is erotic science fiction at its best.
eBook Publisher: Circlet Press, 2003 2003
eBookwise Release Date: August 2010

Available eBook Formats: OEBFF Format (IMP) [323 KB]
Words: 70003
Reading time: 200-280 min.

--"M. Christian's stories squat at the intersection of Primal Urges Avenue and Hi-Tech Parkway like a feral-eyed, half-naked Karen Black leering and stabbing her fractal machete into the tarmac. Truly an author for our post-everything 21st century." --Paul Di Filippo, author of the Steampunk Trilogy --"When I pick up a book by M. Christian, I know that I'll be surprised and delighted. Whether he's targeting horror, thriller, sci-fi or erotica genres, or some creative mixture, he never fails to deliver an original perspective." --Lisabet Sarai, author of Incognito and Fire --"M. Christian is one hell of a writer. He paints his universes and characters in full, living color, thrills the reader with non-stop action. A no-holds-barred storyteller, he embraces his reader at the start and doesn't let go until long after the end." --Mari Adkins, Apex Publications contributing editor --"M. Christian is the chameleon of modern erotica. One day punk, another romantic; one day straight, another totally perverse and polyamorous. But always sexy and gripping." --Maxim Jakubowksi, editor of the Mammoth Book of Erotica series --Amos Lassen reviews The Bachelor Machine by M. Christian: "When I tell you that these stories are hot, I might be giving you an understatement. M. Christianâ??s erotica comes from the heart...he has created an entire new genre." http://amoslassen.wordpress.com/2011/02/07/the-bachelor-machine-science-fiction-erotica/#comment-368 -- Sally Sapphire at Bibrary Bookslut: "The experience of reading The Bachelor Machine is not just one of technological wonder or erotic arousal. Itâ??s also one of confusion and uncertainty, of equal measures dread and desire. These are stories that lead you on, draw you in, and take rude liberties with your expectations." Full review: http://bibrary.blogspot.com/2011/03/review-bachelor-machine-by-m-christian.html -- Johann Carlisle at The Future Fire: "There is an uncommon variety of material in here, from cyberpunk to space opera, alternative history to dystopia. The science-fictional settings are manifold, as are the sexual positions and inclinationsâ?"and, more importantly, the role of the inevitable explicit sex within each story. From the frivolous to the poignant to the socio-politically scathing, thereâ??s something in this book for everyone." Full review: http://reviews.futurefire.net/2011/03/christian-bachelor-machine-2010-2003.html

"We have a special today," a man said, stepping out from behind one of the containers, wiping his hands with an oily rag. Moving like an insect, a precise ballet of extraordinarily long arms and legs, he gently folded the rag around a brace ringing one of the containers. His face was long and narrow, pinched and tight, hair the color of old asphalt, the few white streaks of white like pebbles in a road. His name, the man in the bar had said, was many, various. "Someone's collecting virginities. Give you a hundred for losing yours," Various said.

Thinking quick about it, he thought of her, instead: walking the street, eyes available red, steaming lust for rent, the defiant tension in her legs, breasts spilling from the top of a latex dress--creamy crescents under hard streetlight. She offered so much more than what Mary had given him, so many years before.

"More than it's worth to me," Dusk said, stepping closer and smiling.

After a few minutes--stretching out on the gurney, Various touching the tiny aches of microdermal pick-ups to his temples--he sold Magnesium Mary and a biting cold March night behind the Autopharm™ for one hundred dollars.

"Think of it," Various said, pulling small tools and loops of flopical cable out of the bright orange industrial jumpsuit he wore, rolled at arms and legs. "Try and remember as much as you can. It'll help."

Dusk watched him move around his head, feeling the connections' pricks and gentle stabs of pain. He didn't want to nod or say anything, so he didn't. After a minute more, Various said "Start" from behind his flatscreen panel--somewhere beyond, above Dusk's head.

Start, right: A whistling canyon kind of cold, when simply brisk turns snapping, biting from twisting down narrow streets. Sodium lights, he remembered perfectly, crisply--how they made the street look bilious, intestinal yellow. He'd been fifteen, living with Shirley, his mother, in a yellow Datson next to a Pornotopia store. Already he was running with the Braves but because he was small--shot up later in life--he didn't get to do much except carry shit. He'd been doing just that, thin nylon shirt packed with Speedex capsules in dirty bubblewrap, when he'd seen Magnesium Mary.

To a fifteen-year-old she'd been a goddess, a spike-haired bitch queen, dotted with flashes of steel piercings in eyebrows, nose, lips, and cheeks, who always smoked, always swore, and liked to change her shirt in public to give fifteen-year-olds woodies at the sight of her middle-aged tits and metal flashing nipples.

It'd been an empty night, the cops having cleared the whole area hours before. It was just Mary, Dusk and the hard concrete behind the Autopharm™. She said something, lost to growing up, but the end of it was her grabbing Dusk by the collar of his windbreaker and hauling him into the sweet-reek of garbage alley behind the pharm. She'd fumbled with his belt, and her words stuck "'bout time you grew up, fuck," as she swallowed his scared-limp dick into her burning mouth.

Her suction drew it out of him in a twenty-second come: spasms of too young muscles plunged into steaming, moist, hotness. He blushed and felt the crashing of humiliation as she stood up and spit his come onto the brick back of the Autopharm™.

His first. Then she slammed her fist into his gut, and while he was puking up a fast food dinner she ripped the jacket off his back and took all the Speedex caps. When Romeo, the Braves' chief, found out, he beat Dusk some more--eventually breaking three of his ribs.

Take it, man, I don't want it any more, Dusk thought as Various clicked and clacked devices beyond his sight.

After, when the memory had faded, faded, and faded so much that he couldn't answer the musical question How did you lose your virginity? Various unclipped him and told him to get up.

"Be glad you came to me. Someone like Gregorious you shouldn't trust. I'm much better than he is. I treat you right," Various said, adding finishing touches to Dusk's purchased memory of Magnesium Mary with pianist gestures across his glowing flatscreen. After a tattoo of his long, thin and, Dusk noted absently, pink painted fingernails he held up a tiny wafer of dull silver. "Lost virginity on a chip," he said, then took Dusk's debtcard, paid him his hundred, and sent him away.

Fifty went to back rent. It felt good, but not great, to spend some of his hundred putting off getting kicked out by another month, a little towards his debt. It felt so good, in fact, that he blew another ten getting the lights turned back on in his rack box. There was a rare satisfaction as he swiped his card through the manager terminal in the lobby that, for what seemed like months, he wouldn't have to sit in a black box. Now, for ten Revalued dollars, he could have lights for a month.

Then Dusk walked the length of Cancer Alley for three hours.

Sometime in the past, Dusk had been told, you could see the sky. Now, though, the Alley pinched upwards--buildings on one side and the other, built up generation over generation, shanty on vertical shanty--till there was nothing but cardboard, plywood, plastic truck cocoons and cheap-ass capsule hotels and no sky, never, ever.

There were stars, though. Illiterate Dusk navigated by a thousand flickers from shorting, chopped power lines and greasy cooking fires.

Cancer Alley wasn't that long--just three miles from old St. Fluke hospital (one end) to the New Deal Toxic Recycling Facility (the other)--but Dusk hadn't seen her yet, so just walked from one end to the other. It took him three hours of walking from the ghost of the old public hospital to the sound of screaming, breaking carcinogens to find her.

He'd seen her before, of course, walking up and down this narrow stretch, proudly offering her charms. Dusk knew he had been struck by her, an electric and full-voltage attraction the first time he'd seen her but, then, walking in the always-twilight of the alley, he was hard-pressed to say why, or what, exactly, specifically, she looked like.

Then she was there and he was ... surprised by her. He didn't know why, but he was. He also didn't know why being surprised would make him stop for a second and just stare at her--look at her--as if he was seeing her for the first time.

Which, he knew, he wasn't.

Big eyes, full of available red. She was pure lust--excitement--for rent. Her legs were packed with muscle, defiant tension, covered with the high, reflective gloss of thick latex. Nasty three inch heels. Her hair was smoke, a curly mass of black, drifting strands that surrounded her elegant face like a storm cloud wrapping a strong mountain peak. Her breasts were cream, big and full, pressed in a many-buckled shiny latex top.

She looked at him and turned, not picking Dusk out of the crowd, not seeing him since he didn't seem to have money. Her back was naked, save for the lashings of her top, to the fine dip of her coccyx. On her back, the tattoo of a single wing. It was so shaded, so realized, that Dusk had to look twice to make sure it was ink in skin, and not something else.

Not knowing what kind of self-protection software she might be running in addition to her whoreware, Dusk didn't do what he wanted to--which was tap her on her strong shoulder. Instead he stepped behind her and cleared his throat.

"Yeah?" she said, voice rumbling with caution.

Dusk held up his debtcard.

She took it, slid it through the narrow plastic slot on the checker bracelet on her left wrist. Her eyes went from red to green. Sufficient credit. Thirty minutes of her was his.

"This way, lover," she said, now with tones of warmth, of moisture, of heat.

This way was into the lobby of a grand, but now sad and frightening, hotel. It's name was long gone, and even the ghostly pattern of where it had been was scrubbed clean. Three flights, past three extended families living on two stairs and one hall, and then a door. 313. She slid her thumb down the jam and a solid bolt slammed back.

The room was sparse--the things in it comprised a very short list: a black futon on the industrial rubber floor, a yellow and black halogen work lamp, a bright red plastic toolbox, and a large suitcase.

She turned and smiled, a beam of pure kindness. "Make yourself comfortable, darlin'." Dusk sat down and kicked off his shoes as she walked with fluid temptation over to the toolbox and rummaged its contents. His socks went into his shoes (holes in both) as he watched her, trying to freeze the beauty of her actions in his mind. Standing, he pulled off his shirt, dropped it next to his shoes. Then belt, pants, underwear.

Naked, he stood. The room wasn't cold but he shivered anyway.

She turned, smiling comedy and lust at his hard cock. "Lie down," she said, motioning, with a quick move of her head, to the futon.

Dusk did, moving this way, that, on the lumpy surface till it felt reasonably comfortable. He noticed, absently, a huge yellow water stain on the ceiling, a curious parade of lights from something reflective on the street below. She walked, all elegance and steam, to stand next to his head. His eyes followed the fine geometry of her legs up till they reached the shadowy mystery hidden by her dress.

With a nice move, she put one foot on either side of his head, facing towards his feet. Even with the dancing lights on the ceiling, he couldn't see anything but soft shadows between her legs.

"Don't blink or you might miss me," she said, and a flash of pure, white light licked up one side of her left leg and showed him (blink, blink) the pale curves of her ass, the cream contours of her mons, the gentle folds of her majora--then it was gone and there were shadows again.

She moved a bit more, and again the light flashed, and again Dusk was teased with a burst of white skin blending to pink, of gleaming moisture, of an outer opening just so. Darkness...

He realized that she had a small light in one hand, was using it to draw back the shaded curtain of her dress, showing herself with quick flips of a flashlight. Then he wished he hadn't realized that, understood the trick; magic explained is a little less magical.

The light again, and this time he caught the butterfly flicker of her hand, and he saw something, in addition: blood red nails on lovely frosty-white fingers covering her mons, cupping herself.

The next beat, the next pass, the light stayed--lingering on the sight of her hand between her legs, her brilliant red nails. As he watched (not blinking, not ever), the fingers moved, a massaging ballet on her obscured cunt. His imagination got up and ran fast and far away, and he dreamed an impossible view between red-painted nails and the churning, melting folds of her. He saw, but couldn't really have seen, her fingers stroke and tap the big pearl of her clit, press up and part her very pink, and glistening, lips.