Paradiso
Pendergast steps into the Callway's office and stuffs his gene-forged six-foot-seven-inch frame into the normal-sized armchair. He sits awkwardly in the chair, shifting uncomfortably. The psychiatrist, Callway, turns her head to greet him. The mechanical apparatus over her eyes softly clicks as it focuses in on him. The air in the office is stale, smelling of disinfectants, chemicals, and faintly of a floral perfume. The low, coarse, low-pile carpet, once a blue color, is now a bruised grey. The walls are painted a soul-crushing beige only found in academia halls and company-run offices. The room's drop-down ceiling has no LCD lighting tiles. The room's only source of light comes from the natural lighting of several windows, which brings out the dirt and grime on the beige walls.
Callway restlessly taps the pen against her folded knee. Her rich, deep red robe has been modified to accentuate her breasts and show a generous amount of cleavage. Black highlights accentuate the richness of the robe’s red color. Not that he cared about the exposed skin, he found her attractive. Her sexuality is enough to cause his eyes to wander over her body.
Pendergast feels a flirtatious tension between them. On either side of her are mechanical spiders built into preserved human skulls. The one on her left has a noticeable red light and reads his biometric data and brain waves. The one on her left has a quill on a mechanical appendage that is notating things down. “You're still having dreams?” Her tone is warm, motherly almost. But the sexual tension is still there, like a wound cord about to snap.
“They’re different,” Pendergast says, sitting across from her. “It’s not about the demon. It’s about Andrette, Kailey, and my best friend.” Mentioning these people causes the right mechanical horror to become restless. The pace of the quill scratching intensifies. The mechanical apparatus over her eyes softly clicks as it zooms in on pained features.
“You haven’t talked about him before. Why don’t we start with that?”
"We grew up on green pastures. He initiated me into the gang’s blood-in ritual.” Pendergast sees a scene replaying in his mind's eyes. It's the same scene he has seen hundreds of times. A young teen is backdropped by rusting hulks of prefabricated steel structures. A cracked and worn asphalt underfoot. The young gang member is caught out on the street in an ambush by the blue-uniformed officers of Civil Authority. The teen draws a pistol from his waistband. Gunfire breaks out. He kills one of the officers. But he is shot multiple times. Phantom gunshot continues to ring out in his mind. Each shot causes him to shudder. The right spider registers his biometric response to the trauma. He subconsciously points to the multiple gunshot scars. “I died that day." The final phantom gunshot goes off. His death knell. "I left to join the Marines after I recovered. We didn't meet again until the Outer Colony Wars.”
"I take it that it wasn’t a reunion?"
"We were on different sides of a war." His mind fills with fragmented sounds of war: screams, gunfire, and explosions. The smell of the charred flesh fills his nostrils.
"In your opinion, was your friend right about the war. Is that part of your pain?" She asks.
"I know he was right. Green pastures long since stopped being the asylum for Earth's millions of homeless people and displaced veterans during the Religious War. But no, I didn’t know he was on Triton. That’s not even why it haunts me. I left and never looked back."
"Why is that?" She stops tapping the pen and leans forward.
"We didn’t have hope on Green Pastures. So we replaced hope with depravity and wanton cruelty. I thought he was too far gone to change. So I never went back, at least that’s what I tell myself. It's a lie. I hated my childhood enough to bury it, rewrite it if I have to. Returning means confronting my past." The right mechanical spider is now in considerable distress. The psychiatrist doesn't seem to notice. She checks the parchment.
"Do you realize you’re afraid of what it took for you to survive?" She asks, resting her soft brown eyes on him with a stern but warm gaze. "The very nature of survival takes away choice. In this case, it takes away your civility. It makes you a monster in your own eyes."
"Exactly, I guess." Pendergast shifts nervously in his seat from his trauma. The right spider mimics the motion, moving its limbs in a repetitive motion.
"Describe these dreams of him?"
"I’m not reliving the event. It’s like experiencing alternative realities. I’m boarding a spacecraft, knowing he’s on board, and I start murdering the crew. We're back in the gang, and I turn to him and shoot him. He has this look of shock and betrayal. That’s the binding piece to the dreams, that look of betrayal. The sad thing is, he didn’t look like that in real life." The spider is now squealing and urgently trying to get the psychiatrist's attention.
"You never speak his name." She says, tapping the pen against her chin. "You refer to him as your best friend."
"It's because I can’t say his name. I can’t even remember it. It's like poking around inside an open wound. There is overwhelming pain."
"We talked about Andrette and Kailey before. Let's talk about them again. What about Andrette?"
"I wasn’t supposed to care, to even be on the planet. But damn it, I went anyway. We’re on a bridge. I see the missile. We’re falling and falling. Then blackness and pain."
"You weren’t supposed to be her white knight, but you chose it anyway. Does that make you guilty?"
"I know logically there is nothing I could do," Pendergast says. "I persecute religious people. I’m not even a soldier anymore. That planet went hot. UAC doomed her the moment they sent her there."
"Yet this guilt is a responsibility for you to take upon yourself, like a mantle of responsibility. Not as a penitence for you, but the UAC. Kailey?" She stops tapping the pen against her chin and rests it in her lap.
"Another childhood friend." He leans forward in his chair. "He ran with the gang. It's where we met. I found her practicing some form of religion. I passed judgment, found her guilty, and executed her." Biometric alarms start going off.
"Does doing your job make you guilty?" She asks.
"No amount of duty can hide shame."
"But recognize that your shame isn’t rational. You're placing yourself in a god-head like role. You're a Judge, you know gods are superstitions. Factually, you could not save anyone. You're having the common issue of accepting that everything is out of your hands." She checks her watch. "I think that's about time. Pendergast, you need to look to the future, not the ghost of your past. What you have done is incredible. Don’t waste your potential second-guessing yourself."
Pendergast stands up, head hanging low, eyes boring into the floor, and leaves the room, stepping into the waiting room. Sunlight streams through the windows, causing dust to be visible as it flutters about. Several patients are sitting in chairs, keeping their heads down. A nurse is sitting behind a counter.
Martha Keelman is waiting for him in the intake room. Her features are buried deep within her hood and concealed in shadows. A piece of paper rested in her lap. She stands up to hand it over.
"What are you doing here?” He glances down at the paper. It’s a psych evaluation.
"You failed," her voice is warm and devoid of any negative emotions. Her eyes, despite being hidden, could not hide her concern.
"You can’t do this," Pendergast pleads.
"Our role in the future of humanity is too precious to sacrifice." Keelman struggles to bring her voice above a whisper. She isn't worried about the patients or the nurse overhearing. "I’m not trying to say you're unstable, but you're slipping down a long slope that leads to such debaucheries as religion and madness."
"Then what am I supposed to do? This is the only life I know."
"It will be decided later," she says, beckoning him forward. "Why don't you crash at my apartment. It will only be for a couple of days." Despite the department frowning upon them sharing an intimate relationship, they have shared an ongoing physical relationship for years. When he could spare the time. The idea isn't unusual.
Keelman guides him outside to a waiting transport shuttle.
The shuttle settles down on top of a monolithic apartment tower built into the dry seabed caused by the receding of the Pacific Ocean. Her apartment is small compared to her station. It still has three bedrooms. None of which strictly met that description. The place hasn't changed much since the last time he was here. He tries to remember when that was. His eyes aimlessly wandered, looking into the cramped rooms crammed with various hobbies. There is a good amount of dust in the air, as if the apartment hasn’t been disturbed in a long time.
Pendergast didn’t spend much time looking around the apartment before stepping out onto the balcony and gazing out at the craggy continental shelf dotted with shells, dead starfish, and dead sun-bleached coral. Keelman stays with him for a few minutes. Both of their hands rest on the iron railing. She wanted to feel connection and closeness. It draws her to him. Keelman to encroach upon his personal space. Every inch apart from him is agony.
Pendergast turns to look at her. The light catches her eyes. Time seems to pause almost as a favor to them. She chases the flecks of color in his irises. He leans in. She leans into his lean. Their lips are so close to embracing that it's almost physically painful. Yet their lips remain suspended there. As time remains suspended around them. He pushes her against the railing.
His eyes gaze down into hers, feeling lost within them. It’s so beautiful how they catch the light.
She met his gaze, melting under his touch, tracing flecks of color in his irises. He could feel her velvety and silky robe against his skin. Her hot and moist breath against his neck causes his skin to break out in goosebumps. The rise and fall of her chest, slow and steady.
He leans in to kiss her, and she doesn't resist; instead, she leans into it. Sporadic wild thoughts knit a tapestry in her mind, and little electrical sparks dance down her spine to her toes. Her skin flushes with the intensity of the kiss. He presses against her. Her breasts pressed up against him. She looks at him with seductive eyes, a clear invitation for more.
He pulls back, brushing his lips against hers. She sucks on his lower lip. His weight shifts. Their lips are touching but not pressing together. It's a teasing gesture that leaves her panting and out of breath. Her heart is wild and out of control. Somewhere on the horizon, the sun is setting, casting the desolate seabed in shadows. The air smells of salt.
"Come inside," she says. He stares out at the alien landscape for a few seconds more before returning inside with her. As he steps inside, the clothes slip from around Keelman's curvy frame, exposing the patchwork of protruding, grotesque cybernetic implants and the associated scars. The gene-forge process leaves women flat-chested, but a separate surgery caused her to grow naturally large breasts that are complete eye candy.
For the briefest instance, she is wearing undergarments, but they disappear quickly enough. They are a strange union. Keelman has over a foot of gene-forged height on him. He comes up to the perfect height to suckle on her breast without having to shift his position.
Pendergast was supposed to have her gene-forged height, but something in his genetic makeup caused the process to go wrong. He was left stunted compared to his gene-forged brothers and sisters.
Keelman has to bend down to kiss him. Their height disparity has the usual amount of awkwardness. Despite this, the kissing found a feverish intensity. They were a mess of wandering, groping hands. She stops their intimate intanglement to fill the gnawing emptiness between her legs.
Keelman drags him into the bedroom, gets him into bed, and wraps her legs around his waist. Pendergast is hovering over her, dragging out her gnawing need for him. She grabs him by the hair, tired of his endless teasing. This is what she needs for him to be close, no, to be a part of her. eagerly guides him in with the skilled precision of a lover.
With a desire this intense, she would get off quickly. Pendergast puts power equal to the amount of unbridled passion he feels behind each thrust. The only purpose is to prolong their intimate connection. Being with her meant he didn't have to confront his thoughts. The heat and moisture between her legs drive him wild, drive him forward, drive him towards her.
He can see the back of her head, which is to say, he could see nothing. She looks like a Medusa from behind, with all the wiring running up her back to the implants at the back of her skull. It’s quite disquieting to look at it. He looks at the plain grey polycarbon wall of her quarters. The minutes continue to tick by. His legs burn with the effort as he continues to thrust into her.
Her mind goes tumbling over the side of the orgasm cliff into the mind-numbing blackness beyond. The last thing she sees is him before she falls into the inky black.
Martha rolls over. Her large breasts swaying with the movement. They awkwardly cuddle up next to each other. Blackness begins to creep up around the corner of Pendergast's eyes. He gives into his exhaustion and drifts away.
