separate; break off inside her, as it always did. Soon there would be more of us. They had taken away my ability to bare offspring but evolution is determined. It doesn’t matter how I take them, when it’s over they’re always carrying my child.
Her orgasm spat out my hand as her body arched, muscles contracting and relaxing in pleasure. Drenched to the elbow, I watched her slide off me, moaning into the pillow so her security wouldn’t come and beat me down.
I disengaged my mind from hers and slipped away to clean up.
It wouldn’t be long. They’d come. It never went beyond this moment. I’d learned to take what satisfaction I could quickly. The end was always someone else to work with, until they too succumbed.
I was sitting in the dark on the reception room sofa, fully dressed, when the doors burst inward. I offered up my wrists meekly. The Special Forces guy got a whiff of sex and dealt me a buffet to the head that put me on the floor. The Commander knocked his man down to join me.
“Not the head, fuck-wit! She’s worth more than our combined salary!” He snatched up my hands, noticing a missing fingertip and swore, knowing what it meant. He detailed off his squad. “Medic, check on the empath. Corp, get me Housekeeping. We need to relocate. STAT.”
From the moment they conceived, I never saw my conquests again. I was given to a new empath. One they hoped wouldn’t be swayed by my charms.
“How long did it take?”
“Three months, Sarge.”
With men killing one another, Mother Nature has to do something. The speed of my success could have as much to do with an attempt to keep the population going as evolution’s desire to change their behavior.
I’m not vain enough to assume I’m Gaia’s only chosen Adam to my empaths. But it’s significant that no men have been born with the talent. My children are virtually impossible to abort. As I’d suggested to Cassandra, nature knew the reception we’d get.
When they bound my hands I noticed that my fingertip was already starting to grow back. Enough DNA to do the job, no more. They were leading me away to a new life when the screaming started. She’d just found out what her consent had really meant. The unexpected result of her one-night stand and mercy fuck. I hoped she could forgive me. I’d genuinely liked her.
When she calmed down, she’d probably console herself with the thought that I’d manipulated her sympathy. Messed with her head. Mind games. Of course I had. I’m what you made me. I’m a telepath and that’s what we do.
*
TS: Very shortly, I will have been a civil servant for 20 years. You do less time for committing murder. Combine that premise with a love of science fiction, and “Mind Games” was born.
The Rocky Side of the Sky
By Melissa Scott
Once upon a time… . That’s how stories are supposed to start, or at least that’s how Mam’Sook started them when I was a little girl up in Coldwater. Except this story can’t start that way, because in this one, Once and Time don’t meet. Maybe I knew her, once, maybe then she knew me back, but time itself got fractured, broken apart and badly mended, when our ship wrecked and lost us, and in the process we lost ourselves. So…maybe sometime I loved a woman, and her name was Tisha Rho.
I have all the notes on my log, which I kept because my daddy, Prosper Sr., told me always to keep a journal in case you got lost in the sweet-not-yet; what the cosmologists call the adjacent possible, and the workhorses code in screaming fire-panic red. Daddy had sailed the sweet-not-yet himself, which is why I’m an only, and why I’m Prosper Larkin, Junior, even though I’m female. He’d earned the christening-right, taking the chances he did, and I’m proud to bear his name. He was time-lost just after my fifteenth birthday, came back chronophagic, a burning, wasting shell, died of old age at forty-one, and left me the bond that paid for my wires and my training, access to space
Her orgasm spat out my hand as her body arched, muscles contracting and relaxing in pleasure. Drenched to the elbow, I watched her slide off me, moaning into the pillow so her security wouldn’t come and beat me down.
I disengaged my mind from hers and slipped away to clean up.
It wouldn’t be long. They’d come. It never went beyond this moment. I’d learned to take what satisfaction I could quickly. The end was always someone else to work with, until they too succumbed.
I was sitting in the dark on the reception room sofa, fully dressed, when the doors burst inward. I offered up my wrists meekly. The Special Forces guy got a whiff of sex and dealt me a buffet to the head that put me on the floor. The Commander knocked his man down to join me.
“Not the head, fuck-wit! She’s worth more than our combined salary!” He snatched up my hands, noticing a missing fingertip and swore, knowing what it meant. He detailed off his squad. “Medic, check on the empath. Corp, get me Housekeeping. We need to relocate. STAT.”
From the moment they conceived, I never saw my conquests again. I was given to a new empath. One they hoped wouldn’t be swayed by my charms.
“How long did it take?”
“Three months, Sarge.”
With men killing one another, Mother Nature has to do something. The speed of my success could have as much to do with an attempt to keep the population going as evolution’s desire to change their behavior.
I’m not vain enough to assume I’m Gaia’s only chosen Adam to my empaths. But it’s significant that no men have been born with the talent. My children are virtually impossible to abort. As I’d suggested to Cassandra, nature knew the reception we’d get.
When they bound my hands I noticed that my fingertip was already starting to grow back. Enough DNA to do the job, no more. They were leading me away to a new life when the screaming started. She’d just found out what her consent had really meant. The unexpected result of her one-night stand and mercy fuck. I hoped she could forgive me. I’d genuinely liked her.
When she calmed down, she’d probably console herself with the thought that I’d manipulated her sympathy. Messed with her head. Mind games. Of course I had. I’m what you made me. I’m a telepath and that’s what we do.
*
TS: Very shortly, I will have been a civil servant for 20 years. You do less time for committing murder. Combine that premise with a love of science fiction, and “Mind Games” was born.
The Rocky Side of the Sky
By Melissa Scott
Once upon a time… . That’s how stories are supposed to start, or at least that’s how Mam’Sook started them when I was a little girl up in Coldwater. Except this story can’t start that way, because in this one, Once and Time don’t meet. Maybe I knew her, once, maybe then she knew me back, but time itself got fractured, broken apart and badly mended, when our ship wrecked and lost us, and in the process we lost ourselves. So…maybe sometime I loved a woman, and her name was Tisha Rho.
I have all the notes on my log, which I kept because my daddy, Prosper Sr., told me always to keep a journal in case you got lost in the sweet-not-yet; what the cosmologists call the adjacent possible, and the workhorses code in screaming fire-panic red. Daddy had sailed the sweet-not-yet himself, which is why I’m an only, and why I’m Prosper Larkin, Junior, even though I’m female. He’d earned the christening-right, taking the chances he did, and I’m proud to bear his name. He was time-lost just after my fifteenth birthday, came back chronophagic, a burning, wasting shell, died of old age at forty-one, and left me the bond that paid for my wires and my training, access to space
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