I start taking these notes because Dr. Brown asked the four of us to write everything down.

“We’re making history here,” he said. “For the first time, we are not just enabling or improving existing systems, but creating an entirely new organ. Your journals are the historical documents!”

“Therefore,” he added, “we do not know who will read them, when, or what their knowledge of the context might be. So explain even the most mundane details, as if you were addressing children or people from the past decades.”

So we all write these diaries, even those who, like me, have never written diaries and do not know how to write them well.

As I am going to write for possibly ignorant people, then I think I should tell a little bit about myself and the topic.

I am Kiara, a 25 year old woman. Geneering became a routine thing long before I was born.

Um ... should I explain that too? Geneering is just short for “genetic engineering”. In other words, most people alive today have a lot of useful body enhancements. We almost never get sick, we heal very quickly, we do not get overweight, we keep our sight, hearing, teeth and hair until old age, and so on.

Also, like most people, I have enhanced feelings of pleasure, from sex and taste to sight, hearing, etc. Have you ever felt ecstatic pleasure from good music or painting? I feel it quite often.

So when they called for volunteers to test a completely new and different source of pleasure, a new body organ with that sole purpose, I immediately signed up and by sheer luck was selected. You know, they had about a hundred thousand volunteers applied in ten minutes, and they only needed four for the first run.

They gave us a nice four-bed room in the research complex. You see, now that diseases and unplanned pregnancies are a thing of the past, people are much more relaxed about nudity and sex. You won’t see separate facilities for men, women and other genders in our time.

Also, we are literally required to test the new sensations of pleasure and compare them to sex, among other things. We are all perfectly happy with that.

We are two women (me and Lessie) and two men (Tim and Roger), all about the same age, all eager to participate in the experiments.

In fact, we are very lucky because we all like each other and have agreed to have sex together whenever we feel like it. It’s fun and it helps us collect data.

They injected us with the rypchynes add-on, a standard retrovirus delivery package. So far, it does not cover our reproductive cells. The hereditary version will be released after we make sure it is worth it.

“Why are they called ‘rypchynes’?” Roger asked curiously.

Dr. Mendosa smiled. “That’s our internal joke. We named them after a similar thing in one of Stanislaw Lem’s old stories ... Well, we copied his idea, to be honest.”

“He seems like a curious man, that Mr. Lem,” Lessie said.

“He was a genius and a visionary,” Dr. Mendosa replied solemnly. “Try reading his works sometime. Anyway, you have a week before your rypchynes are fully formed and ready for experimentation.”

I tried to read Lem’s stories, at least this one about rypchynes. What a complicated old language! I did not read much. But the guy really had a weird imagination ... and he really predicted a lot of present day things.

During that week we got along, explored the research complex, slept, had sex, played games, and were generally bored. We could not wait for the rypchynes to grow.

We have the rypchynes! They look like palm-wide bands of beautiful iridescent emerald indigo color that cover the inside of our forearms, from the elbow to the wrist, and run down both sides of the body, from the ribs over the hips to the knees. The color is so beautiful! It reminds us of some butterfly wings, some beetle elytra, and peacock feathers. We admire them all day long. It’s so strange to be so fixated on a simple color, however beautiful.

“Nothing strange,” Dr. Brown chuckled. “It’s part of your brain upgrades. As a rypchine bearer, you are attracted to the sight and smell of rypchynes, just as all humans are attracted to the sight and smell of the bodies of suitable sex partners.”

Wow.

Smell?

We sniffed the rypchynes, our own and each other’s. A very strange, inhuman smell, like creozote, bitumus, and something chemical. Need I say how pleasant this smell is? And it’s slightly different for each of us. I like Tim and Lessie’s smell best, and Lessie likes Roger’s.

“Wonderful!” Dr. Mendosa took notes. “FYI, I can’t tell the difference. And no unaltered human would. Only rypchyne bearers are sensitive to the individual scent variations that control attraction.”

I sniffed Tim’s forearm again and felt an unfamiliar tickling and goosebumps along my rypchynes. I looked at them and was amazed to see that my bands were swelling and bulging, turning into something like thick fur made up of thin feathers. My rypchyne scent grew distinctively stronger, too. I touched them with my finger, and they felt soft and silky, but nothing special.

“This is what rypchyne arousal feels and looks like,” Dr. Mendosa explained. “Excellent. Everything matches the models so far.”

“What now?” Roger asked. He also touched his rypchynes.

“Now you could stop sniffing and touching and observe how the excitement subsides. Or ... you could continue to the climax.”

Stop at this point? Never!

“The rypchynes are stimulated by the rypchynes,” Dr. Mendosa explained. “For the first time, I suggest you do this in pairs, forearms only.”

“Okay...”

We sat on our beds, facing each other, extended our forearms and touched, rypchyne to rypchyne.

We hardly noticed when we started rubbing our rypchynes together. The geneers made our rypchyn reflexes perfect.

Now comes the complicated part of my notes. It’s hard to describe the feeling. It’s really hard. With sex or tasty food, it is so easy because everyone has experienced it, so with a few words you can imagine it clearly. But how do you explain the taste of pineapple to someone who has no taste buds? How do you explain the colors of butterfly wings to a person who was born blind? That’s my present task. But I will do my best.

As I continued to rub erect rypchynes, I began to feel the faint echoes of rypchynic pleasure. It’s the hardest to explain because it’s so unlike anything you could feel in your body. The closest you can get is some sort of vibration or after-pleasure. Or pins and needles in a sleeping arm that comes back to life. When you are so tired that you can barely move, when you are just lying relaxed on a bed, there may be some slight pleasant but distant vibrational sensations on your skin and muscles. As if the parts of your body are slowly fading away one by one, but those fading parts are still tickling pleasantly in the distance. Like that, but orders of magnitude stronger.

That’s still not exactly the rypchyne sensation. Another analogy might be touching a barbecue grill or a very frozen object. For a brief moment, you can’t tell if it’s burning hot or cold. The rypchyne sensation is like that, hot and cold at the same time.

It’s still not quite right. Let’s try again. Have you ever been so tired that you could hardly sleep, your whole body ached, and there was nothing you could do to relieve the pain? Then you go to bed, and even though you can’t fall asleep right away, your body feels both the wonderful relaxation and the slight, dull pain all over. That’s how it is.

So let’s put it all together. Slight vibration and fading, pins and needles, hot and cold, dull pain and relaxation, all mixed together and intensified into a very specific, slightly painful delight.

Have you imagined the feeling yet, even a little? Well, you still haven’t imagined the real experience. I’ve given you all the clues, but you won’t really know it for yourself until you get the rypchynes. It’s like descriptions of sexual orgasm: you can get all hints from the texts, but then the thing comes for the first time, and bam! all the descriptions were just the pale shadows of the real thing. It’s the same with the rypchyne sensations.

The feeling got stronger and stronger and stronger until I felt nothing else. And it was the distinct pleasure and delight all the way. We did it clumsily for the first time, too fast and eagerly, I suppose, so we all four reached the climax just in a few minutes. Me and Roger fainted.

Ohhh. I never felt anything so strong...

Dr. Mendosa enthusiastically took notes. “Yes! Yes! Excellent! Fantastic! You have all successfully passed the first stage. Congratulations!”

We all lay exhausted on the beds, breathing heavily.

“How do you feel?” Dr. Brown asked.