Copyright© 1976 by Herschel Hispano-Suiza

And all, but lust, is turned to dust
In humanity's machine.
Oscar Wilde, The Ballad of Reading Gaol

583 was in a mood for a woman. Not just any old street corner rent-a-cunt, but something really special. So he punched out a requisition for 50 credit units and headed for the nearest sexburger joint.

Ten street divisions away, Fiver could hear the trumpeting sonic projectors: Welcome. Welcome. Come-and-see. Get-some-sex. Do-it-now. Love-is-here. Joy-for-you. High-test-sex. Sex-and-love.

And he stared up at

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Blinking neon breasts, a lewdly beckoning mechanical finger pointing, pointing to a strangely gleaming needle: a 500-meter tilted chrome-and-plexiglas mast firing off electrical discharges, arcing flares of artificial lightnings in actinic starbursts, sending down salvos of fat sparks to explode in bursts of glowing pinpoints over the shiny bald heads of the raging mob foaming around it.

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LOVE-O-MAT -- {flash} -- A fully automated sexual experience. Actinic flaming letters dancing across the night sky.

Deflecting badly-aimed kicks and randomly slashing blades off his plasto body armor, Fiver used his own shiv and electroprod to good effect as he maneuvered diagonally across the screeching, bloody, clawing masses of middle-aged toads. Disregarding minor bruises and cuts, he plunged blindly forward, kept moving at all costs. And would have smashed into the electrified barrier if some poor devil ahead of him had not stumbled onto it first. Fiver ignored the bubbling moans, the stink of ozone and cooking flesh as he searched for, and found the scanner. He held his tattooed ID sequence in front of the glass eye and... screamed as the pit opened beneath him and everything dissolved in light.

Somehow he was still on his feet, in a tube, a long cylindrical tunnel. Eyes adjusted to the shimmering pinkness and focused on translucent curved walls. Were they flexing? Yes, they seemed to ripple to the beat of his pulse. Now they were sinuously flowing, slipping past. No, he was moving -- the vibrolith transport strip underfoot was carrying him away. Ahead, he could make out a dark man-shape -- faceless, anonymous. In front of that, another. An unending file of bodies. Behind, the same. This, then, was the notorious Birth Canal.

Now patterns of light flickered into being -- on all sides, overhead, in the air. Shapes, they were forming shapes, they were converging into images, scenes leaping out at him. Naked thighs, bare flesh -- people coupling, joining their bodies in every imaginable combination, not all of them physically possible. Males, females, neuters, hermaphrodites, trisexuals, beasts of the field. Creatures from Hell, rejects from the Dream Factory.

A high-pitched drone throbbed from hidden sound projectors: tickling the skin, twisting the pit of the stomach, pumping the organs flush with blood. And the odors, subtle, now pungent: the smell of bitches in heat, of she-monkeys being mounted.

And we/they began the chant: Love, love, love, love, love... In a frenzied litany, in masturbatory bliss. When, harvested by clockwork arms, the worshipers were sorted. And routed to preselected cubicles.

A pod. Oblong, glowing faint blue. Partitioned by a sleep platform. Fiver tore at the ultra-thin plasticine sheet enclosing the Bodiform Wafflebed ("Guaranteed sterile as long as cellophane seal remains unbroken").