Paradise Regained
by Alasdair McPherson
Genre: Fantasy/Sci-Fi
Swearwords: Some mild ones.
Description: The world will soon see an end to all conflict. It will be a paradise – or will it?
_____________________________________________________________________
It started like every other day. I woke up just as the lark soared into the morning air singing. I got out of bed and turned it off before it had time to repeat the performance, whipped the sheets off and pushed them into the zapper before I pressed the button that retracted the bed. I pushed an orange cup under the cold outlet after I had been to the toilet.
I set the printer to make the usual t-shirt and shorts on my way to the gym, then I turned back because I remembered that I wanted them Victoria plum rather than Conference pear. I really only wanted the t-shirt in plum but I still haven’t figured out how to make shirt and shorts in different flavours. The others were already on screen when I got to the gym.
“Changed the flavour again,” Charles bellowed as I entered. He gets very close, some days to being offensive. Not that I will complain but the Monitor will catch him and move him to another group if he doesn’t take more care. He is a printer technician and he has a low opinion of my abilities. Sanjit gave me a little smile as I climbed onto the bike and began my warm up exercise. Charles has a dig at him sometimes but he prefers picking on me.
I think it’s because I say nothing about my work. It’s just so hard to explain that I am paid to develop additives that enhance the libido. I don’t suppose the others in the group are even aware that the standard feedstock to the three-D printers has a libido suppressant. On the other hand, they all seem to be happy with our situation so I suspect that my discontent is related to my job.
I don’t know how long the five of us will continue to meet every morning. Kurt seems to be struggling and may lose his AAB fitness rating. Rafael is saying less and less as the days go by.
When the hour was up we signed off and I went to the bathroom complex dropping my sleep-shorts in the zapper. Charles would tell me off for calling it a ‘zapper’ since it is, of course, a recycling unit. His insistence on being right all the time annoys me. Perhaps the Monitor has placed him in the group to test me.
I set the tanning unit going and rotate so that every particle of skin receives the proper doze of vitamin D. I like this time of day. My duty to the fitness group is done and I can turn my thoughts to my projects. I am a little bit in limbo at the moment because my latest additive is being assessed. I know that I should put that out of my mind and concentrate on the next invention.
The problem is that I really think I’ve hit the jackpot this time. As always I tried the formula on myself and it nearly crippled me. I am allowed to use porn movies to help me cope but this time I could not keep my mind off sex. I masturbated so often that my penis – my prick, as they call it – was raw and sore. I moved across to the depilation machine and gave a wry smile when I remembered that I had been so hyped-up and sensitive that lifting my prick out of the way to let the laser at the hair on my balls gave me a raging erection.
Mine is an old apartment and the sanitary devices are out the ark. I have to turn round to have the hair stripped from my back. I was just bending to expose my rear end when I heard a noise behind me. I thought I knew all the sounds in my apartment but this was a clunk that I had never heard before. When I looked over my shoulder there were several pieces of plaster on the floor of the ionic shower.
What’s more there was a noise like something heavy being pulled across the floor. There was another thud and then silence. I was just going to bend down to see what had happened when a hand and arm appeared through a hole at the bottom of my shower!
Even worse: it was obviously a female arm. The hand waved about a bit and was then withdrawn. Next, the scraping noise started again followed by another clunk. Now any direct contact with another human being is abhorrent and anyone initiating contact is subject to severe punishment. I should have shouted a warning but I remained silent while a bald female head appeared in the hole followed by a naked female body.
I was still in shock when she stood up. I suppose she had had more time to consider the outrageous step she had taken for she certainly recovered her self-possession quickly.
“Have you any food? I’m starving.”
She had her head turned so that she was looking at me out of the corner of her eye. I had seen pictures of starving people and she didn’t look at all like them. She didn’t look like the women in the porn movies either. She is slim with rounded arms and legs and with small breasts that sag just a little. She giggled.
“Is that supposed to happen?” She was looking and pointing at my penis that had become somewhat turgid – about half-erect.
“It’s my job,” I said, blushing furiously, as if that explained anything.
The truth is that I had kept some of the batch of the super-formula and I had been adding it to counter the libido suppression effect of the common feedstock that was piped to every printer. I told her to stay where she was while I went to get her some food.
So long as I didn’t think about her breasts my prick remained flaccid. She ate standing up facing me and I was recovering some semblance of poise when she brushed the crumbs off her chest. Her breasts wobbled as she did so and my prick rose to something very close to full size. She giggled again.
“Did I do that?” she asked pointing, in case I had missed what was happening in my groin. “Can we sit down?” So we sat side by side on the ledge between the shower and the tanning section. I should have felt really uneasy in the presence of another human being but I guess I’m not very well adjusted.
Her printer was only working intermittently. She had reported the fault but the engineers could find nothing wrong with the printer or the supply. In fact, the meter indicated that she had been consuming more than usual. She had eaten every garment in her wardrobe and pulverised her bedside table, the only item of furniture in her apartment that had been printed from foodstock.
I was pretty sure I knew what had happened. I had heard scratching noises and had concluded that there were vermin in the building – probably rats. I think the rodents had gnawed into the pipe feeding her printer and were eating her food.
“They won’t last long on our diet,” I assured her. I told her that my job was to find ways of raising the libido to make people more attractive to each other.
“Why does it matter when we never meet anyone face to face? Present company excepted, of course.”
“I don’t know, I mean, no one’s going to tell me are they? They can print human tissue but I think things went wrong when they tried to print a complete baby. They have people now who are making kids in the old-fashioned way but they weren’t keen to get together so I’m making additives that sort of spur them on.”
“It’s funny us meeting like this because I can fill in some of the blanks. They were able to print complete babies but they didn’t grow properly. One arm would get longer but the other would stay small or develop toes on the end instead of fingers. My job is to find ways of controlling the growth so we don’t print any more monsters.
“I have to go now for my face-book coffee session. I’ll come back later for more food.”
She got up and went over to the hole in my wall, and then she turned to me and shook her shoulders so that her breasts wobbled. As if it was on springs my prick shot up again.
“I just wanted to make sure it still worked!” she laughed plunging through the gap.
I had to go too before someone checked up. I’m given more leeway than most folk because so much of my job requires me to think without interruption. I don’t have a face-book schedule, for example, although I have to get to the gym and check in with the main laboratory at the end of the day.
Most of the day I spent thinking about the girl and yes, if it’s any of your business, I had an erection for much of the time! When three-D printing was first introduced the feedstock was chosen to fit the object created – plastic for furniture and protein for steaks and that sort of thing. Some of the ideas that followed were decidedly weird and some of the concepts that should have worked failed with disastrous consequences.
A list of world leaders in science, politics, and the arts was drawn up and their DNA was recorded and stored. Their printers were supplied with feedstock that was formed to exactly match their genetic profile so their food would be immediately available for transfer to the blood stream. Digestion was no longer required. The theory was that the energy saved would be available to their brains for planning and invention. They sickened and many of them died before it was realised that digestion is an integral part of existence.
Now we have a common feedstock that can be printed as food, furniture or Frisbees according to need. It is a little more expensive in raw material costs but that is more than offset by the savings in distribution. After all we have to eat every day but how often do you want to make a new dressing table?
We need to digest the product letting our bodies convert the food so it can be assimilated. The experiment with DNA designed food required the users to eat only from dedicated printers and this, I believe, hastened the process that had begun in the early years of the century for people to keep in touch using indirect communication.
Now we have reached the ideal situation where every person on the planet has his or her individual living space. We are well fed, well clothed and everyone has a worthwhile job. What we don’t have is the conflicts caused by physical proximity. As the President said in his last annual address, we live in an Eden without even a snake to spoil it.
The human need for company is satisfied by remote link-ups with similarly minded people. I meet Kurt and the others to share our work-outs and I socialise with different groups for work and hobbies. There is no conflict, because if two people do not agree the Monitor moves them into different groups so they no longer have to interact.
Our individuality is respected by supplying us with a monthly package of additives that we chose to express our own tastes. I mostly discard my clothes into the recycling tube – the zapper – but if I am concentrating hard I will sometimes nibble at my t-shirt. I mostly have Conference pear t-shirts but I get occasional cravings for other fruits.
I’m a synthesist. Other scientists analyse the old foods that were grown in the earth and supply me with their chemical profile. I combine simple ingredients to reproduce them. Nature was wasteful, producing many intriguing combinations some of which modify the essence that we want to isolate. Oysters were widely believed to increase the libido but I can get the same effect from a microgram that would require you to swallow six dozen oysters!
I signed out and took more food to the bathroom. There was no sign of the girl but she had tidied the plaster that had fallen on the floor – now all I was left with was a large hole in my wall. I had not taken any libido enhancing food with my evening meal but that didn’t entirely eliminate my prurient interest in her body.
The next morning I was up before the lark and popped my head into the bathroom on my way to get my orange juice. The food I had left was gone. I went into the gym pleasantly anticipating seeing her again when I took her breakfast to the hole in the wall. After the gym I went into the tanning machine. I debated with myself about leaving my sleep shorts on but I decided that I had nothing she had not seen the first time.
I was too impatient to use depillator so I went straight to the ionic shower and waited, trying to stop myself thinking about her breasts.
“Are you there?”
Her voice was muffled and, when I bent down to look through the hole, all I could see was the top of her hairless head.
“Do you want more food?”
“Yes please. I’m not coming through today. I don’t know what I was thinking yesterday. I was so bold. You could have reported me, you know.”
“I really enjoyed seeing you.” She giggled: “I could see that for myself!”
That began two days of torture for me. She would not come through and the hole was too small for me to attempt to use it. We spent hours talking to each other. She asked what I meant about the rats being a temporary problem and I explained that eating our food would make them lose interest in producing baby rats.
“I don’t know about that,” she said but she would not say anything more.
I had been nearly three days without a libido boost but I was still reacting to thoughts of her naked body. We both lay on the floor to talk. We couldn’t be overheard but it just seemed proper to talk in quiet, gentle tones. We puzzled over her reluctance to visit me and we decided that her hunger simply lowered her inhibitions temporarily.
At first we kept our chats to topics that would not have been objected to by the Monitor – if we had been talking through our communicators, that is! We soon began to talk about our lives and our hopes for the future. We are both vaguely discontent although we agreed that we have nothing to complain of.
Late in the evening of our third day apart, I offered her a late night snack as usual but I added a remark about wanting to starve her if that was the only way I could see her again. There was a long pause before she replied and I thought she had left the hole.
“Do you still have some of that enhancer stuff you were taking when I saw you?”
“Yes but I haven’t been using it. I didn’t want you to be, you know, scared of me.”
“Can I have some now? I can’t stop thinking how nice it was sitting beside you and I was really flattered that you’re thing – what do you call it? – got hard when you looked at me. I think a drop of your stuff would give me the boost I need to overcome my inhibitions.”
When I handed it through, I warned her that she should only take a half dose because of her low body weight but I didn’t mention that I had given myself a double helping.
“I liked the nearness of you and the smell of you. Do you think I’m perverted?”
“If you are then I am too. I’ve never felt such satisfaction – such contentment – before.”
“I don’t even know your name.” I told her.
“My name’s Eve. I’ll see you in the morning, Adam.”
Swearwords: Some mild ones.
Description: The world will soon see an end to all conflict. It will be a paradise – or will it?
_____________________________________________________________________
It started like every other day. I woke up just as the lark soared into the morning air singing. I got out of bed and turned it off before it had time to repeat the performance, whipped the sheets off and pushed them into the zapper before I pressed the button that retracted the bed. I pushed an orange cup under the cold outlet after I had been to the toilet.
I set the printer to make the usual t-shirt and shorts on my way to the gym, then I turned back because I remembered that I wanted them Victoria plum rather than Conference pear. I really only wanted the t-shirt in plum but I still haven’t figured out how to make shirt and shorts in different flavours. The others were already on screen when I got to the gym.
“Changed the flavour again,” Charles bellowed as I entered. He gets very close, some days to being offensive. Not that I will complain but the Monitor will catch him and move him to another group if he doesn’t take more care. He is a printer technician and he has a low opinion of my abilities. Sanjit gave me a little smile as I climbed onto the bike and began my warm up exercise. Charles has a dig at him sometimes but he prefers picking on me.
I think it’s because I say nothing about my work. It’s just so hard to explain that I am paid to develop additives that enhance the libido. I don’t suppose the others in the group are even aware that the standard feedstock to the three-D printers has a libido suppressant. On the other hand, they all seem to be happy with our situation so I suspect that my discontent is related to my job.
I don’t know how long the five of us will continue to meet every morning. Kurt seems to be struggling and may lose his AAB fitness rating. Rafael is saying less and less as the days go by.
When the hour was up we signed off and I went to the bathroom complex dropping my sleep-shorts in the zapper. Charles would tell me off for calling it a ‘zapper’ since it is, of course, a recycling unit. His insistence on being right all the time annoys me. Perhaps the Monitor has placed him in the group to test me.
I set the tanning unit going and rotate so that every particle of skin receives the proper doze of vitamin D. I like this time of day. My duty to the fitness group is done and I can turn my thoughts to my projects. I am a little bit in limbo at the moment because my latest additive is being assessed. I know that I should put that out of my mind and concentrate on the next invention.
The problem is that I really think I’ve hit the jackpot this time. As always I tried the formula on myself and it nearly crippled me. I am allowed to use porn movies to help me cope but this time I could not keep my mind off sex. I masturbated so often that my penis – my prick, as they call it – was raw and sore. I moved across to the depilation machine and gave a wry smile when I remembered that I had been so hyped-up and sensitive that lifting my prick out of the way to let the laser at the hair on my balls gave me a raging erection.
Mine is an old apartment and the sanitary devices are out the ark. I have to turn round to have the hair stripped from my back. I was just bending to expose my rear end when I heard a noise behind me. I thought I knew all the sounds in my apartment but this was a clunk that I had never heard before. When I looked over my shoulder there were several pieces of plaster on the floor of the ionic shower.
What’s more there was a noise like something heavy being pulled across the floor. There was another thud and then silence. I was just going to bend down to see what had happened when a hand and arm appeared through a hole at the bottom of my shower!
Even worse: it was obviously a female arm. The hand waved about a bit and was then withdrawn. Next, the scraping noise started again followed by another clunk. Now any direct contact with another human being is abhorrent and anyone initiating contact is subject to severe punishment. I should have shouted a warning but I remained silent while a bald female head appeared in the hole followed by a naked female body.
I was still in shock when she stood up. I suppose she had had more time to consider the outrageous step she had taken for she certainly recovered her self-possession quickly.
“Have you any food? I’m starving.”
She had her head turned so that she was looking at me out of the corner of her eye. I had seen pictures of starving people and she didn’t look at all like them. She didn’t look like the women in the porn movies either. She is slim with rounded arms and legs and with small breasts that sag just a little. She giggled.
“Is that supposed to happen?” She was looking and pointing at my penis that had become somewhat turgid – about half-erect.
“It’s my job,” I said, blushing furiously, as if that explained anything.
The truth is that I had kept some of the batch of the super-formula and I had been adding it to counter the libido suppression effect of the common feedstock that was piped to every printer. I told her to stay where she was while I went to get her some food.
So long as I didn’t think about her breasts my prick remained flaccid. She ate standing up facing me and I was recovering some semblance of poise when she brushed the crumbs off her chest. Her breasts wobbled as she did so and my prick rose to something very close to full size. She giggled again.
“Did I do that?” she asked pointing, in case I had missed what was happening in my groin. “Can we sit down?” So we sat side by side on the ledge between the shower and the tanning section. I should have felt really uneasy in the presence of another human being but I guess I’m not very well adjusted.
Her printer was only working intermittently. She had reported the fault but the engineers could find nothing wrong with the printer or the supply. In fact, the meter indicated that she had been consuming more than usual. She had eaten every garment in her wardrobe and pulverised her bedside table, the only item of furniture in her apartment that had been printed from foodstock.
I was pretty sure I knew what had happened. I had heard scratching noises and had concluded that there were vermin in the building – probably rats. I think the rodents had gnawed into the pipe feeding her printer and were eating her food.
“They won’t last long on our diet,” I assured her. I told her that my job was to find ways of raising the libido to make people more attractive to each other.
“Why does it matter when we never meet anyone face to face? Present company excepted, of course.”
“I don’t know, I mean, no one’s going to tell me are they? They can print human tissue but I think things went wrong when they tried to print a complete baby. They have people now who are making kids in the old-fashioned way but they weren’t keen to get together so I’m making additives that sort of spur them on.”
“It’s funny us meeting like this because I can fill in some of the blanks. They were able to print complete babies but they didn’t grow properly. One arm would get longer but the other would stay small or develop toes on the end instead of fingers. My job is to find ways of controlling the growth so we don’t print any more monsters.
“I have to go now for my face-book coffee session. I’ll come back later for more food.”
She got up and went over to the hole in my wall, and then she turned to me and shook her shoulders so that her breasts wobbled. As if it was on springs my prick shot up again.
“I just wanted to make sure it still worked!” she laughed plunging through the gap.
I had to go too before someone checked up. I’m given more leeway than most folk because so much of my job requires me to think without interruption. I don’t have a face-book schedule, for example, although I have to get to the gym and check in with the main laboratory at the end of the day.
Most of the day I spent thinking about the girl and yes, if it’s any of your business, I had an erection for much of the time! When three-D printing was first introduced the feedstock was chosen to fit the object created – plastic for furniture and protein for steaks and that sort of thing. Some of the ideas that followed were decidedly weird and some of the concepts that should have worked failed with disastrous consequences.
A list of world leaders in science, politics, and the arts was drawn up and their DNA was recorded and stored. Their printers were supplied with feedstock that was formed to exactly match their genetic profile so their food would be immediately available for transfer to the blood stream. Digestion was no longer required. The theory was that the energy saved would be available to their brains for planning and invention. They sickened and many of them died before it was realised that digestion is an integral part of existence.
Now we have a common feedstock that can be printed as food, furniture or Frisbees according to need. It is a little more expensive in raw material costs but that is more than offset by the savings in distribution. After all we have to eat every day but how often do you want to make a new dressing table?
We need to digest the product letting our bodies convert the food so it can be assimilated. The experiment with DNA designed food required the users to eat only from dedicated printers and this, I believe, hastened the process that had begun in the early years of the century for people to keep in touch using indirect communication.
Now we have reached the ideal situation where every person on the planet has his or her individual living space. We are well fed, well clothed and everyone has a worthwhile job. What we don’t have is the conflicts caused by physical proximity. As the President said in his last annual address, we live in an Eden without even a snake to spoil it.
The human need for company is satisfied by remote link-ups with similarly minded people. I meet Kurt and the others to share our work-outs and I socialise with different groups for work and hobbies. There is no conflict, because if two people do not agree the Monitor moves them into different groups so they no longer have to interact.
Our individuality is respected by supplying us with a monthly package of additives that we chose to express our own tastes. I mostly discard my clothes into the recycling tube – the zapper – but if I am concentrating hard I will sometimes nibble at my t-shirt. I mostly have Conference pear t-shirts but I get occasional cravings for other fruits.
I’m a synthesist. Other scientists analyse the old foods that were grown in the earth and supply me with their chemical profile. I combine simple ingredients to reproduce them. Nature was wasteful, producing many intriguing combinations some of which modify the essence that we want to isolate. Oysters were widely believed to increase the libido but I can get the same effect from a microgram that would require you to swallow six dozen oysters!
I signed out and took more food to the bathroom. There was no sign of the girl but she had tidied the plaster that had fallen on the floor – now all I was left with was a large hole in my wall. I had not taken any libido enhancing food with my evening meal but that didn’t entirely eliminate my prurient interest in her body.
The next morning I was up before the lark and popped my head into the bathroom on my way to get my orange juice. The food I had left was gone. I went into the gym pleasantly anticipating seeing her again when I took her breakfast to the hole in the wall. After the gym I went into the tanning machine. I debated with myself about leaving my sleep shorts on but I decided that I had nothing she had not seen the first time.
I was too impatient to use depillator so I went straight to the ionic shower and waited, trying to stop myself thinking about her breasts.
“Are you there?”
Her voice was muffled and, when I bent down to look through the hole, all I could see was the top of her hairless head.
“Do you want more food?”
“Yes please. I’m not coming through today. I don’t know what I was thinking yesterday. I was so bold. You could have reported me, you know.”
“I really enjoyed seeing you.” She giggled: “I could see that for myself!”
That began two days of torture for me. She would not come through and the hole was too small for me to attempt to use it. We spent hours talking to each other. She asked what I meant about the rats being a temporary problem and I explained that eating our food would make them lose interest in producing baby rats.
“I don’t know about that,” she said but she would not say anything more.
I had been nearly three days without a libido boost but I was still reacting to thoughts of her naked body. We both lay on the floor to talk. We couldn’t be overheard but it just seemed proper to talk in quiet, gentle tones. We puzzled over her reluctance to visit me and we decided that her hunger simply lowered her inhibitions temporarily.
At first we kept our chats to topics that would not have been objected to by the Monitor – if we had been talking through our communicators, that is! We soon began to talk about our lives and our hopes for the future. We are both vaguely discontent although we agreed that we have nothing to complain of.
Late in the evening of our third day apart, I offered her a late night snack as usual but I added a remark about wanting to starve her if that was the only way I could see her again. There was a long pause before she replied and I thought she had left the hole.
“Do you still have some of that enhancer stuff you were taking when I saw you?”
“Yes but I haven’t been using it. I didn’t want you to be, you know, scared of me.”
“Can I have some now? I can’t stop thinking how nice it was sitting beside you and I was really flattered that you’re thing – what do you call it? – got hard when you looked at me. I think a drop of your stuff would give me the boost I need to overcome my inhibitions.”
When I handed it through, I warned her that she should only take a half dose because of her low body weight but I didn’t mention that I had given myself a double helping.
“I liked the nearness of you and the smell of you. Do you think I’m perverted?”
“If you are then I am too. I’ve never felt such satisfaction – such contentment – before.”
“I don’t even know your name.” I told her.
“My name’s Eve. I’ll see you in the morning, Adam.”
About the Author
Originally from Dalmuir, Alasdair McPherson is now retired and living in exile in Lincolnshire.
He says he has always wanted to write, but life got in the way until recently. He has already penned eight novels and many short stories. His five latest novels, The Island, Pilgrimage of Grace, Desert Ark, Swordsmiths and Loyalty, are McStorytellers publications.
You can read Alasdair's full profile on McVoices.
He says he has always wanted to write, but life got in the way until recently. He has already penned eight novels and many short stories. His five latest novels, The Island, Pilgrimage of Grace, Desert Ark, Swordsmiths and Loyalty, are McStorytellers publications.
You can read Alasdair's full profile on McVoices.