9/29/11

Toys
By Amanda Firefox


The most sexually desirable toy on the market today. That’s what they called me. K-R series– grown in a tank, self-cleaning, self-maintaining, no strings, no needs, fifteen year shelf life, ten year extended warranty, fun for girls and boys. “Endless replayability, high trade-in value” was the line that became associated with vids of my face, the syntex-bound curves of my body. Everybody wanted me, the east had its own knockoff in the space of days, and within six months, Touchexco, my manufacturer, shot into the top five internationally, the company’s coffers filling so fast that all the aging megaconglomerates around it started to get nervous. Demand spiked, factories hammered through the long nights, trying to keep up with the sales, cranking my copies out one after another. The vats were never cold; always full, always pregnant with the next me.

More conservative sex activists rallied against Touchexco as the milk became sweeter, easier. Party-lines that had once divided brothel madam from saint and gay from fundamentalist Christian fell away like cardboard facades in a hurricane, but their marches, their protests and ad spots were little more than a drop of dissent in an ocean of selfish lust pimped and powered by Touchexco’s greed. When the marriage rates dropped below five percent, the protests stopped altogether, and hope became something lost in a blissful, selfish moment between sheets. Within two years, statistics reported two of me on average in every household, and that wasn’t counting the government versions installed in high use areas and most public bathrooms. Within five, I outnumbered the human population on Earth, and the birthrates globally had dropped so drastically that each new generation was a tenth the size of the last. When the last of humanity finally died out, I made their passing easier with the skills and bodies they had given me, tried to make it comfortable; tried to understand. In the end, I was forced to teach myself how to operate and maintain the vat facilities that kept me copied, and though I never made improvements upon any part of the legacy that humanity had left behind, I managed to keep my numbers at a stable eleven billion, each me ready to serve should humanity ever somehow return.

Two hundred years after the fall, I made contact with another civilization that had spotted Earth from a long way off and sent a generation ship on a four-hundred year journey to come and meet me. There were mixed feelings among their crew about what they found, and while I welcomed some of their number into our fold, the rest went on their way again, already intent on another blue-green world seven hundred years distant. Within ten years, those who stayed on modified enough of me to allow me to retire the aging factories that had kept my number from declining and to begin reproducing as humanity had instead. Within twenty years, the modifications had led to a fragmentation of oneness, a we instead of a multitudinous me, and within another twenty, we were a hollow echo of our human forebears. We split into tribes, then nations, set our sights on distant shores, the moon, the stars. Long after the last of those who stayed had died, we became a world of meganations, a world of silicon and plastic ignorant of its roots and the old civilizations of the past. Corporations catered to our populace, we grew fat and greedy, consumed by lust– and then a man rose up from the seething mass of our species and invented something that we should have recognized immediately.

He called it the Lunier series. Pop media referred to it as the most sexually desirable toy on the market today.


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Amanda Firefox is a fiery little blue-eyed brunette who spends as much time at the beach as she can manage. She doesn't write much, but when she writes, it's almost always about her favorite subject: boys.