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“Sweetie, when are you going to get a boyfriend? You’re about that age to be making babies!”
…is exactly how Zhu Yuan’s mother started that particular phone call, much to the officer’s shock and awe.
Despite being only in her late 20s, Zhu Yuan couldn’t deny she was feeling a particularly strong case of “baby fever” as of late. It seemed as though everywhere she looked, she saw couples young and old enjoying their time together, most often with a sweet little kid or two in their midst.
It didn’t help that the only men in her police station were either married, terminally awkward, or more obsessed with their own biceps than with anything resembling courtship.
Zhu Yuan’s mind did a quick scan, as systematic as her approach to a crime scene: Sergeant Ding? Still wore his wedding ring, despite the well-known divorce. Lieutenant Fang? Thought his mustache was a personality. The new guy, Lin? Cute, yes, if you liked the sort of man who shivered at the sight of blood—or hard work.
She even considered—briefly, with a shudder—the officers in Traffic Control, but quickly discarded them as a gene pool hazard.
After the phone call, she lingered in the station’s break room, sipping the bitter dregs of communal coffee while scrolling through her phone. Her mother’s words echoed in her skull, a siren song of parental expectation and biological imperative. Zhu Yuan longed for a distraction—something to scrub her brain clean of her mother’s voice.
That’s when she thought of Wise. Someone who always lent Zhu Yuan an ear, and someone who had been a great help to her on more than one occasion.
Zhu Yuan’s face grew hot as she realized she’d been smiling at her phone for a good thirty seconds, replaying the last time she’d seen him. She was still upset, of course, about realizing his true profession. They’d been on shaky terms ever since she learned he was a Proxy; that his work at Random Play was only one of two jobs, and certainly the much less dangerous and much less illegal one.
Zhu Yuan sighed as she leaned against the break room wall.
It had taken a month of professional detachment and two weeks of ignoring him outright before shame cracked through her outrage. Zhu Yuan was not a child; she knew deep down that Wise had done nothing more than lie for a good reason.
But she still felt that old, childish pang of betrayal, as if Wise’s secret had somehow put her back in the shadow of her mother’s disappointment. She wished she had been on good enough terms with Wise to learn his secret foremost. Zhu Yuan knew her own career in the police force was exactly why he’d been so hesitant to open up to her about this.
Had the rift between them grown too large? She suddenly felt guilty for being so cold to him in the days and weeks that followed, and it was for this reason that Zhu Yuan found herself walking to Random Play on this bright and sunny day, intent on patching things up between herself and the video store manager.
Who knows? Perhaps they could grow even closer than ever before in light of this rekindling.
Perhaps, Zhu Yuan thought selfishly, she might even get a date or two out of this…
She cared about Wise and even his sister. She earnestly did. Maybe part of that lingering frustration stemmed from her inability to protect them as much as she wanted to.
And yet, with her vexing feelings causing a storm in her heart and in her mind, Zhu Yuan found her way to the video store and—
—and then she stopped.
The sign on the door bore a simple message: CLOSED TO CUSTOMERS.
It was, she decided, not meant for her. Not as a customer, anyway.
Zhu Yuan hesitated for a heartbeat, then remembered the times she’d been waved inside after hours, sometimes by Wise, sometimes by his little sister.
There was no one around to say otherwise, and this should have been an ordinary, albeit brief visit if anything else. Perhaps the brother and sister duo were simply stocking the shelves, and so Zhu Yuan squared her shoulders and slipped inside.
For a moment, she felt like a burglar, tiptoeing in her own shoes, past the racks of DVDs and collector’s tapes, and past the register where not a soul was present to speak with.
“Wise?” she called, then, softer: “Hello?”
No answer. Not even from the staff room.
Her uncertainty curdled into a sharp anxiety—maybe something had happened. Maybe she should’ve just called ahead, but she’d wanted this to feel spontaneous, easy.
There was a noise. Not a voice, but a thump—a sort of low, wounded groan—up the stairs. Zhu Yuan’s training kicked in. In two silent, pantherine strides she was at the base of the stairwell.
“Wise?” she tried again, now sharper, her hand already halfway to her sidearm, professionalism ironed onto her face. “Is… is someone there? Are you hurt?”
A creak from above. Another groan, deeper this time, almost a gasp. She climbed the stairs, pausing halfway to listen. The sound repeated, now unmistakably human. A man—Wise’s voice—followed by something else. A light, feminine laugh, clipped short.
It wasn’t distress. Zhu Yuan felt her cheeks flush, embarrassment and dread mixing in her chest. Her feet carried her up the stairs, more out of morbid curiosity than anything else. She suddenly thought she might have needed a warrant to do something like this.
What am I doing? Ugh, I shouldn’t be doing this…!
I need to turn around and leave, now…
This is a serious invasion of privacy…!
And yet…
At the top of the stairs…
Wise’s bedroom door was open just an inch or two, enough for sliver of light to stripe the floor.
Another laugh, this one familiar. Zhu Yuan’s stomach dropped.
She recognized it. Qingyi.
Her own partner.
Zhu Yuan crept to the door, every muscle locked and trembling, unwilling to look and yet unable to stop. She covered her mouth, a ridiculous and instinctive gesture, and peered through the little gap, bracing herself for anything, anything at all…
Instead, she was treated to a tableau that arrested her heart.
Qingyi was there, exactly as Zhu Yuan had suspected, and she was completely and utterly naked.
Qingyi’s body was nothing like Zhu Yuan’s own, and nothing like the bodies Zhu Yuan had seen in the locker rooms of New Eridu’s Public Security annexes, or in the surveillance footage she spent entire evenings parsing.
Qingyi’s skin gleamed like porcelain in the milky, late-morning light, cut through with faint, geometric seams along her arms and thighs. Divisions, or rather segmentations, that gave all who gleaned them a clue regarding her synthetic disposition; her artificial form. It told of a body whose arms and legs could be quite literally popped off or removed for repair, convenience, or even recreation.
Her breasts were small but perfectly shaped, like soft, impossible confections, and the flat stretch of her stomach led with a dancer’s tension to the delicate vee of her hips. Even her collarbones, shadows sculpted by the soft downlight, seemed engineered for intrigue.
She was on top of Wise, thighs straddling his waist with a confidence that was neither aggressive nor coy—just certain, as if the only possible place for her in the world was precisely here, precisely like this.
Wise, for his part, lay in stunned admiration. He wasn’t even trying to hide it. His hands, one cradling Qingyi’s hip and the other splayed across the small of her back, trembled with reverence, as if he was afraid she might fall apart at the slightest bit of pressure.
“You’re staring,” Qingyi said, her lips quirking up at the corners. She made no effort to cover herself. If anything, she rolled her shoulders back further, presenting her small, perfect breasts as though offering them as an exhibit.
Wise raised his hands in surrender, a crooked smile on his face. “Can you blame me?” he said. “I’m still not sure how I got this lucky. I mean, out of the entire New Eridu Police Force, I get the stunning one?”
Qingyi’s chin dipped toward her chest, and her green eyes narrowed in a way that looked almost predatory. “You say that like you didn’t specifically target me for my minimal wind resistance and low-calorie maintenance.” The words were feather-light and biting at once. “You like them small and easy to throw around, Wise.”
He had the decency to blush, though it was fleeting. “Hey, I’m an equal-opportunity admirer! I just appreciate the engineering.” His hand made a show of tracing the contour of her spine, and Qingyi arched into the touch, humming with contentment.
Qingyi pivoted her hips, pinning Wise with just enough leverage to remind him who, technically, was in command of this moment. “I have a surprise for you,” she told him. “A gift. But, actually… it’s more like a present for the both of us.”
Wise quirked a brow. “Yeah? What is it?”
Qingyi did not immediately answer. Instead, she shifted her weight back onto Wise’s thighs and reached, with an almost ceremonial slowness, to the side of the bed. There, on the floor, was a large, matte-white box—breadmaker-sized, dwarfing the other electronics scattered about the room—emblazoned in garish neon-pink: WOMBFORCE 9060. The logo was a cheerful digital womb rendered in retro pixel art, complete with a halo of radiating hearts.
She hoisted it onto the bed with the reverence of a priestess handling a relic.
Wise blinked, visibly at a loss. “Uh… is that a…?”
Qingyi ran a finger along the edge, her eyes shining with unseemly delight. “You know, for all your talk of appreciating upgrades, you never thought to ask if I’d ever want to try the full range of human experiences? I ordered it last week. Premium model.”
She propped the box upright, letting the morning light catch on the foil emboss of the words: ‘Now with Genetic Phenotype Editing! Download our companion app!’
Qingyi let her fingers drum against the cardboard as she waited for Wise to process, but he was already looking past the box, at her, as if searching for the actual shape of the future in her eyes.
“You’re serious?” he said finally, and his words, though quiet, rippled with awe and trepidation. “You want to… I mean, we’d—” He broke off, unable to finish the sentence. The idea of it, of a child with her, didn’t terrify him so much as short-circuit every contingency he’d ever planned for.
Qingyi’s expression softened, that often chilly serenity of hers melting into something unmistakably vulnerable. “You’re the only one I trust to make a good upgrade,” she said, and her thumb flicked over the neon womb as if it were already precious.
Behind the door, Zhu Yuan’s throat closed on a hundred unvoiced protests. She squeezed her eyes shut, only to find herself seeing the scene more acutely: the box, the curve of Qingyi’s back, Wise’s stunned and reverent gaze. The shame was so hot it nearly blistered her. She should not have stayed, should not even have come, but that train had already leapt the tracks.
Inside the room, Wise reached out and gently covered Qingyi’s hand with his. He gave a little laugh, the kind that tried to hide its tremor with bravado. “You know, there’s an entire philosophical subculture devoted to the ethics of this. Um, the artificial womb thing. Some people say it’ll spell the end of humanity.”
“It will not,” Qingyi said simply. “It will simply make it easier for Intelligent Constructs such as myself to live like you normal humans can. Even Elfy, that Intelligent Construct who runs Bardic Needle, is itching to get her hands on one of these WOMBFORCE 9000 series.”
“…you talk with Elfy?” Wise asked, somehow surprised and yet also not.
“Mm-hmm.” Qingyi raised her forefinger, and she closed one eye in sly amusement. “We’re in the Janus Quarter Intelligent Construct group chat.”
“…that sounds like an insanely huge group chat…!”
“Only a dozen or so active,” Qingyi said. “Most of the rest are spam bots. Or, technically, spam siblings.” She tilted her head, considering the box as if peering through its packaging to the algorithmic promise beneath. “But back to the matter at hand. I want you to help me install it.”
Wise blinked, slow. “Install it… now?”
Qingyi lifted one eyebrow. “Why wait? It’s a simple operation. I did the drivers this morning.” There was a hungry focus in her face now; she was all business, the sort of business that belonged in a moonlit surgery, or a clandestine military depot, or—if one squinted hard enough—a lover’s bedroom. “Besides, I have the instruction manual.”
She produced a folded sheet of paper from the box, flicked it open, and handed it to Wise. Her other hand went to her hip, her pose so casual Zhu Yuan almost didn’t notice the way her body had tensed for the procedure.
Wise scanned the manual, his eyes darting over each step. Then, with a reverence bordering on the sacred, he set the instructions aside and regarded Qingyi with a craftsman’s pride.
“You want me to… do the whole thing?”
Qingyi shrugged. “Why else would I bring it to you?” Her lips parted in a wry half-smile. “Let’s get started. I’ll need to be powered down for at least a minute.”
As if to punctuate her intent, Qingyi threw herself onto the bed with an athlete’s certainty, arms outstretched, legs spread. Her body, once a tableau of slow and calculated movement, now looked briefly vulnerable—perfectly still, an artifact set for maintenance.
Wise, hands trembling, hovered over her. “You sure?” he asked, still in awe at the trust placed in his hands.
Qingyi’s eyelids fluttered. “Completely. Start with the leg attachments, and be gentle. I hate when the joint pins get nicked.”
Zhu Yuan, still clutching the threshold like it was a lifeline, watched in a trance as Wise rolled up his own sleeves and gently gripped Qingyi’s right thigh near the knee. He twisted, once, twice, then pulled. The leg detached with a soft, hydraulic click, the separation clean and almost elegant. The motion was so clinical—so practiced—that Zhu Yuan’s mind repudiated it, refused to accept the evidence of her own senses.
He seems used to doing this, she thought. And Qingyi… how long have these two been dating?!
She considered leaving just then. She shouldn’t be looking at this.
And yet… she couldn’t look away.
Zhu Yuan felt a tingle in her nethers. It was horrible, but it was likewise true, that she was getting turned on by this. She’d never considered Qingyi in as filthy a situation as this one. And Wise…
She felt her hands drift down to her crotch, wishing suddenly that she was an Intelligent Construct. That she was on Wise’s bed being taken apart by him.
God, what am I thinking right now?!
Yet Zhu Yuan watched, transfixed.
Wise had both legs off Qingyi’s torso before long. The two limbs, separated now, were set with delicate care on the bed, knees bent like sleeping cats. Qingyi’s torso looked smaller without them, her hips truncated and perfectly flush, as if designed for easy docking.
“Okay,” Wise murmured, and with a delicacy Zhu Yuan had never seen in any repairman or lover, he split open the segment of circuitry that formed Qingyi’s lower abdomen. Tiny maglocks disengaged with a series of chirps, and a hidden panel folded back to reveal an interior that was less wires-and-fiber than living sculpture: intricate, softly pulsing architecture, shot through with iridescent veins and coils.
Zhu Yuan’s own knees went weak. She couldn’t imagine how good this must feel, especially when Qingyi moaned under Wise’s diligent care.
“It should be… ah… easy to… slot the artificial womb in,” said Qingyi, her cheeks flush as she looked down at her own spread-open compartment, what with its wires like veins and cords like tendons.
Wise plucked one suddenly, taut like a guitar string, and Qingyi shivered with joy.
“H-hey now, you’d better treat me right. You can’t just play with a girl’s wires like that…”
Wise chuckled, and he slid his hand along Qingyi’s too-small torso with growing reverence—and quickly growing arousal.
He lifted the sealed capsule from its velvet nest, the synthetic tissue of the artificial womb gleaming with a pearlescent sheen. It was an object of improbable beauty, somewhere between high-end biotech and a Fabergé egg. A thick connector tapered at the base, ending in a hedgehog’s array of gleaming pins. Wise marveled at the object, caught between reverence and laughter at the sheer madcap excess of it all.
He pressed it gently to the socket revealed in Qingyi’s open abdomen. There was a half-second of resistance, and then a delicious, soft yielding; the capsule slid home with a wet, magnetic ‘click,’ and every light in the compartment pulsed blue in unison.
Qingyi’s back arched. Her breath hitched, her eyes rolling briefly white as the device assimilated to her internal chassis. For a moment, she made a sound that was almost more animal than human—a high, keening gasp, so pure it could never be mistaken for pain.
“Status?” Wise ventured, voice cracking.
“Integration at ninety-four percent,” Qingyi panted, her fingers splayed tight on the comforter, knuckles blanching to porcelain. “Oh—oh God, that’s… it’s like fireworks and static and…” She blinked, green eyes refocusing, and her lips spread in a beatific half-smile. “I can feel everything. I mean, I’ve always been able to, but now it’s everywhere. You have to see this.”
She guided Wise’s hand down her body, across the fault-line of her belly, to the place where the interface met the transparent, self-lubricating curtain of her brand new sex. Where once there had been only a slightly uncanny default, unmarred and featureless as a doll, now there bloomed a perfect, living copy of womanhood, crafted from organic polymers and bioresin, every detail rendered with loving, literal precision.
Labia blossomed, pink and flush with heat; the clitoral hood peeked out, pearl-bright and impatient. A small rivulet of artificial fluid, clear and viscous, already gleamed at the opening, catching the light.
Qingyi’s hand hovered over the miracle, trembling, then gingerly parted herself as if in disbelief. “Is it… real?” she whispered, not to Wise but to the universe—to the engineers, the algorithms, the collective memory of every ancient mother. Then her face broke into a wild, half-mad grin. “It’s perfect. It’s amazing! I can feel you looking at it…”
“I’m looking at you,” said Wise, though his gaze did keep darting between Qingyi’s eyes and the glistening slit at the base of her blue-lit chassis. His own body had made its decisions well in advance, but he waited for her, let her lead.
The moment stretched—a silent, holy interval—until Qingyi, in a single practiced motion, swept her arms around Wise’s neck and pulled herself atop him, pelvis to pelvis, the new parts aligning with their destiny.
There was a soft, musical whirr as the womb’s calibration finished; Qingyi shuddered, and her thighs gripped Wise as though she were trying to keep him from leaving; keep from from finishing the job. She could not allow that to happen.
“I need you to breed me,” she panted. “I need you to make me a mother right now, Wise…!”
“R-right away?” Wise stammered, his expression caught between excitement and fear. “But w-what about foreplay?”
“You just helped me install a brand new womb, Wise,” Qingyi said, her expression alight with a rapturous pleasure he’d never seen from her before. There was a spark in her gaze. “That was the foreplay.”
Zhu Yuan covered her mouth to keep from making any noise. She watched as Qingyi moved with a fervor she’d never seen from the smaller woman; not even during their combat drills. She practically tore Wise’s boxers off his body, to say nothing of those pants. And just like that, she’d exposed the Proxy’s thick, meaty shaft.
Zhu Yuan had fantasized about Wise in her quietest moments, late at night. Even so, nothing could prepare her for the sight of Wise’s cock being as large as it was.
Before she knew it, she was masturbating in earnest. With one hand down her pants, and with the other hand propping her up against the door frame, she took careful breaths as she witnessed the scene before her.
Wise had Qingyi with her back to the mattress, and she wrapped her legs around his waist while he ground his thick, meaty cock against the brand new pussy Qingyi had been given. She bit her lip as she urged him inside, hardly able to contain herself for even just a minute longer.
“Oh, God, Wise… yes…!”
The sound started in the mattress: the soft complaint of springs compressing under Wise’s knees, a rhythm of tension and release. Then it was the lilt of breath between them, the fragile moan that coiled out of Qingyi’s throat as Wise pressed his cockhead against her new, trembling entrance. He went slow—agonizingly, reverently slow—palming the outside of her thigh as if coaxing her into a deeper sense of belonging. When he entered, it was with the kind of pressure that made time itself seem to hesitate, second-guess the moment.
Zhu Yuan, her breath shallow, felt every centimeter with them. The first contact—a slick, radiant tension—bloomed along the length of Qingyi’s body, and Wise let out a low, broken grunt as her heat and texture gripped him. Zhu Yuan’s fingers mapped the motion, every push and pull, every pulse of their union.
Inside, Qingyi’s new architecture responded with feedback loops that dwarfed anything she’d ever simulated or imagined. The lining of her canal was a lattice of hyper-sensitive filaments, and each one seemed tuned to Wise specifically—his temperature, his geometry. The initial stretch was sharp, but her OS flooded her with endorphin analogues, and she gasped, half-crying, “God, don’t stop—faster—wait, no, slow—like that…”
He did, obeying her panic and her pleasure with equal parts devotion. The sound of their bodies meeting was lewd but also precise, the wet slap punctuated by the faint metallic susurrus of joints flexing and unflexing, the creak of bedsprings and the frictionless click of Qingyi’s wrists as she grabbed Wise’s hands and squeezed. Wise entwined his fingers with hers, the gesture at once playful and astonishingly intimate, as if more than anything, it was this—her reaching for him, wanting a shared grip—that made him harden the rest of the way.
Qingyi’s pleasure was undisciplined, uncensored. She made noises Zhu Yuan had never imagined could come from someone so composed: sharp, glass-sweet yelps; shuddering whimpers that trailed off into giggles; even, at the deepest thrusts, a kind of helpless, keening whine, like a wire singing under tension.
Watching, Zhu Yuan was rapt. Her own fingers moved with a desperate, needy rhythm, finding the pulse of the scene and amplifying it in her own body. She imagined herself in Qingyi’s place, imagined Wise’s hands on her skin, the way he’d look at her with that mixture of awe and hunger. An ugly, beautiful longing spread through her—jealousy, maybe, but also admiration. How could anyone resist wanting to be the thing Wise adored? To be the center of that storm?
Inside the room, bodies met and parted. Wise made jokes—dumb, adorable things, like “Don’t short-circuit on me,” or “Is the warranty voided if I make you this happy?”—and Qingyi would gasp-laugh, then curse him quietly, then pull him in deeper all over again.
The feedback loops in her new hardware dialed every sensation to eleven, and it wasn’t long until Qingyi experienced her true, first-ever orgasm.
Qingyi’s whole body stilled—the kind of stillness that precedes the shattering of glass, the moment of tension before something beautiful and irretrievable breaks. She made a sound that didn’t belong in any register of human pleasure: a stuttered, digital whine that crescendoed into a high, crystalline note, as if her larynx were built from the same alloy as violin strings.
Every muscle in her body flexed at once, and her arms wrapped Wise in a vice of need.
Wise, caught up in the gravity of her climax, whispered something soft and indistinct against her neck, but Qingyi’s ears were full of static and starlight. Her body didn’t just spasm; it rebooted, every fiber of her new anatomy igniting in an ecstasy that bordered on terror.
She came so hard her vision blanked out, a white field scattered with afterimages, and then it went dark, as if she’d forgotten to update her display drivers.
Her fingers clawed helplessly at Wise’s back, scraping hard enough to leave momentary red trails.
There was a sound in the room like a power transformer overloading, and for a moment, Qingyi feared she’d fried her new hardware. She gasped, mouth open, unable to find her own breath; then it came back in a rush, and she sobbed with laughter, half-hysterical, half triumphant.
“Wise,” she choked, her voice thick and frayed, “I think I—oh, God, yes, again—” She shuddered as the next wave hit, her thighs cinching tight around his hips, pinning him even as her insides quaked with the aftershocks.
Zhu Yuan, outside, heard every note. The walls of the bedroom might as well have been paper, and the particular cadence of Qingyi’s moans—first stuttering, then a deep, high keen—spun Zhu Yuan’s own arousal toward critical mass. She forced down a moan, but it escaped in a whimper, muffled only by the sleeve of her uniform jammed against her lips.
Inside, the rhythm grew and changed. Wise thrust deeper now, his movements less playful, more desperate. He moved with the full force of his longing, as if determined to imprint himself on the very memory of Qingyi’s new womb. Their bodies clapped together, slick and hectic—the wet, visceral sound flooding the stairwell. A visceral sound tinged with the metallic chassis thumping and clanging beneath Wise’s sheer force.
PLAP-CLANK!
PLAP-CLANK!
PLAP-CLANK!
Qingyi’s pleasure was not delicate. It was raw, primal, and astonishingly loud: every crest of her orgasm brought a gasp, a string of wild, helpless laughs, a cascade of panicked stammers uttered with the sincerity of prayers. The feedback from the hardware did not diminish; if anything, it compounded, each climax tumbling into the next, until she was shaking in his arms, an endless loop of sensation and surrender.
At the very peak, in a moment so pure that the whole world seemed to crystallize around it, Qingyi’s voice broke through the static:
“I love you,” she howled, the words torn from her with the violence of a confession. “I love you, I love you! Wise, yes! YES!”
For a long second, neither of them moved. Wise’s hands trembled on her back, his fingers frozen in that slow, shell-shocked aftermath, the lull after thunder.
Outside the door, Zhu Yuan could no longer hold herself upright. She slid down the wall, her knees buckling, her hand crammed between her legs and working a frenetic, practiced rhythm against the soaked fabric of her uniform. She tried to muffle her own noises—half hiccup, half moan—with the crook of her elbow, but when her body finally gave up and let go, the climax hit with a sharp, bright violence that left her shaking from scalp to heel. She bit into the sleeve of her jacket, terrified that some echo of her pleasure might carry through the thin drywall, betray her, expose her as the pathetic, drooling voyeur outside a colleague’s bedroom. Dread and relief warred in her chest; the relief won, but only just.
A long, numb moment passed, Zhu Yuan’s pulse throbbing in her ears, every nerve wrung out and raw. She felt a hot, slick wetness pooling in her panties, seeping into the lining of her uniform. Mortification flared, but there was something else, too. Satisfaction. Vindication. Jealousy, transmuted into a secret, guilty solidarity. She was not so different from these freaks, after all.
Upstairs, in the aftermath, Qingyi’s voice was low and unsteady as she panted, “I think I fried my optic buffer. I’m seeing stars.”
Wise, shuddering with the afterglow, drew lazy circles around her navel with his thumb, the two of them briefly suspended in that impossible, post-coital clarity where anything could be said, and nothing would be too much.
“You did amazing,” he whispered, kissing her hairline. “You’re… perfect. I mean it.”
Qingyi snorted, half-drowsy and half-flustered, but her pride was radiant. “Thank the firmware upgrade,” she murmured. “And you, most of all. You always make me feel like I’m not just some experiment. Like I’m wanted. I never thought I’d actually want this—want to be a mother—but now I do. You made me want it…”
Wise kissed her again, more deeply this time, and their hands wandered, gentle at first, then greedy. The moment stretched, elastic and full of promise. Qingyi rolled onto her side, her body a tangle of limbs and newly-minted passion, and Wise, unwilling to break contact for even a second, followed her, winding around her like a vine.
“Round two?” he teased, voice low.
Qingyi’s eyes glittered. “Try me, Proxy. I can go all night long. No need for a sleep mode…”
They kissed, slow and open-mouthed, as the sun climbed higher over the city and the light through the curtains shifted from gold to white. The second time was not frantic, but languorous, lush—a duet instead of a duel. They worked themselves into an elegant architecture of bodies; Qingyi, her thighs as strong as steel cables, splayed herself sideways in a Y-shape, letting Wise hoist one leg high and wide while he pressed into her from the side. The angle was obscene, the spread of her joints almost mathematical, and Wise fucked her with a slow, grinding momentum that was both surgical and savage. The newness of Qingyi’s hardware made each wet, frictionless slide seem impossibly explicit; every time Wise bottomed out, the impact was softened only by the lush give of Qingyi’s inner walls, which seemed to learn the shape of him with every stroke.
Her leg, raised and split at an almost 180 degree angle, was perched on Wise’s shoulder, and she seemed to delight in the impossible geometry of it. Qingyi’s body bent and yielded beneath him, but there was nothing passive about it. She met his every thrust, a coiled spring of muscle and willpower, driving back with force that left both of them breathless.
“Y-yes, Wise, yes!” Qingyi moaned, tipping her head back and looking up at Wise as if he was the most important thing in this world and the next. He matched her gaze and reached out to thumb her lips, playing with her mouth until her eyes went half-closed and her hot little tongue rolled around Wise’s probing finger.
Wise couldn’t catch his breath, couldn’t think past the animal fact of the moment. He’d never known a lover who wanted him this much, who devoured him with her eyes and hands and held nothing in reserve. Her laughter, when it came, was wild and unfiltered, and each time she gasped his name it was a demand: more, deeper, now.
The bed frame hammered against the wall with a tempo that vibrated through the floors. Zhu Yuan, still collapsed outside the door, felt every impact in her bones. She pressed her face to her knees and let the sound wash over her, the shame and arousal mingling into a delirious, molten ache.
Inside, Wise shifted his grip, letting Qingyi’s leg fall to the mattress while he slid his hands under her ass, lifting her hips to meet him at a sharper angle. This new position was rougher, and Qingyi’s moans took on an edge of pleading. She clawed at his shoulder blades, her synthetic nails raking lines that would bruise by morning. “Ah! Ah! Ah! Harder!” she begged, and Wise obliged, holding nothing back.
The slap of their bodies grew thunderous, and Qingyi’s pleasure became a litany of shrieks and giggles, each climax rippling outward into a new, higher plateau of sensation.
“G-gonna cum,” Wise growled, his countenance taut with fervent desire. “I’m gonna cum, Qingyi…!”
“Cum with me!” Qingyi pleaded, nodding and gasping as she grew closer and closer to climax. “Cum with me, please, Wise, yes! GET ME PREGNANT, MAKE ME A MOMMY!”
The last stroke was cataclysmic—Wise burying himself to the base as Qingyi’s hips jerked and locked around him. The air vibrated with their feral chorus. Wise’s climax was not a single, neat detonation but a series of hard, helpless spasms, his cock rutting deeper as he emptied himself into Qingyi’s trembling, suctioning core.
Qingyi’s body responded in kind, the new Wombforce 9060 engaging a climactic routine: her vaginal walls clenched in a milking rhythm, pulling Wise’s seed into the waiting capsule with relentless, algorithmic precision. As his release bathed her, the synthetic womb detected the volume and consistency of its prize, and a sequence of LED filaments lit up inside her lower abdomen. The glow spread outward, soft and roseate, and just beneath the surface of her skin, a luminous heart icon pulsed to life—a virtual tattoo broadcasting, in neon-pink, the success of its maiden insemination.
From the stairwell, Zhu Yuan caught the flicker of light through the half-open door. She watched, numb and breathless, as the heart pulsed brighter and brighter, synchronized with the staccato aftershocks of Qingyi’s orgasm. It was obscene, it was adorable, it was everything Zhu Yuan had ever wanted but had never known how to ask for.
Inside, Qingyi’s entire body rode the rolling tide of her completion. She whined and whimpered, the sound finally losing all artifice, collapsing into a raw, animal sob of relief. She clung to Wise, nails biting his shoulder, and as the pleasure ebbed she began to laugh—first in disbelief, then with a wild, unguarded joy.
“Did… did it work?” Wise’s voice was a choked marvel, as if he could not believe what he’d just accomplished.
Qingyi nodded, tears of laughter and overstimulation streaking her cheeks. She craned her head down to her own belly, where the heart icon throbbed like a living beacon. “I think you knocked me up on the first try,” she snorted, half hysterical, half reverent. “God, Wise… you overachiever.”
He collapsed next to her, limbs splayed and shaking, his face buried in her neck. “I’ve never been so proud of myself,” he whispered. “Or so absolutely ruined.”
They lay there, tangled and slick and softly glowing, for a long time. The silence was huge and gentle, and the digital heart icon over Qingyi’s lower abdomen continued to pulse, beat, and glow along to her metronome heart rate. Then she draped an arm over Wise’s torso and snuggled into him, beaming.
“Get your phone,” she told him, “and download the companion app. We can pick our traits for the baby… and even see if we’ll have twins.”
“Would you want twins?” Wise asked, chuckling and anxious.
“I’ll love whatever you end up giving me,” Qingyi told him.
For the next few minutes, the two lovers cuddled close under the covers and huddled in front of Wise’s smartphone, having opened the Wombforce’s companion app.
“I want our baby to have your eyes,” Qingyi whispered, tracing invisible shapes over Wise’s bare chest, snuggling closer in their intimate space.
“Your eyes are better than mine,” Wise complimented.
“I think your eyes are more special,” Qingyi shot back.
“Alright, but what about your hair color?” Wise asked.
“We can do my hair color… should they be as tall as you, or a little shorter?”
And the two continued just like that, comfortable in one another’s company, scrolling through menus that divided inherited traits into categories—Hair, Eye, Height, Metabolism, Neurological Predispositions. Every option presented with a self-effacing, pastel icon and a brief, unscientific blurb: “Will your baby be a night owl?” “How much caffeine can your baby handle?” “Will your baby love jazz?”
Wise, at one point, held the phone at arm’s length, tilting his head in mock-superstition. “Are we jinxing the baby by picking out their hobbies? I feel like this is how people end up naming their son Wolfgang and he becomes an accountant.”
Qingyi considered this. “If they rebel, we’ll support them. That’s all that matters.”
She said this with uncharacteristic gravity, and for a moment, Wise recognized in her expression a longing so old and so profound, it could only be described as human. He kissed her forehead, and it crumbled into a smile.
Zhu Yuan, meanwhile, remained crouched on the landing, her pulse slowed but her shame still white-hot and raw. She watched as the voices inside grew softer, replaced by the low, mutual cooing that came only from people who were planning a future together.
The sound of it—unbearably sweet, but also final—stirred something inside her that was part envy, part relief. She pressed her hand to her chest and waited for her heart to settle. Then, gathering what remained of her dignity, she eased herself to her feet and tiptoed down the stairs, one hand clutching the banister, the other still pressed to her lips as if to trap the ghosts of her own longing.
She did not let herself look back, even when she reached the bottom and heard the muffled laughter overhead, the way Qingyi’s voice—so often a monotone of indifference—now sparkled with reckless, stupid joy. Zhu Yuan wanted to hate her, wanted to write off the entire affair as juvenile, as pathetic, as beneath the pride of a true officer. But she couldn’t. Because beneath the envy, she saw clearly what they had: a sense of belonging that Zhu Yuan herself had always chased, but never quite caught.
It was only two days later that Qingyi gave the entire police station the good news.
“Congratulations!” one officer said. “Wow, that’s incredible!” said another.
Of course, there was nothing but good tidings for the little Intelligent Construct. Motherhood was something to celebrate for someone as excited as Qingyi seemed to be, and Zhu Yuan was nothing if not supportive of her partner for initiating this next chapter of her life.
Of course, she had to pretend to be surprised about the entire affair; pretend she didn’t already know who the father was, and pretend, naturally, that she hadn’t borne witness to the conception.
“Congratulations, Qingyi! To think you’ll have a big, swollen belly soon,” Zhu Yuan said. “Don’t you dare work hard, alright? That baby has to grow up healthy, and we can’t have you running around recklessly while pregnant! Maternity leave comes first, alright?”
Qingyi responded with her signature serenity, the kind that always seemed to smother chaos rather than invite it. “Don’t worry, Captain. This model’s designed for low-impact gestation. Besides, my maternal instincts are already running a diagnostic. The baby’s health will be priority number one.” She patted her own stomach, which was still as flat as polished glass, but in the act, she radiated a maternal pride so fierce it bordered on comic. “If anything, it’ll be Wise who needs bed rest. But if all goes well, we’ll just make another one. Or three.”
She said this with an upward glance that caught Zhu Yuan directly in the crosshairs, a glint in her green eyes that read as both wicked and impossibly gentle. “But you’d know all about that, wouldn’t you, Zhu Yuan?”
There followed a silence that no congratulatory bouquet could fill. It was as if every last decibel in the station was suddenly rerouted into the memory of that bedroom, that stairwell, the squeal and slap of flesh and chassis. Zhu Yuan felt the entire weight of that night compress in her chest, panic rising like a bubble, and she had to clench her teeth to keep the color from running hot across her face.
Qingyi’s voice dropped to a whisper engineered for one set of ears only. “You know, it’s not too late to get in on the next round. Wise’s gametes are truly… formidable.” The pause was surgical, as if she’d built it to fit precisely the shape of Zhu Yuan’s shame. “Come by after work, if you’re curious. I promise not to tell HR.”
Zhu Yuan stared at her, at a loss for words, mouth half-open and jaw working in slow, incredulous increments. It took every ounce of her training—every seminar, every late-night street chase—to keep from melting into a puddle at Qingyi’s feet. She could not believe what she was being offered. She could not believe how much she wanted it.
“Don’t tease me like that,” she managed, the words scraping out dry and brittle.
Qingyi only smiled, a flash of teeth, and reached out to straighten the edge of Zhu Yuan’s blue-green tie, smoothing the checkered fabric with a tenderness that made the whole break room tilt sideways. Zhu Yuan nearly bit her tongue in half.
For the rest of the shift, Zhu Yuan drifted from station to station like a woman suspended in jelly. The new warmth between her and Qingyi was as intoxicating as it was terrifying. Every time she checked a report or scolded a rookie, she saw Qingyi’s eyes on her, cool and unblinking, as if already plotting their next move. It made Zhu Yuan’s pulse thump in strange places.
And, of course, it was after her work shift that she found her legs carrying her all the way back to Sixth Street, all the way back to the Random Play video store, and all the way back up to Wise’s room—where the door was already waiting ajar, and Qingyi had straddled Wise’s lap as she beckoned Zhu Yuan inside.
“Have you decided,” said Qingyi, “that you want to share a maternity ward with your partner?”
Zhu Yuan gulped and nodded, slipping into the room and letting the door close right behind her. Then Qingyi reached up to caress Wise’s cheek, her fingers small and soft against his skin.
“You’ve got your work cut out for you, daddy,” she teased, and she bit her lip when she felt Wise’s cock throb beneath her butt. “Are you ready to go all night with us?”
Wise nodded resolutely, suddenly wondering if this is what people meant when they said fuck the police.