"Why do you want to hurt me?" The words burst from the throat of some wounded animal before she could bite them back: Stupid, stupid bitch. Whining and crying and groveling just the way he likes it. You know why he does it. Your whole life you've known people like this existed.

But of course the animal hadn't been asking why at all. The animal wouldn't have even understood the answer. The animal only wanted him to stop.

His hand ran lightly over her ass. "You know why."

She thrashed her head from side to side in frantic, violent denial. "There are other ways, easier ways! Without the risk, without anyone trying to stop you—"

"Nobody's trying to stop me now," Achilles pointed out.

"But you must know, with a good set of phones and a feedback skin you could do things that wouldn't even be physically possible in the real world, with more women than you could ever dream of having in—"

"Tried it." Footsteps, returning. "Jerking off in a hallucination."

"But they look and feel and even smell so real you'd never know—"

Suddenly his hand was knotted tightly in her hair, twisting her head around, putting her face a few scant centimeters from his. He was not smiling now, and when he spoke again, his voice had lost all pretense of civility.

"It's not about the sights or the smells, okay? You can't hurt a hallucination. It's play-acting. What's the point of torturing something that can't even suffer?" He yanked her head again for good measure.

And in the next instant released it, casually cheerful once more. "Anyway, I'm really no different than any other guy. You're an educated stumpfuck, you must know that the only difference between fucking someone and flaying them is a few neurons and a whole lotta social conditioning. You're all like me. I've just lost the parts that pretend it isn't true.

"And now," he added, with a good-natured wink, "you've got an oral exam."

Taka shook her head. "Please..."

"Don't sweat it, it's mainly review. As I recall, in our last lesson we were talking about Seppuku, and you seemed surprised at the thought that it might reproduce sexually. I know, I know—never even occurred to you, did it? Even though everything has sex, even though bacteria have sex. Even though you and I are having sex, it never occurred to you that Seppuku might. Not too smart, Alice. David would be very disappointed."

Oh Dave. Thank God you can't see me now.

"But let's move past that. Today we're gonna start with the idea that sex might kick in as, say, as a density-dependent response. Population increases, sexual mode cuts in, what happens?"

He moved behind her again. She tried to focus, tried to put her mind to this absurd, humiliating game on the remote chance there might be some way to win. Sexual mode cuts in, she thought, genes shuffle, and the recessives—