She breathes a sigh of relief. “It’s my fault,” she says. “They told me never to say that, for liability reasons. But I let you slide through the exit exam. You just seemed so happy.” She shakes her head.

“Sophie,” you say. “Can we, uh—can we um—?”

She grins shyly. “What?”

“Can we, just one last time, before they fix me, have sex?”

She frowns. “Gary. You don’t need to do that. We’ll do it afterward, in a week. We’ll do a proper exit exam with all the trimmings.”

“No, this, this is for me. Just—you know.”

“Gary.” She swallowed. “I think that’s a bad idea.”

“I just want to say good-bye to it. To this way. With you.”

She pursed her lips, and there was a hint of a blush on her pale cheeks. “You’d have to sign a release form….”

You nodded.

She got up and took a clipboard and clipped a form and a pen to it. She turned around too fast, coming back, and knocked the doctor stool so that it rolled over and slammed into the desk.

She handed you the clipboard. Then she shrugged off her lab coat.

G. BONHOMME

on “The Program”

In “The Program,” I wanted to see if I could write a story that worked simultaneously as erotica and classic extrapolative science fiction.

In both cases, I was juggling. I wanted to see if I could keep three balls in the air at once: literature, porn, and a thought experiment.

I also wanted to write from the perspective of a sexist, lazy guy—a boor—who gets a comeuppance. That was the original intention, but it was superseded as the character grew on me.

I played with the porn cliché of a mind-control device that renders its subject a willing sexual plaything—particularly the straight man’s fantasy of being turned into such a plaything by a woman. Most straight men might overrate their usefulness as playthings—supply and demand, as seen in the market for pro doms, confirms this. It struck me that making a man actually useful in this capacity would require some…reengineering.

The Letters

Eric Albert

“Dear Mr. Davis,” Megan typed, “I would like to suck your dick.”

She paused and considered whether the idea needed further explanation. No, better to keep it short and sweet. She inserted a blank line, typed “ME,” saved the file, and sent it to the printer.

The “ME” part was clever. Mr. Davis would think the letter writer was hiding behind the anonymity of a first-person pronoun, but in fact it stood for Megan Elizabeth. Megan Elizabeth Bryant, in full.

Megan was used to feeling clever.