Companion 3000
“Sure, some work,” he grumbled, reluctantly scooting his long, sleek body to one side. Leita had seen pictures of animals from Old Earth that Schneider somewhat resembled. She thought they had been called “otters”. Then again, he also looked a little something like a cat—one of the few domestic animals that had survived the flight from humanity’s abandoned home world.
“It is work,” she insisted, calling up her company’s monthly records as proof. “See, I have to go over some figures.”
Leita owned a small but profitable mining company on the far fringe of an asteroid belt on the edge of the Centauri solar system. She had inherited it from her parents, brave pioneers who had built the business from the ground up. The entire thing was completely mechanized, from the droid ships that went out to collect the ore she was after, to the sorting machine, to the refinery where the ore was smelted into metal and poured into molds. Once a month a company ship would come to collect the molded bars and cart them away to more civilized parts of the system, parts Leita longed to visit but couldn’t.
She was a one-woman show and taking a vacation meant shutting the whole operation down. Now, if only she had someone to help her service the droids that broke down or got damaged while out mining the field, she might be able to afford shutting down for a month or so to find herself a little social life. What she really needed around here was a mechanic. A big, strapping, masterful mechanic. One with piercing eyes and warm, calloused, knowing hands and a really big tool belt…
“Sure, I know what kind of figures you have to go over and they’re not exactly the numerical kind, either.” Schneider’s sarcastic voice dragged her out of her fantasy and Leita realized she’d been staring at the glowing cube for over a minute without doing anything.
“Shut up,” she mumbled savagely, manipulating the cube until the site she really wanted to look at popped up. “So what if I like to look? It’s not like I’ve ordered anything.” Yet, she added to herself.
For Her Pleasure proclaimed the glowing, purple letters at the top of the cube. You must be eighteen standard years of age to enter this site if human. Three hundred standard years if Bersinian. Bersinians were a particularly long-lived species of ET that didn’t reach sexual maturity for centuries. Leita felt sorry for them—she was barely twenty-seven standard years of age and so consumed with unfulfilled sexual longings that the idea of waiting another two hundred and seventy-three years to look at porn on the Web was unthinkably frustrating. Not that she wasn’t already frustrated enough.
She scrolled through the species list that included almost all known forms of alien life that inhabited the galaxy except Periis. Periis were an exclusively homosexual male species that reproduced by budding. There was also no mention of Toliwogs, a group of hyper-religious creatures that inhabited one small moon in a distant galaxy.
Toliwogs believed that an appropriate punishment when one of their number was caught masturbating was amputation of a hand. Since Toliwogs had twelve hands, it was entirely possible to gauge how dirty an individual’s mind was by counting the number of remaining hands. Only Toliwogs with eleven hands or more were permitted to enter the priesthood. Toliwogs with less than three hands were excommunicated and could sometimes be seen in spaceports with signs that read “Please lend a hand to the handless”.
At any rate, Leita was glad she wasn’t a Bersinian, a Perii or a Toliwog as she found “human” on the long list and clicked on it with her glove. There was the standard fare, erotic stories, mind link personal ads, even feely fantasies that could be hooked directly into your nervous system to give you an intensely pleasurable mind movie that felt exactly like the real thing. Well, almost. Leita knew from bitter experience that nothing but a living, breathing, hot-blooded man in your bed felt like a man in your bed. Too bad she no longer trusted men.
Tonight Leita wasn’t interested in the standard stuff, not even the brand new S&M feely fantasy that normally would have caught her eye. She flipped straight to the premium section of the For Her Pleasure site and stared at the choices, biting her lip.
“Mm-mm-mm,” Schneider murmured, breaking her concentration. “Small, medium, and extra large. Decisions, decisions.”
“Shut up,” Leita commanded again, studying the 3-D images floating above her cube. She nervously nibbled at her left thumbnail as she manipulated the cube with her right hand.
“Companion 2000” the purple letters flared. “Guaranteed to grant your every sexual desire and fulfill your need for companionship.”
“Hey, I thought I fulfilled your need for companionship,” Schneider, protested, slinking his long neck around so that he could read the words over his shoulder.