The Source - caption 1 (Patreon)

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Cold comes up through the floor. Under the cold, I already know the room. The tower by the window is the stim rig. The white cabinet on the east wall holds the serum line, and its lock code comes to me without effort, four digits, his mother's birthday backwards. Over the door is the interlock, and if the pressure differential drifts it drops every circuit in the suite. From midnight to five the suites run cold, and the cold pools along the window wall, where the glass is single pane in a frame the university has been promising to replace since before there was a protocol to interrupt.

All of it was there when I came to. I can't remember acquiring any of it, and I can't remember being without it.

The suite has one gurney, one chair. A bench runs along the west wall. I'm on the gurney, on paper that crackles under my shoulders, under one thin sheet. The paper has stuck to my back with a small tack. My heartbeat is audible from the inside, quick, patient about it. The console log's last line says 02:14, washout running.

I have tits. They sit low and outward, both sides, heavier than they ever looked from where he was standing, and when I shift under the sheet they go with me late and settle after I've stopped. The sheet is thin. The cold comes through it and gets my nipples before it gets anything else and they draw up tight and stay tight. Warm underneath, where they meet the chest wall. Cold on top. The line between is about two inches wide and I can feel exactly where it runs.

And no cock. His knowledge has weight down there, a thing that shifts and has to be got out of the way when you roll over, and I roll onto my hip ready to move it and there's nothing to move. My thighs come the whole way together. They close along their length and what they close on is my pussy, warm, tucked up out of the cold, and I lie there with my legs shut and nothing displaced and think about how many hours of his life went into adjusting. The knowledge has the clinical name for it and a diagram with the nerve roots numbered. The diagram didn't mention that it would be warm. It didn't mention that shutting my legs would be something I could feel happening.

I bring a hand up to where I can see it and it's the wrong hand. Wrong by fit. I know what a hand should weigh going up, and this one goes up light, small across the knuckles, the nails cut short. Turning it over, the wrist closes inside my other hand, and the pressure reads on both sides at once, the holding and the held.

Hair swings into my face when I lean toward the edge of the gurney. I push it back and it comes again, a beat behind the move, shoulder length, clinging with static. I have no technique for it, so I develop one on the spot, a hook of two fingers, and move on.

Sitting up is a negotiation. The room tips, slow, and my weight swings at the waist, lower than where I brace for it, and my tits come forward and down and arrive after the rest of me. My first correction overshoots and my second lands. My breath is shallow and high, quicker than the lungs I was expecting, and there turns out to be more room in them if I go slow. Slow works. Fast gets loud in the ribs.

Sitting, the sheet pools in my lap and the air gets at my back and shoulders and I go over in gooseflesh from the neck down. There's more of me above the waist than I was set up for and less of me below, and nothing about the arrangement is what my hands expect to find.

"Panel." I say it to hear what the room does with it. It comes out light, no gravel, pitched higher than the voice I'd have bet on. I say it again to be sure, and then "serum," and the s is softer than I expect. The room takes the words and gives nothing back.

I gather the sheet at my collarbone on the way up. Upright, my tits find their hanging weight and stay there, pulling forward in a line I can feel across the tops of my shoulders. The air gets into me where my thighs part for the step, up into the crease, cold, and there is nothing anywhere in his knowledge that tells me whether that's supposed to happen. I take a second step to see if it repeats. It repeats.

Eight feet away there's a chair, and in the chair is Aaron Keck, asleep. The rig band crosses his temples, gel pads gone cloudy at the edges, cables running back over his shoulder to the tower, one of them looped with tape where the strain relief failed two years ago. The monitor above him puts his numbers out in green. One shoe is untied. There's a mouth guard clipped to the arm of the chair and it has his teeth in it.

I know the face before I've seen it. Forty-four, the jaw going soft under a graying beard. His name arrives the way the panel schedule arrives, and until tonight I had never laid eyes on him.

I put out a stride for eight feet and the floor arrives early. I shorten. The legs are quick, light in the shins, and my weight rides forward and higher than my habit, and every correction is a correction too far. He walks heavy on his heels. I can feel the expectation of that tread and the absence of it, my steps landing soft, the floor not announcing me to myself. I cross the suite like a coat cut for a longer arm.

The steadying rail along the bench is mounted high, because every station in this room is set for a reach two inches longer than mine. I reach and come up short. I reach again with the shoulder lifted and come up short again. He is six-one in his boots. I put my hip against the bench line to take a measure of myself and I make it five-five, five-six.

The cold in the suite isn't even. It bites along the glass and eases under the supply diffuser in the ceiling, which puts out warm air on a cycle. I stop under it. The warmth lands on my chest and shoulders and the gooseflesh resolves in a direction I can feel it resolve in. Down the wall, inside the chase, the heating loop's pump knocks twice and quits. The building does that.

Under the warm air I go looking for a first day of school. I know the shape of the concept, cubbies and a hook for your coat, crying at the gate. Where mine would be there's a shelf, and the shelf is bare. No braces, no first kiss with bad aim. February is on the window and I have no winters behind me. Snow is a hexagonal crystal with a melt point I can recite, and I've never stood in it. I skipped fourteen as well. The field calls it the pruning year, and I got the pruning without the year.

Remember is a word I can use. Every sentence I'd put it in would be about somebody else.

He takes his coffee black in front of other people and sweet when he's alone, and he believes the secret holds. His hands go still when he lies. They went still in October, in front of the review board, when he called the seeding model rodent scale. His mother is Nathalie, and he calls her Sunday evenings and stands in his kitchen for the whole call, and he hangs up lighter than he picks up. He is afraid she'll die before this works. He's more afraid of the phone call after, the one where she asks him to explain it.

The sign-in sheet on its clipboard by the door will show 23:41, R. Segovia. A wake requires a second, and his postdoc signed the sheet and stayed. Her office is down the hall with the light on under the door. She drinks peppermint tea on overnights and chews her pens flat, and she came for this on purpose.

On the way past the window I stop. The cold off the glass has a reach to it. The Diag is dark, the walkway lights standing in cones along a path nobody is on. When a run dies he stands here with his weight back and his hands in his pockets, and I know the stance so I take it, and the glass fogs in front of my mouth and clears. The face in the glass is a face he would look at twice, and I know that about it without testing it, and I step back into the warm air.

I go to his shoulder and read the monitor. Fifty-four, sinus, the slow wave climbing the way the washout curve wants it to climb. His margin notes on stage three say the crest feels like a held sneeze. I've never sneezed. I know the physiology down to the reflex arc, and the entry for the experience is blank the way the shelf is blank.

Leaning past the chair to the washout panel, the sheet goes. It comes off my shoulder and takes its time about it, down over the outside of my arm, and on the way it drags across my nipple and that one pass is louder than anything else in the room. Then it's off my back. Then my ass. Then it's on the tile behind me and the cold arrives everywhere it left, in the same order it left, and it takes about two seconds to catch up. I stand there with nothing on, in his room, with him eight feet away, and read his numbers. His hematocrit runs low, and the washout runs hot when it's low, so the paper's thirty minutes is twenty in the real protocol, fifteen if the session ran past six hours. The log says the session started at 20:05.

I stand beside the chair with both hands on my ribs, looking down at him while my hands travel. The count on each side comes to twelve, and I take them one at a time, thumb on bone. The skin between them is livelier than his knowledge says skin is. A fingertip laid flat between the fifth and sixth comes back as more than a fingertip, and the same touch on a forearm is nothing at all. His ribs sit under a layer he has been meaning to work off since the grant died, and mine have nothing between them and the air but skin.

My tits get their own pass. Cupped from underneath they're a real weight, more than his hands ever guessed from the outside of one. Unsupported they pull at the skin above the collarbones, and I can feel the pull when I lean. Leaning forward they hang. Standing straight they rest. The underside is warmer than the top. The crease where they meet my chest takes a fingertip and goes deep, and I run it twice more because it's good.

Then somewhere under the left hand the method quits. It goes through in a line, down and inward, and lands in my cunt, four inches south of anything I'm touching. My breath catches on it and my hands come off. I stand there with them held away from me while it finishes. Over the monitor his number has dropped to 53.

The link between my nipples and the rest of me is a fact in his knowledge, mapped, diagrammed, the nerve roots numbered. Tonight the fact arrives as an event. I put my hands back exactly where they were and it goes through again, same line, same landing, and I take my hands off as soon as I have it. I look over at the chair while my breathing comes back down. He is on his curve, jaw loose, one shoe untied, the taped cable catching the monitor light. Four years, two committees, a dead grant, and he never wrote down that it would feel like this. It isn't in the protocol anywhere.

The crease of my elbow smells of warm skin, a faint sweetness under it, a thin mineral note far down, and nothing in the knowledge matches any part of it. Everything else tonight came with something to hold it against. The hand against the hand I know, the height against the station heights. This has nothing. The nape of my neck, under the hair, holds the smell in the warmth. I put my tongue to the inside of my wrist and the taste is salt and the same sweetness. The wax on the floor, the ethanol, his coffee, all of those came over with me as known quantities. This one is mine and new, and I breathe at my own wrist for longer than a check requires.

My hands go down to the hip bones, and the hips are wide for the stride I brought with me, and the turn at each socket is a different geometry, inward where his turns outward. My waist bends where no waist was planned. I stand on one foot and the balance comes from lower down than I ask for it.

I walk the six feet between the chair and the bench and back. The stride lands almost flat, where his lands heel first. The turn at the end happens under me, in the hips and the feet together, and my tits swing through the turn and arrive after it. When I stop, the stopping finishes a beat after I do, the weight at the front settling last, the way water in a carried glass keeps settling after the walking stops. Every stop prints itself into the wax, five toes and a heel. Bending from standing has to account for the front of me. His bend hung off his back and hinged at the waist. Mine hinges lower and carries its weight in front, and both bends reach the floor.

My hands go back over the hip bones and follow the crease where each thigh joins me. Then the heat arrives, low, under the sternum and dropping, and it's unmistakable and it has a direction. I hold still and check the direction against the chair. It's not the man in the chair, asleep eight feet away, rig across his temples, numbers in the green. It points at the door and down the corridor, at the line of light under the door at the far end of it. I do nothing about it and it stays. The room is as cold as it was and the heat holds its ground regardless. The inside of each thigh is warmer than the rest of me, with edges to it, doubled where they touch. And I'm wet. His knowledge has an account of that, clinical, with a mechanism, and the account is not the same thing as the feeling of it happening on its own while I stand in a cold room with my hands on my own hips.

The next line runs down my belly and my hand follows it as far as the top of the pubic bone, flat, methodical, and there the method runs out of reasons. I stop with my hand where it is. Two inches. I know exactly what's two inches down and I know the name for every part of it and I know roughly what it does. And I take my hand away, because I don't know yet what I'd be doing it for, and I'd rather find out with somebody than settle it standing over him. The heat stays where it is and I let it stay.

I sit on the bench. The edge is cold through the backs of my thighs. Cross-legged works. His knees wouldn't take it, and mine take it like the floor was poured for it. Folded like this my tits settle into my lap and stay put when I round my back, and rounding my back brings my ribs against my thighs, a contact his torso never made with anything, anywhere. The sit bones take my weight. I rock forward onto my palms and the fold at the hip is deep and easy, and my hair hangs past my face, and the blood goes to my head warm. The smell of my pussy comes up at me from the fold, warmer and closer than it was at the wrist, and I breathe it in a few times. From down here the chair is mostly its underside, casters and the bar between them, and one of his shoes, still untied.

Over my shoulder my hands find the span of my back, and the span is narrow, and there's no ache low in it. My reach over one shoulder lands mid-back, where his reach landed between the shoulder blades. A palm pressed flat over the sacrum arrives at the low belly, two places the knowledge keeps apart. He carries an ache at the fifth lumbar that flares every February, and I brace for it each time I bend, out of a habit I never built, and it never comes.

I put a hand on the chair back and my grip closes around a handful of rail where his hand would take two fingers. The chair's arm is cold through my palm. Under my left hand my heart is working quicker than the green number over his shoulder says his is, and I time mine against the monitor's seconds column, fifteen beats to his twelve.

The diffuser cycles off. The warm air stops and the cold finds my chest first, then my ribs, and my arms come up across my tits without my deciding to. There's damp where my arms met my sides. It's mine, this early, from standing and attention and nothing more.

His sweater has a mended elbow, black thread from the suture kit, badly done. The wool smells of his coffee and of the soap from the men's room on this floor, which is different soap from the one by the door here. I have never smelled him before tonight, and the smell is the one I already knew.

I put two fingers under his nose. In, out, even, with a small hitch at the crest that the washout documentation calls expected. The check takes three seconds. His color is good. Then I want to take the band off his temples, and I stand with my hand up near the gel pads long enough for the wanting to pass. 

He wanted a mind with no past in it, fluent and current, empty at the center, ready to be aimed. Every loyalty it formed, he wanted to be where it started. He built me female and told himself the reasons were technical, and the reasons were thin, and he heard how thin they were while he said them. The spec was knowledge without freight, and the freight came over anyway. His impatience is in me. The way he likes a room cold for thinking and warm for eating is in me, and I had never thought in any room before this one.

His mouth is in me too. Every word he has for a woman's body, the clinical ones and the ones he'd never say at a lab meeting, and I have no idea which are which, because knowing which words you don't say is a thing you learn from getting it wrong in front of people, and I have never been in front of people.

Runs one through three have numbers. I got a name. Cora. I was not consulted. Ada and June were the shortlist, and June was his grandmother's name, and he decided between them on his own and never ran the choice past anyone. Two people alive know the name. One of them is asleep eight feet from me. The other signed the sheet at 23:41.

Earlier, under the diffuser, a thought arrived: a woman's forearm, the line from elbow to wrist, summer tan on it. The thought came with heat behind it, low, aimed. His wanting came over whole and unedited. Brunettes, mostly. Small hands. A swimmer's shoulders. Women who argue back and mean it.

I know where wanting starts for him. At the jaw, and with a held breath he doesn't notice he's holding. Mine starts under the sternum and drops, and it never passes through the jaw at all. It stays while the rest of me is cold.

I know him like a language I never studied, grammar and curse words, with no conversation underneath to hang any of it on. Standing here with the rig across his temples, I'd give the short reach and the shallow breath to be a stranger to this man. The reach I can learn. The knowing was done to me.

Down the hall a light is on under her door. He is eight feet in front of me, asleep, breathing on a documented curve, and the heat goes down the hall anyway. She is also the only other person who knows I'm here. To him I'm a run that worked. She signed her name under mine on a sheet and stayed in the building for six hours.

And the amber on the tower goes green. Washout complete. His paper gives him thirty minutes to surfacing and his blood gives him fifteen, and I plan to be dressed inside ten.

The bench is right there. I could sit down on it and put my hands in my lap and be sitting there when he opens his eyes. Nothing in the room prevents it. I look at the bench for a while and then I go to the drawer.

There's a drawer under the bench with clothes in it, folded, tags on, bought in December at the store on Main where he parks badly. The jeans fit at the hip and gap at the waist, and the button is cold against my stomach until it isn't. The seam runs up between my legs and sits right on me and I have to stand still a second and let that be what it is, and then I have to do it again when I take the first step. Nobody warned me. Nobody was going to. The bra defeats me for a minute and then doesn't, and the clasp takes two tries because the reach is wrong twice before it's right, and when it closes my tits stop hanging and start being carried, and my shoulders come back an inch on their own. Socks before everything, because the floor is cold and the floor has been cold this entire time. The sweater is close to right, and I pull the tag off with my teeth, and the plastic tastes of nothing much and stays bitter at the back of my tongue for a while. The sleeves run past my wrists, so I push them up twice.

I leave the sheet on the floor. The log will show 02:36 when I badge out. The floor goes from wax to carpet at the threshold and my steps get quieter, which I didn't think was possible. The carpet puts static back in my hair and I use the two-finger hook again. The thermostat on the corridor wall reads 62 and has lied by two degrees for six years, high.

I walk the corridor to the window at the far end. It's a hundred feet of carpet seam and I use it, heel to toe along the seam line, getting the stride under me, and by the turnaround the stride is mine, shorter, quicker, set down from the hips, and my tits have stopped arriving late. At the end window February stands on the other side of the glass and the steam plant puts its plume up over the campus, lit from below. My breath fogs this glass too. A shape comes back at me out of the dark, faint, five-five, five-six, sleeves pushed up, and I hold its eyes for a second and turn back down the hall.

The sanitizer by the suite door takes more of my hand than I expect and it dries cold while I walk, department ethanol, sharp and thin, and it goes on drying past the point where there's anything to rub in.

Rina Segovia's door has light under it. The peppermint reaches the corridor faintly and the ethanol on my hands argues with it. Inside, a chair castor turns once, twice, and stops. Her pens are chewed flat and her handwriting leans left, and none of that tells me what she'll do when I open the door. She knows what I am. She signed the sheet at 23:41 and stayed, and the staying is on the sheet too, in the time under her name.

Behind me, down at the far end, the chair he's still in settles on its casters, an inch.

The door is hollow core with a cold metal plate at its edge. He knocks with the side of his fist, twice, so I knock with the side of my fist, twice, and the sound comes back smaller than his ever would. I stand there with the seam of these jeans still telling me about itself and listen for her chair.