Michael Swanwick's Periodic Table of Science Fiction 14

Si

Silicon

28.0855

Programmable Breasts

The new Wonderbreasts have just been released and there's no escaping the ads: on billboards, bulging out of evening gowns and glowing bright as neon. Over the radio, playing seductive music from subcutaneous woofers and tweeters. The TV commercials demonstrating their prehensile abilities are eye-popping.

Reality moved beyond satire decades ago.

Women no longer look even remotely human. They have no noses to speak of. Their lips are enormous. Their eyes, modeled after those of the latest anime sex-heroines, originally belonged to cows. By today's standards, I am a pervert.

I have what is now classified as a retro-fetish. I desire only natural women, with soft breasts, the hips God gave them, and gently curving stomachs incapable of flashing real-time downloads of the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

At night, I prowl the bars in seedy parts of town, looking for women so poor and marginalized they've never mutilated themselves. I take them home and touch their perfect bodies, and on a good night I convince them, briefly, that they are beautiful.

But then the grey light of morning comes, returning to them their ugliness and self-loathing. They slink away, miserable and ashamed. Nothing I can say will change their minds.

These are the women who turn me on. These are the women I love. Someday, I'll find one who'll stay.

© 2002 by Michael Swanwick and SCIFI.COM.