Chapter 2: Medical Perversion
The sterile quiet of Laloz’s house was a lie. It hummed with suppressed panic. For three days, the ghost of that doctor’s visit had lingered, the word ‘viability’ hanging like a threat. Laloz had descended into a frenzy of research, his comm screen cluttered with medical journals on anomalous prenatal development, hormonal cascades, and risk factors. The glowing data painted a terrifying picture of things that could go wrong.
Glitch watched him from the kitchen island, sipping synthetic tea that tasted of nothing. Her own body felt like a borrowed, treacherous machine. “You’re going to burn out your optics,” she said, her voice flat.
“There was a study in Neo-Tokyo,” he mumbled, not looking up. “A similar case. The stress hormones from the mother’s system… they can trigger catastrophic…”
“Laloz.” She slammed her cup down. The sharp sound echoed in the cavernous space. “Stop. You’re scaring me. You’re scaring it.”
He finally looked at her. Dark circles bruised his eyes. His hair was a wild mess. He’d been trying to fix the thing he couldn’t understand with the only tools he had: diagrams and data streams. It was failing.
“I’m trying to protect you,” he said, the words brittle.
“By making our home a fucking clinic? I can’t live like this. I feel like an experiment.” She pushed off the stool and walked to the wall of glass, staring out at the city’ perpetual rain. “I need to feel something real. Not just… this dread.”
She heard his chair scrape back. Felt him approach from behind. His hands came to rest on her shoulders, heavy and warm. “I know,” he sighed, his breath stirring her hair. “I’m sorry. I’m losing my mind.”
He turned her around. His gaze was hungry, frantic. Not for data, but for her. For the proof of life, of connection. “Let me just… feel you. Please.”
They didn’t make it to the humming bed. He backed her against the cold glass, the city’s smeared lights a tableau behind her. His kiss was desperate, all teeth and searching tongue. She matched his hunger, clawing at his shirt, needing the animal truth of skin.
He yanked her leggings down, they pooled at her ankles. He fumbled with his own belt. And then he stopped.
A visible shudder ran through him. His eyes, so full of want, clouded with a new, grim calculation. “The doctor said… no more direct contact. Until the second trimester. To be safe.” The words sounded rote, rehearsed. A mantra against disaster.
“Fuck that,” Glitch growled, reaching for him.
He caught her wrist. His grip was firm. “No.” He dug into his pocket and pulled out a small, square foil packet. The sight of it was a cold shock.
A condom.
After months of nothing but heat and wet and claim, it looked absurd. Alien. A piece of latex bureaucracy.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” she hissed.
“It’s not a joke, Glitch!” His voice cracked. “What if something happens? What if we hurt it? I can’t… I won’t take that chance.” His hands were shaking as he tore the packet open. The sound was obscenely loud.
She watched, a knot of anger and hurt tightening in her chest, as he rolled the pale sheath over his hard cock. It was a barrier. A dismissal. It said the very essence of him was now a potential contaminant.
“This isn’t you,” she whispered.
“It is now,” he said, his voice hollow. He lifted her, her back against the window, the glass chilling her skin. He guided himself to her entrance, now sheathed in stupid, clinical rubber. “This is me trying not to fuck up the only real thing I’ve ever made.”
He pushed in.
The difference was profound. It wasn’t just the diminished sensation, though that was glaring—a muted thickness where there should have been searing intimacy. It was the meaning. Every thrust was a translation, a filtered version of what they had. She could feel his shape, his rigidity, but not his heat, not the living pulse of him. It was sex through a lens, safe and sterile and fucking heartbreaking.
“Tell me you feel me,” he begged, slamming her against the glass, his pace frantic, as if he could pound through the barrier.
“I feel the condom,” she spat back, the truth a weapon.
He groaned, a sound of pure frustration. He drove into her harder, his hips pistoning. The window rattled in its frame. His face was buried in her neck, his breaths ragged puffs against her skin. “I’m still in here,” he grunted. “It’s still me. God, you’re so tight. You’re still fucking perfect.”
But the magic was broken. Her orgasm, when it came, was a clinical, distant thing—a series of mechanical contractions chasing a ghost of pleasure. She cried out, but it was frustration, not rapture.
It was enough for him. With a choked, anguished shout, he stilled, shuddering as he spent himself into the rubber trap. The act felt wasteful. His seed, which had once been a promise, was now medical waste.
He sagged against her, his body slick with sweat. For a long minute, they just hung there, suspended against the city, connected by a sad, synthetic skin.
He pulled out slowly. The condom, slick and full, was a grotesque punctuation mark. He knotted it, discarded it in a sleek chrome bin. The tiny plink as it hit the metal was the loudest sound in the room.
He wouldn’t meet her eyes as he pulled up his pants. The distance between them was now a physical, tangible thing, measured in microns of latex.
Glitch slid down the glass, pulling her leggings up. Her body felt used and empty. The high-tech house felt like a cage. In the corner, the robot’s fractured circuits chose that moment to sputter, sending a jagged pulse of neon-blue light arcing across the ceiling—a brief, insane lightning storm contained in their prison.
Laloz finally looked at her, his face drawn in the erratic light. “I had to,” he said, but it sounded like a question.
She had no answer. She just wrapped her arms around her stomach, around the life inside that had already changed everything, and turned away from the man who was now just another thing she needed protection from.
The silence after the condom hit the bin was a living thing, thick and suffocating. Glitch kept her back to Laloz, her forehead resting against the cool glass, feeling the distant thrum of the city through her skin. She heard him move, the soft shuffle of his feet on the polished floor, but he didn’t touch her again.
“I’m going to shower,” he finally said, his voice stripped raw.
“Great.” The word was a dismissal. She waited until she heard the hydraulic hiss of the sanitizer door before she let out a shaking breath. Her own arousal had curdled into a sour, restless ache. The phantom sensation of that fucking rubber sheath lingered, a taunt. She looked at the chrome bin. A single, bloated reminder of their new normal.
It wasn’t enough.
The need was a physical violence in her veins, an itch beneath her skin that the clinical, careful fuck had only aggravated. She stomped to the bedroom, to the humming black bed that had started all of this. She yanked open the nightstand drawer. Inside, beside the discarded robot interface chip, was the box. One hundred ulta-thin, non-spermicidal, hypoallergenic barriers. He’d bought in bulk.
She grabbed a handful of the silver squares, the foil crinkling in her fist.
When Laloz emerged from the shower, skin steaming, a towel around his waist, he found her waiting. She was naked on the edge of the bed, her legs spread, one hand slowly working her cock to a half-hard state. The other hand held up a condom packet, pinched between two fingers like a dare.
“You wanna be safe?” Her voice was low, challenging. “So be safe. But don’t you dare stop.”
He stared, his damp hair dripping onto his shoulders. The war in his eyes was plain: fear against a rising, answering hunger. The sight of her touching herself broke him. The towel dropped.
He crossed the room in three strides, took the packet from her, and ripped it open with his teeth. He sheathed himself again, the process quicker this time, a brutal efficiency. “Like this?” he growled, pushing her back onto the leather.
“Just like that,” she hissed, wrapping her legs around his hips.
He entered her in one harsh, deep stroke. The condom was still there, that infuriating membrane, but the intent had shifted. This wasn’t about protection anymore; it was a weapon, a tool for a different kind of violence. He fucked her with a focused, relentless rhythm, each thrust smacking their flesh together. The bed’s sensors flickered, registering the biomechanical stress.
“You feel that?” he grunted, his hands gripping her thighs hard enough to bruise. “All me. Every fucking inch.”
“Prove it,” she gasped, arching up to meet him.
He did. For hours. The first condom grew slick and warm inside her. When he came, his shout was guttural, triumphant. He pulled out, knotted it, tossed it toward the floor. It landed with a soft, wet slap.
He didn’t pause. He rolled her over, pulled her onto her hands and knees. The second packet tore. The second sheath rolled on. He drove into her from behind, his fingers digging into the soft flesh of her hips. The angle was deeper, meaner. She pushed back against him, taking him all, her own cock swinging heavily beneath her.
“Is this safe enough for you?” she moaned, her face pressed into the cooling leather.
His only answer was a harder, faster pace. The room filled with the sounds of them: skin, sweat, ragged breath, the constant, low crinkle of foil. The third. The fourth. Each climax was a sharp, wrenching peak, draining them but offering no peace. They fucked on the floor, against the wall, bent over the ridged housing of the silent robot. A graveyard of used condoms grew in their wake, pale, spent blossoms glistening in the low light.
Dawn was a grey smear at the window when they collapsed, finally spent, onto the ruined sheets. Laloz’s body was a map of sweat and strain. Glitch traced a line of it down his spine. The bin was overflowing. Dozens of them, a monument to futile exertion.
He looked at the mess, then at her, his eyes hollow. “Did that fix it?” His voice was hoarse.
She stared at the ceiling, feeling the deep, satisfying ache in her muscles, the raw stretch of her ass, the hollow victory. The barrier had been there every single time. A pervasive, unbreakable law.
“No,” she said. The word hung in the air, final.