KODJA

CHAPTER 1 - A MAN WITH NO FUTURE
It was obvious. The woman was faking it.
He hated faked orgasms. He hated them even more than he hated the bastards from the Birth Regulation Agency, with their fetid clone stench, emotionless expression and semen neutralization devices sticking out of their wrists. As far as Kodja was concerned, faking orgasms was not an option. Especially in a world where orgasms were considered as the only natural blessings left. He scraped the Intensi-fun trodes from his forehead, grabbed a bottle of some semi-lethal exotic liquor he always kept in the back of the closet for emergencies like this and returned to the bed with a sinister glow in his recently self-retinctured eyes.
"What are you doing?", asked the woman.
He didn't answer. Instead, he ordered the absently hovering drone in the back of the room to play one of the Sensdiscs he selected before. The drone buzzed in reply and started scanning the room in order to detect, triangulate and tune the Nano-sensplates in their skulls with its circuitry. Soon, they both felt the first Sense-sim impulses running thru their nerve systems, shaping into strong abstract feelings similar to music.
He strapped her to the bed, feasting on her bewildered expression, wearing only a perfidious grin. The neon lights wearily oozed from outside and mixed with the artificial tincture of his eyes. Sense-sim impulses were throbbing in their brains, like a virus designed to cloud sobriety. He kissed the imprinted surface of the birth code on her breast and worked his way to her nipple. His hand slided between her legs, twitching to the beat of the Sense-sim maelstrom in their heads. He spat in her belly button and gently smeared the saliva all over her abdomen. She smiled, eyeballs dancing under eyelid curtains. He grabbed the bottle and poured some liquor in her belly button. The woman sighed as the cold liquid touched her skin. He activated his wrist-kit, a set of basic instruments and Com-links inserted beneath the skin, to set afire the puddle using a lighter. An infinite moment later, he choked the raging blaze with his mouth. Her high-pitched laughter syntonized with the fragmental tunes and syncopal beats resonating in their skulls. He shoved his thumb in her mouth and started soaking her pubis with liquor. The lighter flashed once again. She bit his finger, convulsing. Her half-crazed stare reeked of perverse delight. He rolled her over to kill the fire. The smell of burning pubic hair aroused him tremendously. He pounced upon her like some rampant netwar virus on the loose, digging his face between her thighs. She grabbed his head as if it were an off size joystick, a unique pleasure-generating console. Her heartbeat begun competing with the convulsive crescendo of the Sens-sim audio frenzy in her head. Her palms were sweating. Her breathing was shallow and quick. Her mind was blank. The reset button was finally pushed.
She came.

He woke up around 3 AM. The woman was gone. She came and left just like dozens of them before. They did it like a couple of stray mongrels in heat and he loved her. Just like he loved the other dozens. He suddenly felt utterly awake and alive. Sense-sim impulses still burned in his head. There were scraps of rabid bass lines and pulsating rhythm echoing in the depths of his subconscious. A matrix composed of scattered audio impressions repeating themselves into infinity. His mouth was dry, his eyes burned. His heart was pounding. His body quivered. The pathology was clear. Reminiscence time was here again. He grabbed one of the colourful pills on the bedside table and washed it down with liquor, grinning.
As uninvited memories began to surface, he became terribly aroused. He was programmed that way. It was a cheap trick, but it helped. The overwhelming psychological burden of a desolated youth spent in countless hospitals and ongoing surgery was efficiently bypassed this way. His deepest fears became sheer pleasure. Pain became his best friend. This kind of treatment was highly illegal in the Union. Mostly because patients developed a highly unorthodox comprehension of elementary feelings and became somewhat psychotic after a while. But here, in the Outskirts, it was common practice. Mental sanity wasn't exactly top priority around here. In a place where madness was considered a valuable asset, common sense was a luxury one could not afford.
Kodja sighed as terror and pleasure took over, competing for his attention. The vapid odour of sterile interiors. The nauseous taste of anaesthesia in his mouth. Sharp incisions. Torn flesh. Gaping entrails. There was something intensely sexual in all this violent flashbacks. His breathing grew irregular. A streak of dim red blood gushed from his wide-spread nostrils and blended with salty grains of sweat scattered all over his face. He could almost sense his rotten genes dissolving, disfigured by radiation, toxic waste, pesticides and growth hormones. He could almost feel them devouring the little that was left of his future. Thanks to modern science, it gave him one hell of a hard on.
He masturbated thinking about white aseptic interiors, bloodstained scalpels and plastic tubes sticking out of his nostrils. He fell asleep an hour later, appeased.

Vain's unfinished SF novel, found attached to the diary. Only the first chapter is finished, the rest is just a sketch. Below: a copy of the original manuscript.