The world aboveground was free, totally and utterly free. There were no boundaries, no taboos beyond causing other's harm. And even in such a world, this was forbidden. The last, the final, the ultimate sexual experience.

“I'll wait.”

He didn't answer. He removed his clothes, walked to the towering bulk of the computer and touched it.

The crackle-finish surface of its north flank was smooth and cool to his touch. He felt sensuality pulsing in the machine. They had exposed the leads for him, and he paused for a moment to consider what obligations they must owe Lady Effim for them to give him The Dust, to permit him Mekcoucher time with their love-partner. The dwellers in this subterranean hideaway. They were all like Fursday. Advanced stages of love commitment to this machine. Part metal, part human, totally the computer's property. Helpless to deny their passion. He grabbed the leads.

The blue lead went into the surgically implanted socket on the inside of his right thigh, the red input lead went into the socket on the inside of his left thigh. The “stim” electrodes found their proper areas through his hair and scalp. He merely placed the medusa cap on his head and they wriggled to their proper clips, sank their fangs, wire snakes. One lead hooked him into the plethysmograph and the Lissajous oscilloscope and the GSR galvanometer. The Velcro band containing a million black-dot photocells was ready and he wrapped it around his penis. Then he snorted The Dust, the yellow wonder from Barcelona.

He lay up against the metal body of the machine, arms out cruciform, legs spread, cheek flat to the waiting surface. He could feel the expectancy in the computer, hungry lover.

He thought of the first time he had made love to Joice, the feel of her flesh. It was not enough.

Then he contracted the muscles in his thighs and closed the circuits.

Instantly, the metal of the machine began to flow. He felt himself sinking into the north flank of the computer. His fingers penetrated the metal as easily as if it had been modeling clay. He began to get proprioceptive feedback from muscle activity…he could feel the whorls on his fingertips as sucking whirlpools, dark swirling waters that drew his blood and bones through the flesh and out into the machine, spinning the essence of his physical being away from its skin container…his chest began to harden, to vibrate with sound like a thunder sheet of aluminum…the soles of his feet melted and his arches flattened and his lower legs oozed into puddles of mercury…he sank into the machine, was enclosed, its arms around him, welcoming him…

The Dust blew in hurricane clouds through his body and puffed out through the great smooth apertures in his head and back and buttocks. The Dust mingled with lubricant and it was altered, even as he was altered.

He perceived with purest immediacy the sense of his positioning of arms and legs and ferrite cores and LSI circuits and bowels and conductors and limbs and body and plates and fissures and counterweights and glands and wiring in the immediate environment that he was the machine had begun to be him.

Then the auditory and visual feedback began, delayed responses, an instant later than they should have been. He spoke: Oh, good and it repeated from another mouth a moment later, ood. Echolalia.

He felt his penis engorging with blood and felt the density of light increasing in the capillaries as the plethysmograph measured his arousal in a new language the machine he was the machine interpreted…the density of light decreased… increased…decreased…increased…

He spiraled upward into the machine-Lissajous pattern oscilloscope sine and cosine waves from the x and y axes actually came together, pulsated in three dimensions and he teased himself the machine he the man with vernier knob stimulation-it came out green and the machine trembled, began to secrete testosterone, estrogen, progesterone…

She, the machine, he, the machine, she, the man, he, the machine…the man, he becoming she becoming machine…

His heart was pudding.

The Lissajous pulsations became hallucinations in the sex organs of the computer…galvanic skin response on the galvanometer…aching in his spine…

Sinking slowly into a sea of oil. Great skyscraper bulk of metalflesh slowly warmly moistly sinking into a sea of blue-black oil. Pumping. Pumping. Wet closing over his head, running in waves over his naked body. Invisible mat of hair covering every plate and surface, a fine golden down, soaking up oil, engorging, coming to climax.

Her breasts were warm, the rivets sensitive to each feather caress of electric stim. Her vagina filled with soft, melting things that went up and up and roughened the oil-slick inner surfaces, sliding to touch and knead the vulva. So good. Ood.

His memory, he could see everything in his memory, stored in the banks, every moment of his life from the first dripping emergence from the vats, the running, the extruding, the rolling, the flattening, the cutting, the shaping, the forming, the welding. Every moment of his life: the instant he was first engaged, the circuits closing, the surge of power, the first inputs, the primary runs, every boring clearing procedure, every exercise, every erroneous output.

His mother, his father, great cats and the wet scent of their breath, like coolant on overheated coils, the soft taste of Joice in his mouth, her body moving beneath him, sinking into her, tiniest folding of her labia around his penis, the rising to orgasm, the overloading, the heat, the peace of darkness.

Then he altered his stroke and felt the change to precognitive anticipatory feedback, telling himself how it would feel, fulfilling his own prophecies, the smell of flesh on metal, metal on flesh, the colors of whirling information, increments of semen and fused capacitors.

He was the teleport, additional human faculties, soft sponge pineal gland, polluted adrenalin, strange eyes, this was the best for me the very best I've ever hungry metal lover. They began to converge…everything began to converge. He, the machine called Neil Leipzig, was the x axis; he, the machine called love-partner, was the y axis; they began to converge; identical sine waves, out of phase.

His pattern was a growing. The machine's was a throbbing. He passed the machine at a higher level every pulse. The machine grew frantic and drank more power. He tried to catch up, chasing the nymphomaniacal peaks as the machine beckoned him, teased him, taunted him, drew him on, then flashed away. He extended on metal limbs, the machine's soft flesh grew sunburned and dark and leather tough.

Then he peaked out, it, she, peaked out, unable to draw more power from her source. They exchanged modes, as the point of destructive interference denied quantum mechanics and was reached: a millisecond of total sound and utter silence. Orgasm: metal became flesh, human became machine.

The interference pattern was a grating whine that became more and more pure as they came into phase. The machine, in its human throat, began to vibrate in sympathy. She, who had been Neil Leipzig at the start, captured the exponential pattern that had been his, the machine, captured it as it fell away.

They circled, and the image on the Lissajous screen became a circle as she captured the machine and held her in phase again. Prolate and oblate: two dimensional images slowing, softening, dimming, the message of release and surcease .986, 1.0014,.9999986, 1.00000000014…

The first thing he heard was the sound of the two cheetahs attacking something, agony and fury. The first thing he saw was the dying point of green light on the oscilloscope screen. The first thing he felt was the rough metal of his chest against the sweat-soaked north Bank of his love-partner.

He was dry. As though he had given the machine a transfusion, as if it had sucked all the juices from him. He understood why Joice and all the others, as free as they had been, had been unable to arouse him in times past, how the first Mekcoucher with its promises of this, had led him further and further into the inevitability of what he had just experienced.