SIERRA STORYTELLING: A STORY OF SELF-LOVE

Alone in the luxurious hotel room, the woman awaited, shrouded in darkness and quivering with anticipation. She wore black lace stockings and a tight leotard made of cotton and organza, with a deep neckline that revealed the hollow space between her breasts: two soft curves that, despite her age, she could still show off to great effect without support. She sat on the edge of the bed, her long legs crossed, and waited for someone to arrive.
It was not long now, before the appointed time. Soon the door would open and the long-awaited assignation would finally materialize. Surprisingly, the woman realized that she had overcome every personal qualm and was now only waiting for everything to begin. For a long time, in the previous weeks, she had debated with herself the merits of this idea and, above all, its morality, but in the end her curiosity had prevailed and prompted her to book. That was when her wait had begun: she had waited for the appointment to be confirmed, for the day to arrive and finally, now, for the agreed hour and minute.

She had never spoken directly with the person she was waiting for. Every necessary communication had been filtered by an intermediary. The conditions she had set for the meeting, however, were very precise: complete obscurity and no conversation whatsoever. She didn’t want to be seen or make herself recognizable in any way. Not that she feared the judgment of others, or even of the person she was waiting for. Prostitution had been legal and strictly regulated all over the world for a few centuries now and she was, after all, a former convict, only recently released after 150 years of cryo-imprisonment. A night of paid sex wouldn’t hurt her reputation, for sure.
But she wasn’t entirely sure that this particular rendezvous was legal. Or even just ethical. Therefore, she preferred to avoid fully involving her partner in the specifics or, at least, not upset her or even just weird her out. She believe that she would have appreciated this meeting even as a younger woman, but she was also aware that each person was the product of both nature and culture, so she wouldn’t dare make assumption about the girl. She wanted to enjoy this adventure and indulge in this whim without consequence.

It was the first time that she had payed for sex. Her first time with a woman. And, considering the woman with whom she had wanted to share this night, she was quite sure it might be her last.

The girl was just then getting down from the transport unit and crossing the access scanner to the luxurious hotel, chosen by her new client for their first meeting. As usual, she had taken far better care with her appearance knowing that today’s client was a woman, but in this particular case she didn’t know if it was actually worth it.
The requests made by the client were not completely unusual. Despite the fact that the stigma associated with paid sex was now only a distant memory, almost a fairytale for novices of pleasure schools, there were still customers who chose not to be recognized. Or that perhaps preferred not to be able to recognize the professional who provided them with the erotic service required, especially in meetings of a homosexual nature. The reasons could be the most varied and for the girl this was not the first time, neither with male clients nor with women.

And yet, every time she went to such an anonymous meeting with a woman, she could not help wondering if the reason for such secrecy was far more peculiar than usual. Among the professionals in her trade, it was a possibility that was discussed from time to time, with very different points of view. There were those who considered it an abomination, those who did not judge but wouldn’t have wanted it to happen to themselves and those who actually fantasized about it, more or less secretly.
The girl belonged to the latter category and, if she had the chance, would have organized this kind of meeting herself. But the law was clear and those like her were not allowed to look for any information about their homologous that went beyond what was made available by the government. And the Government was interested only in avoiding endogamy: everything concerning the private or sexual sphere of individuals, beyond certified fertile relationships, was legally irrelevant.

So the girl could only hope to be found and, in the meantime, fantasize about anonymous customers. Like the one beyond the door she had just reached.

A vibration, a clack. The moment had arrived.

The door opened and the girl appeared in the doorway. For a few moments, the woman managed to guess her form, embraced by the soft light of the corridor. Long and willowy legs, further elongated by high heels and wrapped in high-waisted pants, shiny and tight, perhaps made of leather. A tight corset emphasized her waist and her breasts, tall and firm, leaving the pale décolleté free. The elegant line of her shoulder blades and neck and the pronounced cheekbones were emphasized even more by the extremely short, almost masculine hairstyle.
At that age, the woman had never been particularly vain. But looking at the girl now, she found her immeasurably beautiful. And she also appreciated that, as agreed, her eyes were closed.

The door closed and the girl opened her eyes. She waited a few seconds for her sight to get used to the darkness and when she sensed the woman's shape on the edge of the bed, she turned to her. No conversation whatsoever.
"Hello. Are you ready?"
The woman nodded slowly, hoping the girl could see the movement.
In the darkness, the girl smiled and approached the bed, until she was in front of the woman, who instinctively opened her legs until they surrounded the girl's. The latter bent down and stroked the woman's face with one hand, as if to reassure her and make sure that this meeting was really what she wanted. Then she kissed her.

The moment when the lips of the two women met, every thought was put aside and lost any importance. The woman stopped questioning herself about ethics and morals, and the girl forgot about any possible conjecture, but both abandoned themselves to the moment, to the sensations, to each other’s touch.
That first kissed stretched over a few moments more, as they let their lips find the most perfect intersection and allowed their tongues to get to know each other. Then the girl's hands began to caress the woman's face and neck, intertwining her fingers in her hair and drawing her cheekbones with her fingertips. The woman grabbed her by the hips, pulling her closeruntil her legs bent beside her on the bed and she sat on her lap.
They began to undress and explore their bodies. When the woman opened the zipper of the girl's corset, letting it fall to the ground, her lips moved quickly over the young woman's neck, until she reached her breasts, the nipples already turgid with desire. She kissed them, caressed them, squeezed them and sucked them with enthusiasm, while the girl freed her from her outfit and together they backed onto the bed until they were both lying over it.
They continued to touch and kiss each other, rejoicing in one another's body, until the girl moved down along the woman’s waist, kissing and tasting lower and lower and, embracing her around her waist, positioned herself with her head between the woman’s legs. From then on, the woman lost all remaining inhibitions and gave herself completely up to the pleasure that the lips, the tongue and the skilled hands of the girl knew how to give her, trying to reciprocate every touch to the best of her inexperience.

The two bodies clinging to each other on that bed became almost one as the two kept on kissing, touching, penetrating and tasting each other. They soon lost count of the pleasure given and received, a count which neither of them was interested in keeping. They moved in a sinuous dance of curves, limbs and fluids. They had fallen easily in a common rhythm, and the more pleasure they gave the more they seemed to desire, without either of them giving any sign of wanting to stop.

Just a few minutes had passed, or maybe a few hours, when the two women finally laid side by side, tired and exhausted. The woman briefly left the bed to go to the bathroom, returned to the room and fleetingly caressed the girl's cheek one last time, kissing her once more on her soft and tired lips, then both fell asleep satisfied.

The woman was the first to wake up. She got up and retrieved her lingerie from where she’d dropped it. She was still wearing her stockings but immediately covered them with the clothes she had arrived at the hotel with, a simple pair of jeans and a sweater she had left in a corner of the room. She was still not used to the fact that since any personal information was recorded on the chip that every citizen had implanted in their left wrist, there was no need to carry a purse anymore, so she lost a few moments thinking about where she might have put her bag. Old habits of an old world, which might have been dubbed as Orwellian sci-fi in the times when she was born and raised, before the arrest, the trial, and the cryo-sentence.
At the time, subcutaneous chips were still just a theory, but science had instead managed to perfect cryopreservation and hers was one of the first instances in which it was chosen as an alternative to the usual custodial sentence. An extreme solution, perhaps, but which was theorized to solve the issue of prison overcrowding and remedy the glaring failure of the rehabilitative purpose of the sentence. The shorter sentences would have allowed prisoners to not waste years of their life behind bars, but at the same time lose all contact with the criminal consortium that had facilitated their action. In the most serious cases, however, the sentence was much more cruel: a prisoner wouldn’t age a minute during the cryo-detention, but his sentence would have lasted for a hundred years and more, projecting him or her into a new world, with no landmarks or family still alive whom to return to.

And here she was. One hundred and fifty years after her conviction, still forty years old, just like when she stood trial, reborn to the world and fresh from the (mandatory) course on temporal reintegration. No references, no friends, no relatives. No connection.
Except for what she had found in the dossier that she had been given upon her release.

Airin Lee (42): Origina
Living blood-relations: remote
Clones: 3 // Alpha: deceased, no issue - Beta (86), widow; retired; no issue - Gamma (21), single, erotic services

Cloning. In her time it wasn’t even contemplated, but at the reintegration course they had explained that during her detention an experimental cloning program had been started. It was mainly addressed to subjects deemed "irrecoverable", and its purpose was to demonstrate that changing the parameters of education and growth of a subject could prevent their criminal instinct from developing. Apparently, she was an ideal candidate.
She had not been able to know much more about her clones: she was not expected to know more, and neither were clones and Originals encouraged to look for each other. Information about the different genealogies was stored and safeguarded by the State, which accessed it only in the event of a marriage or reproductive license request, in order to ascertain that those concerned were not genetically too close. She had therefore no way of finding her Beta or even recognizing her if she met her on the street. But for Gamma, that was a different matter altogether.
Erotic services was a wide category, but for the most part it relied heavily on one’s looks and Airin still remembered what she looked like at 21. It took her a couple of months of research, of course, and the algorithms generated by her web research had by now probably labeled her as an incurable pervert. Which perhaps was not so far from reality, since the fixation that had taken possession of her from the beginning of her search was only one. Her clone worked with sex. What would it feel like to have sex with herself?

The girl was still asleep when Airin left the room and when she finally woke up she was alone. The night had been very satisfactory: the intermediary who had handled the assignation had said that the client had never been with a woman, but Gigi had barely noticed. She hoped the woman had enjoyed the meeting and that others would follow or, at least, that she wouldn’t abandon the fair sex, now that she’d had this first experience. It would have been a pity.

Now that the carnal ecstasy had passed, Gigi returned to the thoughts that had entertained her upon her arrival at the hotel. Obviously she knew from birth that she was a clone and as such she’d been raised: the right family, the right teachings, all that she needed to become a well-educated, irreproachable and honest citizen. And, of course, like all her fellow clones she wondered about her Original and about any homologous she might have had.
At the age of 18 she had been given a dossier with all the information she was entitled to, the bare minimum to allow her not to fall in love with a close relative.

Georgia Grier (18): Gamma clone
Original: classified information
Homologous: 2 // Alpha: deceased, no issue - Beta (82), married; retired; no issue

Classified information. The information on the Originals was always extremely poor and, in general, were made available to the clones only after the Original and their eventual spouse had been dead for at least 30 years. Classified information meant that they were either alive, recently dead, or possibly subject to cryo-detention. The care taken in the growth and education of Gigi suggested that her case was the latter, which had led the girl to almost to mythicise her Original over the years. Almost certainly, she was a much more interesting person than anyone she had known until then.
Since she had started working as an erotic service provider, however, a singular fixation always accompanied any reflection on her Original. What would it feel like to have sex with herself?