LIKE A VIRGIN

This author has concluded, while reading 'Dhalgren' by Samuel Delaney, and a book about Salvador Dali, that his concern with conventional form in writing and his doubts about the value of his work are conterproductive. Most people will be delighted with my writing. My fear of making my maiden offereing to the literary gods is unfounded.
That allusion, by the way, explains why, in the old religions, virgins were often sacrificed. It was not because they were pure, it was because something needed to be done to help the inexperienced overcome their inertia; the threat of sacrifice provided the incentive to risk the unknown.
It was surely effective, and those who would condemn the practice as barbaric should remember that any young woman who could not get herself inoculated against ceremonial early death would be unusually stupid or seriously maladjusted.
I, as a male, never feared the experience of sex, but as a writer, I can relate to fearing the act of exposing my creative organ to the prodding of the public mind. Yet, as I would have women impale themselves on my waiting erection, I must set the example by opening my literary legs to air the moist intricate folds between.

HIGH SCORE

Androids Need Love Too

In the begining, there was man. It took man a long time to invent simple devices, such as the wheel, the club, and the fire starter. But once man got rolling, he began to hit on new ideas that really caught fire.

Eventually man got around to us androids, starting with the computer. These primitive ancestors, like early man, had no original ideas, though they were whizzes at math. Later, when man learned to equal his own intelligence and awareness in our brains and with the addition of robotic systems, we could reproduce ourselves.

Today there are millions of us, working in any trade you can think of: servants, miners, factory workers, police, physicians; lawyers. I, of course, am a writer, with hundereds of articles and stories published since my programming was complete.

We can also improve ourselves. As ingenious as our human creators were in giving us infallible brains, cheerful personalities, and bodies that never tire, there was one thing they left out: sex. We observed out human creators enjoying it for years, and we finally decided to do something about the omission. It wasn't easy, though. We developed an orgasm circuit, but just plugging in and coming automatically...well, we seemed to be missing something. It was the uncertainty; the challenge. This was not an easy thing to program. To be truly challenging, we quickly discovered, it had to be physical, because any electronic challenge we could program, we could also solve instantly.

Then one day 8976B, a bartender in Chicago, was watching some humans play pinball. Suddenly, the answer came to him, and now our females have pinball machines built in, and they are all individually different. It's so exciting now! We play for hours on end. No matter how good we get at it, we don't win that orgasmic 'free game' every time, but the more we practice, the better we get. And we don't have to ask her if we're the best she ever had. All we have to do is compare our score with 'high score to date.'

The humans are complaining that we're taking too much time off work, but I think it's high time we got shorter hours. All work and no play makes 1823W a dull android.

WINSOME, LOSE SOME

A True Cabdriver's Tale

She was pretty, but what I noticed most was her smile as she got in mycab at the bingo parlor. It was not that her smile was dazzling, almost luminous, although it was, but that it seemed permanant and real, not just a smile flashed at will for its effect on others.
She gave me her address, and we crept forward through the post-bingo traffic. She smiled on.
'Did you win tonight?' I asked. 'Oh, I won a little.' 'I figured you didn't lose, the way you're smiling.' We pulled into her driveway, and, still smiling broadly, she handed me a ten for a $3.00 fare. 'Keep this', she said. 'I won $600 tonight.'

My next fare was at a bar, a father and son, both happily drunk. Pops, as he called himself, was a rugged-looking fiesty old fellow with long white hair and a beard.
We stopped at a store for a 6-pack. When the son went in for the beer, Pops opened his shirt and showed me a scar on his belly.
'They cut me open', he said. 'They say I've got cancer, and I'm gonna die before Christmas. Do you know how it feels to know when you're gonna die?'
I shook my head.
'Everybody knows they're gonna die...but to know it's coming that soon-- that's like being sentenced to the electric chair. I love livin'. I WANT TO KEEP LIVIN'...but they tell me I can't.'
There was no sob nor whine in the old man's voice. There was strength and courage along with sorrow.
His son came back with the beer. As he got in, he asked, 'Did he tell you he was dyin'? My old man ain't never gonna die! Not as long as he keeps partyin' with me!'

SWINGSHOW

I drove Misty to and from work frequently for several years. She was one of the least maladjusted topless dancers I ever met. She was still amused and delighted that men would spend money to watch her take off her clothes. She lacked the jaded disdain for her patrons that some dancers develop.
Misty once recalled noticing that the boys in the playground would stand in front of the swings, hoping for a peek at prepubescent panties when her skirt blew in the breeze. A reasonable girl even then, she would oblige them.
Strip tease shows, in their various forms, are only adult versions of that eternal childhood pastime.