Old Hunters on the New Wild Read online

  Chapter 3 – The Younger Generation…

  “Do you desire more, Mother-son? Would you like to try something different?”

  “Let me just trace the circles of your rings.”

  “That is all you want?”

  “Maybe I will want something else later. Now, I only want to trace the rings around your eye.”

  The purveyors of the doll girls counted Cayden Holmes among their favorite clients. The young man employed a doll girl every weekend, and he always treated the product well, never battered the girls, never quibbled over any extra fee following an unanticipated service. Cayden indulged in all the favors the doll girls offered. He tasted every model of doll girl who stood behind the gleaming, glass windows of the doll stations – the tall and fair-skinned blondes wearing horned helmets and Valkyrie wings, sun-tanned vixens wearing only bikinis when they arrived at their clients’ door, geishas with painted faces, dressed in satin kimonos, Polynesian islanders with hips and necks adorned with floral lei. Cayden called on each doll whose measurements their makers advertised in the glowing pixel pages each week delivered to his apartment’s mailbox. Demand for new models and dolls never cooled. The want grew hotter and hotter. For with the dolls, base mankind discovered perhaps its greatest dream – sex without consequence, sex without disease, sex that needed no emotional bond, sex that achieved no more, nor less, than simple, needed pleasure.

  The doll that currently lay in Cayden’s bed was a read-head, green-eyed flame that knew every trick of the lips, a model of pleasure that never hesitated on account of tastes or morals. Yet that doll held her breath as Cayden disregarded the curve of her hips and breasts, so skillfully molded to burn a human man’s yearning. Cayden’s finger instead softly circled those rings that branded her right eye, that pair of blue circles that branded that doll a clone. Cayden felt the doll’s heartbeat thunder in her chest. He saw how she frowned. And so he leaned into that female and distracted his night’s lover with a kiss.

  “Please, Mother-son, let us do something more. Something other than this.”

  “I’ve never known a doll to flinch before my invitation to bed,” Cayden whispered, “but I’ve never met a doll who didn’t tremble while my finger traced the ink of her bands. Why do you flinch when I give such attention to those circles around your eye?”

  The doll girl hesitated. Cayden felt her body stiffen, and her racing heart once more roused the want of his blood.

  “Let me tell you why I think you dolls shake when my fingers trace your circles.” Cayden pulled has hand away from the female’s face, and he calmed his doll girl by gently cupping other flesh. “I think you shake because you fear that by staring long enough at your rings I might see the only secrets you doll girls have to hide. I think you shake because you sense I understand what’s written in those zeroes and ones, in all those hashes. And I think your heart races because, through those rings, I look deeper into your soul than you wish to allow.”

  “I can give you so much more, Mother-son. You’ve invited me to your bed for better things.”

  “Of course, but I have also invited you for this.”

  Cayden urged the doll to sleep after they finished another round of lovemaking. The doll turned her face away from Cayden’s eyes as she nestled her head into the pillow, no doubt to hide the intimate secrets of her blue rings. He wondered if the doll girls felt the pleasure and comfort they always provided to him. He often worried they were hatched from their test tubes to forever give and to never receive, and that thought saddened him.

  Cayden’s father urged him to give up the habit of consorting with the doll girls. Old Wyatt told his son that the dolls were the plastic toys of adolescent want, that their compliance and shape were designed to soothe the favors of boys instead of men. Wyatt told Cayden it was time for his son to take a real woman for his lover, to learn how to court and romance, so that Cayden might one day find a woman who would consent to be the mother of his children. Wyatt reminded Cayden time and again how the human race struggled to conceive the coming generation. But no matter how many times Wyatt claimed the contrary, Cayden couldn’t believe his father wanted to encourage his son to bring a child into the world, seeing how the old man was forever lamenting about what remained of the planet, and where the old man believed it was all headed. Cayden suspected that his father’s scorn towards the doll girls arose from how easy it was for Cayden to entice those females into his bed. Wyatt had been a hunter for too long. Wyatt burned for the pursuit. His blood thrilled for the chase. Cayden doubted that even a young Wyatt could every receive pleasure from a doll girl it she didn’t force him through a hundred hoops and demand he surmount a hundred challenges to win such a doll girl’s favor.

  Cayden would’ve had a much easier time resisting the touch of those doll girls had he taken only pleasure from those females. But Cayden admired too much about each doll’s creation. To him, a doll girl was much more than a warm receptacle for his lust. He recognized them as incredible works of science and art, and he considered them the most beautiful and subtle of humanity’s creations. Cayden devoted himself to the study of those genetic riddles that composed the doll girls. He attended the rare and prestigious academy from which the geneticists recruited the men and women they chose to train into clone makers. He sacrificed sleep in order to read another trade journal, or to study another chart that showcased the chromosome pairing that resulted in flush lips and sultry eyes. He pounded at his computer’s keyboard to master coding languages, eager to gain some proficiency that would help him recognize more in the ring of binary code that circled each clone’s eye. Unlike his father, Cayden didn’t believe that humanity and the world were lost. He maintained a faith that humanity might rebuild the world if woman and man continued to learn how to make beautiful things, and what was more beautiful than any of the doll girls?

  Thus Cayden employed that emerald-eyed doll for more than lovemaking. That tryst was also another session of Cayden’s study. His eyes narrowed to decipher what secrets he would find in those blue rings his finger traced. He wanted to see how all those zeroes and ones colored the doll’s eyes. He wanted to see the code that made that doll’s legs so wonderful. He believed his intimate study would provide him with a foundation of knowledge unlike any possessed by a rival prospect to the genetic makers’ ranks. Cayden believed he invited so many doll lovers into his bed so that he might excel someday in the making of clones that would replenish all the health the world had lost. He believed his loving of those dolls to be much greater and noble than the simple satisfaction of his want.

  Cayden stirred in his sleep while his clone companion soundly slumbered. Laying awake, he thought he might roll that doll onto her other side, so that he might stare another time at the secrets contained within those rings that circled around her eye. But he decided he would not. To wrench that doll awake and force her to face him so that he could stare at her most intimate secrets seemed a cruel way to treat a beautiful thing that worked so hard to please him. Tomorrow promised him a very busy day, and Cayden thought it best to put aside his doll girl, no matter how her body tempted him.