‘Not a hair shirt,’ he mused, licking his dry lips. His glance passed over the box lid, the quick-start guide, the user manual. His smile, more smug than gleeful, was a contortion as he reached for the gloves and slid them on.
Gloves first and then the stockings. They were calf-length and slipped easily inside the elasticated cuffs of the off-grey trousers. There were no shoes. He would not need shoes. Finally the mask. Gimp-like or, more to his taste, super-heroic with a firm mouth-slot around which bio-fibroid hems formed a pair of surrogate lips. Only his eyes were free to the air, his eyes and nostrils.
On the jacket, to the left of the row of Velcro straps there was a green plastic panel. He plugged in the trailing nest of cables, long and snake-like, they formed a tangle of multicoloured vipers which in turn ended in a single tail. USB or ISO 1394, it was all the same. He connected the cable to the L-box and leaned back.
‘No need for screens,’ was what he thought. His flat-screen showed the control console anyway. ‘So what,’ he told himself.
Waiting to be upstreamed, he skimmed the manual. Introduction. The Love Suit. Dating version: 3.4.1. Approved by the Church of Jesus Mohammed of the Latterday ePostles. Nothing unrepentable could happen. This suit was safe for all manoeuvres permitted within the bounds of public and private decency.
He pressed the stud to activate the congress-call. He felt secure as any god-befriended boy could feel. This suit was not intimate-equipped. There were no pant-trons, no bodily particle accelerators, he wore no electrolytic pouch or inserts. He was excited nonetheless.
The screen blanked and then her avatar, Betty Boop of the 21st Century, in cat-suit and pearls, came in-window. She spoke and he heard her inside the ear-folds, a sweet and tongueful whisper. The manual fell from his hands as he felt the cool dampness of her lips run from his ear to to his mouth in one smooth and far-off kiss. His bio-fibroids contracted in that moment’s passion. He regretted the suit's lack of inner mouth-parts.
He felt her arms around his body as his own stretched out and circled an invisible waist. He could feel her roundness in the fumble-pads. His palm receptors told him she was there. Upwards they crossed mountains of blankness till he touched her face. Some areas were always out of reach on a first date.
They wrestled on regardless. He with his eagerness and his suit rippling with embraces from half a continent away. She audible only in his inner ear, equally enfolded in a Love Suit of her own: tight, electric and palely pink.
This, he told himself between kisses, is love. Love in the digital age, he murmured, as his fingers found her somewhere in the empty space between his open arms and the glinting screen where readouts scrolled their way to some ecstatic cyber heaven.
© BH 2011
Inspired by a two-day conference on telemedicine and the recent invention of an internet kissing device. Ahh, bless!
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