BlueNight sighed. The mass of warm, flexible, green plastic that made up his body at the moment shifted up, then down. Anyone watching would have seen a five foot tall toy lizard sigh on the roof of a two-story house in the middle of the woods. Nobody was watching, because it was the middle of the night, under a full moon.

BlueNight looked up at the moon. It was a surprisingly clear night, in fact he couldn't remember when it had been so clear. It reminded him of the night sky in Albuquerque. It reminded him of... her.

They had met in an orthopaedics clinic in a hospital in New Mexico, eleven years back. He had completed an appointment with a patient who would need reconstructive surgery on his foot. She had completed her yearly physical with a different doctor.

He saw her enter the elevator, and slipped inside just as the doors were closing. He had put on his usual "Doctor Trustable Goode" form, as he thought of it, but while he was ruggedly handsome with a streak of grey, she was utterly perfect.

Her eyes were a deep blue rarely seen, her hair a golden yellow. Her ears were each half the size of her head, thin, translucent, mouse-like. She had a short, blunt snout with cute little buckteeth that probably had to be ground down occasionally. Her few wrinkles showed her to be about thirty. Her face was the spitting image of Gadget Hackwrench, of Disney's Chip and Dale's Rescue Rangers, a show BlueNight watched often as a child, and often as an adult.

BlueNight didn't have to watch her with his eyes; as an inanimorph, he could see with any part of himself. At the time, he watched her with his entire right side while "staring" at the elevator door.

Her neck was thin, her shoulders narrow. Her arms were slightly tanned, thin, and completely feminine. She wore C-cups, but padded them, as infra-red vision revealed. Her belly looked firm, the layer of fat at a healthy depth over her abs. Her hips were wide, and padded nicely. Her tail was perfectly proportioned. Down he looked...

Her legs were artificial. The infrared fuzzed under plastic at mid-thigh (and what thighs!) to completely turn cold where her knees would have been. His magnetic sense extended around her in curiosity, revealing plastic and metal under blue jeans, with the plastic ankles and feet covered with socks and sneakers.

She stood five feet tall, dwarfed by his six-foot-two "Stature of Authority and Trust".

He was in love.

He sighed again, memory mixing with emotion. He remembered that clumsy, awkward first conversation, that first date, the following six weeks. He remembered that first big reveal.

They watched a movie about a destined-to-fail romance between a gendermorph and a norm, typical Hollywood pablum since the onset of SCABS, and not nearly as good as Boys Don't Cry. When they left the theater building, he turned to her, noticed her tears, and wiped them away. "It's okay," he said.

She turned away. "It's not that, Luke. It's... I'm... We're like that couple we just saw."

BlueNight's mind raced. Did she know he was an inanimorph, or did she think he was normal, and would eventually weary of "slumming" with a SCAB? Did she even suspect his duplicity, his night life as an invisible super vigilante, reading the police and fire bands and zooming to the rescue? "What do you mean?"

She started crying again. "I'm..."

BlueNight realized she meant something else, and said, "Ssh, it's okay. It doesn't matter to me. It shouldn't matter to anyone."

Her eyes opened. "You knew?"

He shook his head. "No, I figured out what you were going to tell me. Like I said, it doesn't matter to me, and it shouldn't matter to anyone. You are biologically and psychologically a woman, and as long as that's true, I don't care what came before." They walked toward his car in silence for a moment, then he said, "Actually, I've been keeping a secret from you, and it's ten times as big as your secret. I was waiting for the right time, and I guess this is it."

She stopped walking, and she looked at him. "What do you mean?"

He heard the confusion in her voice, the potential for bad emotions, and he sighed. "I can be any collection of atoms, but I can't really be alive. I'm an inanimorph and my clothes are part of me."

They stood a foot apart for five seconds, then she walked up to him, threw her arms around him, and kissed him passionately. "If you can live with me having been a man, I can live with you not being alive."

The words echoed in his memory as BlueNight looked up at the stars, the moon. On the roof of his mansion, their home, he whispered, "But I can't live with you not being alive." He hung his head, and cried. He couldn't really cry, because he couldn't separate parts of himself from other parts, but salt water dripped from tubes leading to his plastic eyes, salt water he had prepared earlier that night and stored inside himself.

A good memory, that was what he needed. He wanted to remember something else.

The last sex they had before she killed herself. He had given her a purple jumpsuit, and she laughed, having seen several episodes of Rescue Rangers. "Do you want me to say golly?" she asked, walking out of the bathroom with the jumpsuit on and goggles in her hair.

"If you could," he replied, and turned into a pile of parts. She got busy, putting this piece on that piece, tightening this nut here, screwing that bolt there. Each part in the pile was connected to another part by a web of invisible molecule-thin threads that changed size and flowed around her hands as she put the pieces together.

She was a mechanical engineer and software genius, and Alan Conglomerated had gotten its start with Faux Paws, custom prosthetics for SCABS victims. She was wearing the absolute latest in Faux Paws, with pseudo-skin and pseudo-muscles activated by nerve endings in her thighs. They mapped feet and leg sensations to a tactile pad wrapped around the ends of her legs, making it feel almost real. She had the cutest toes.

This motor here, that interface there, this computer nodule over here. Machine oil here, moving parts need lubricant you know. At last, she had used all the parts. BlueNight was a sturdy machine, with bars and cross-supports, and nipple-pads and leg-rests and a motorized spindle between them.

She pretended the machine was nothing more than that, as she removed the jumpsuit while putting the machine together. She pressed her lithe body against the machine, and turned on the motor. She gasped at the sensation; she was so involved that she later said she imagined it had turned on by itself. The rubber spindle on the motor turned slowly clockwise, and she pressed her nipples against the cold metal nipple-pads as she ran her hands up and down her thighs, curled her tail under the leg-rests.

After using a lever to lock the motor in exactly the right place, she grabbed a cross-support and pulled herself down hard onto the motorized spindle, grimacing with the power of her orgasm, the rubber spindle turning deep inside her as its wide base stimulated her labia and clitoris. It took two minutes for her orgasm to end, each second of pure agony and pleasure better than the last.

Her arms, thighs, and entire body ached for hours, weak from exhaustion.

BlueNight sighed, remembering his wife, remembering how much they pleased each other. He guided his mind away from thoughts of her blood-stained, mutilated body shuddering to a stop, cooling within his grasp, and remembered her body wet instead with sweat and oil, shuddering in a different way.

Website Copyright 2004,2005 Michael Bard.  Please send any comments or questions to him at mwbard@transform.com