while the black stars burn Read Online Free

would be like to feel the weight of her baby’s warm head in the palm of her hand. She imagined what it would be like to have a toddler grab her legs and say “I wuv you, Mama!” She imagined no longer having to sneak off and cry in the women’s restroom when the young secretaries announced their pregnancies at her office.
    “I really need to work,” he said. The same thing he’d said every night since she miscarried. He’d seemingly convinced himself that if he just stayed busy enough, he’d never have to face his own grief over losing their child.
    She felt all her fragile imaginings crumple into nothing.
    “ Please ?” she whispered.
    “There’s a 30% bonus if I can get this deployed by midnight.” He looked puzzled, then frowned in concern toward the kitchen. “Is Rachel malfunctioning?”
    Heat rose in her face. “No. I just…wanted to be with you….”
    His expression was blank, distant. “I’m really busy. Sorry.”
    The sudden spike of anger felt like battery acid in her chest. But she made herself smile. “Fine.”
    She turned away and went into the kitchen, where Rachel was kneading bread and humming Christmas carols. Just ever-so-slightly off key, sometimes; it was part of her naturalistic programming.
    Rachel was a Juno 2500 Personal Assistant Android. She’d been Amy’s, purchased via the proceeds of a large National Science Foundation grant awarded to Amy’s lab. Rachel started as a gene sequencing slave, but soon she was upgraded to work as Amy’s personal assistant at conferences and was quite well-received at poster sessions.
    Amy brought Rachel with her when she visited three years before. Jeffrey didn’t care that his wife had a girlfriend; he probably wouldn’t have cared if she had a boyfriend, either, but at the time that felt like a step too far to Mira. Mira took Amy upstairs and they made love while Rachel made them all dinner. Afterward, Amy decided to go to the store to find a kind of Riesling she liked.
    A honeybee drone hit her on the way home; there wasn’t anything left of her to bury.
    Mira spent weeks lost in a fog of depression; when she emerged, she realized that Rachel was still puttering around their townhome. Apparently, nobody from Amy’s university had come looking for Rachel or had even asked about her; everyone assumed she had been vaporized along with her mistress.
    Furthermore, Jeffrey had changed Rachel’s serial number records in the national database and had programmed her with additional behaviors and skill sets. Mira discovered this when, after one of her crying jags, Rachel gently hugged her and oh-so-politely asked if cunnilingus might take her mind off things.
    As it turned out, it did.
    Since then, Mira had used a big chunk of the money she’d been saving for adoption search fees to swap out Rachel’s decorative genitalia with a fully functional package modeled on that of a male porn star whose movies Mira intended to never see.
    “Rachel,” Mira said.
    The lovely android stopped kneading the dough and turned, smiling expectantly. A millisecond later her face took on a perfect expression of concern. “You look so sad! What’s the matter?”
    “I’d like you to take me upstairs and fuck me unconscious.”
    “Okay, but…I think your blood sugar is low. You should eat something. I can make you a snack?” Rachel wiped her hands off on her apron.
    The android was equipped with a multitude of bioscanners and was never wrong about such things. “Okay. Fix me whatever.”
    Rachel carefully set the dough aside in a glass pan, draped it with a damp tea towel, and made a perfect, tiny peanut butter sandwich and poured her a half-glass of milk to go with it. Mira dutifully ate it.
    “Do you feel better?” Rachel asked.
    “I do, thank you. Now, please take me upstairs....”
    *
    Afterward, Mira fell into a hard sleep on Rachel’s soft, lifelike bosom. Unlike Jeffrey, Rachel would not have a bad dream at 3am, slip out of bed and go work on the