“You know, my name isn’t Airlock. It’s Eve.”
“Airlock Eve. Is Eve not your family name?”
I shook my head. “Eve is my given name. It’s just that there’s a lot of Eves on Eden. A lot of names are popular, and we don’t have family names, so we use titles, but they change as our jobs and roles change.”
“Emissary and Weapons. I see.”
“Emissary is also named Eve. Weapons is Sojourner.”
“I will call you Airlock.”
“My name changes along with my role…” I said, but I trailed off when I started to think about my new role.
Thuliak must have been right on the same train of thought as me, because his face filled with a very self-satisfied grin.
“Don’t,” I said.
“Beg me to call you Airlock,” he said, grabbing hold of my wrist.
“What else would you call me?” I whispered.
“Not just Eve,” he said, “maybe Breeding Eve.”
I glared at him. “It’s never an -ing ending. You have to be able to call me it without my name. You can’t just call me ‘Breeding,’”
“Eve is popular,” he said, “because of your old stories?”
I nodded, thankful he was changing the subject. “Adam and Eve.”
“So you did keep that one,” he said, “It surprises me that so many of you took Eve’s name.”
“Why is that surprising? If Adam hadn’t eaten the apple…”
From the way his eyebrows wrinkled up, it hit me. “It’s the other way around, isn’t it? It’s Eve who ate the apple?Of courseshe did. Patriarchal society had to blame women for literally everything. That’s why we came here, Thuliak, and that’s what you’re taking away from us with your pornos.”
He just looked at me with a mixed expression of patience and pity. His strong brows furrowed as I spoke.
“There is no choice, Airlock, and you know it. If there had been a choice, why would High Command have to protect you from the truth?”
I had no answer there. He was right, I’d made the decision they’d tried to keep us from making in a split second. I’d decided it without even deciding it. The moment my eyes got stuck on his body, I’d already made my choice. A lifetime of attempted sheltering shattered in a second. How would it be any different for the women on the planet seeing those pornographies?
“What?” I hissed. “I don’t need you to feel sorry for me.”
“Even after they hid so much from you, you still believe part of their indoctrination?”
“We were always free to leave.”
“You humans make things too complex, with religions and stories and hidden meanings. Why can’t women just be meant to produce offspring, while men are meant to breed them?”
I bristled and crossed my arms, covering my bare breasts. “Would you want to be reduced to nothing but your biological role?”
He smiled wide. “I am nothing but a biological role,” he said, “at least in this body. Do you want me to tell you more about what it means to be part of the Hivemind, or would you rather I make you cum even harder than I did last time?”
I ran my tongue across my teeth. I was angry with him. Sending images of alien men to Eden was sure to corrupt us at unprecedented levels. Our entire society was going to collapse, or more optimistically it was going to drastically change. High Command wouldn’t be able to stop the leaks, and soon enough the Khetar would be landing on Eden, and then nothing would ever be the same.
At least I’d be able to go back to Eden if everything happened like Thuliak said it would. My exile would likely not last long.
My eyes were on his cock, because it was getting hard and rising up. I was still in utter disbelief that it could do that. It made sense the more I thought about it, because I’d hada lotof questions about male anatomy, and the fact that the cock could be either hardorsoft depending on the situation answered a lot of my questions.