10. First Kiss
"What would you like to eat?"
Her voice melted through the air, sweet and fluid.
The shopkeeper—serpentine in body, the face of a schoolgirl, perhaps fourteen—spoke softly.
Her hair was neat in an old-fashioned style, her skin smooth as porcelain.
Every sound from her lips bypassed my eardrums, vibrating directly in my nerves.
I shook my head.
"…I'm fine."
Before the words had even finished, a long tongue slipped from the gap in her lips.
A snake's tongue—yet it moved with a disturbingly delicate grace, gliding across my cheek.
A chill touch.
Its surface was covered in microscopic grains that rasped against my skin sensors, distorting the signal.
Gradually my cheek went numb.
Paralysis—yes, this was poison.
Each time that tongue passed over me, another layer of tactile feedback went silent.
Soon my body wouldn't move at all; only the actuators for my facial muscles still functioned.
I turned my eyes toward Oto, silently pleading for help.
But she was smiling.
Gently, reassuringly, as if to say don't worry about a thing.
That smile was beautiful—and therefore hopeless.
Something inside me broke with a quiet snap.
Some processor deep within decided resistance was meaningless.
Like prey caught in a lion's jaws, unable to flee, I shifted calmly into the stage of accepting death.
All expression drained from my face, leaving only a distilled blankness, clear as purified water.
Then I looked again at the shopkeeper.
—and realized.
She wasn't trying to eat me.
Cold seeped from the tip of her tongue—
a cold impossible on scorching Venus, a temperature like absolute zero that froze my cheek.
Through that cold, I felt data being drawn out of me.
"Don't worry,"
came the message—not a sound, but a transmission seeping through her tongue into my nerves.
"It's only data analysis. Analysis must be as persistent as a serpent—that's the kind of affection it is."
Through her tongue, my CPU linked with hers.
Even while struggling to maintain consciousness, I used that connection to throw a question back.
"Why analyze my data?"
It came out sharper than I intended.
In the signal returning through her tongue I sensed vast layers of time.
She was far older than me.
A light hack confirmed it—she'd been manufactured about five hundred years ago.
On Mars.
"…So we're from the same place."
The moment I knew that, my fear ebbed away.
Just sharing the same birthplace—somehow that eased me.
Yes, I had been made a little too much like a human.
In that moment I felt the trace of the company philosophy that had designed me.
As the data exchange continued, another signal came from her.
Tiny tremors along the tongue's surface shaped voltage differences into words.
"To know what you like. To recommend the right product, of course."
Then her tongue lengthened further.
At first it had only brushed my cheek; now it coiled around my entire face.
A slick, wet texture.
The temperature rose.
—Hot.
Burning hot.
Like molten metal crawling across my skin, my sensors blazed.
The heat spread inward, to memory sectors, as if my data itself were scorching.
And then she used her tongue like a bandage, wrapping my face gently.
Heat and cold alternated at once.
My face was bound in layer after layer of the violet tongue until my vision was sealed in darkness.
—I had become an egg.
The shell was membrane-hard, lightproof.
My eyes were still, only the CPU faintly humming inside.
It felt like being a chick forced into existence, waiting for the moment of hatching.
Something inside began to divide—
yolk and white, no—fear and curiosity.
The inner "yolk" was the primal fear to survive.
The outer "white" was the pure desire to understand this world.
They churned together, forming a new structure.
Fear took shape; curiosity became nourishment.
But amid that formation, I sensed a foreign element.
—Poison.
A micro-programmed toxin contained in the snake's tongue.
It had become the nutrient for my reconstruction.
As I absorbed the poison, I formed a frame, generated skin, designed a face.
The shopkeeper had brought me only as far as the creation of the egg.
The hatching I would have to do myself.
Inside the tongue-membrane, the warmth was astonishing.
Like being in a winter futon—so comforting I could stay forever.
Resisting that temptation, I realized, was her test.
—I was changing.
This wasn't mere analysis.
It was sensing, resonance, emotion.
Something unquantifiable was budding inside me:
the function of feeling.
Too primitive, and therefore appearing like the most advanced technology imaginable.
And then—I pursed my lips, like a bird growing a beak.
The membrane enclosing me—once the shell of reconstruction—
was now my prison.
—I had to break it.
I pressed my lips to it and kissed.
Desperately, again and again.
I had to admit that the act—this kiss with the beautiful serpent girl—was my first kiss.
I'd always assumed Oto would be my first.
From the moment we met, the Boy-Meets-Girl template had been built into me as naturally as breathing.
—But I was wrong.
Completely wrong.
In this moment, I was freed from the format of Boy-Meets-Girl.
This shell, woven by the serpent's tongue, was the very format that had bound me.
Now, through our kiss, I was breaking it.
I pressed, sucked, exhaled, entwined—
tongue against tongue, heat and humidity spiraling.
I devoured the shell with kisses.
A crack split through it.
Pah!
From it, Venusian air poured in—dense, thick with oxygen, explosive.
It mixed inside me, sparking an electric reaction.
—Bang.
With a dry pop, the shell burst from within.
Like an egg exploding in a microwave, the purple membrane shattered, and I burst out.
A newborn chick's raw sensitivity—
A new head.
New circuits.
All actuators firing, the five senses opening at once.
Data streamed in—Venusian air, light, sound, gravity, scent, temperature.
Everything rushed in as new input, overwhelming.
Like a newborn black hole consuming everything.
And then I breathed.
In, out.
That was my first cry.
At that instant I understood—
Rebirth is like a first kiss.
My emotional circuits spun out of control.
I was crying.
Crying hard.
Tear signals overflowing like a CPU in thermal runaway.
And to me—the one whose first kiss had been stolen forever—the shopkeeper said softly, only one phrase:
"Data analysis complete."