Checkmate, she had me there.

Fortunately I was so totally over her that it wasn’t an awkward moment at all, despite the thick layer of perspiration forming around my foreign, twitching semi-smile.

Outside the president could be seen stumbling down the levi-ladder from his transpor-vehicle, wandering to and fro on the lowtartobaccomac. The world seemed to stand still in this minute, though I knew it still spun and wobbled like my head and knees only wished they could, respectively. Melo pulled the syringe and took a quick squirty jolt for himself. If any moment deserved it, this was it.

"Oh Charlize, you mean absolutely nothing to me," I said, lying through all of my fourth-generation, light-shifting, self-whiting, opalescent teeth. "I hope the president brings more than impeccable curves and a batch of reproductive organs second to none, because your game is pretty well played out with me."

In fact the president brought much less than that. He was the product of tens of generations of damnable, artificial, often illegal genetic lab propagation. His bloodline, incestuously narrow from New Terras democratically regal blood most blue and red, had lost its ability to reproduce many eras before. Fortunately, science kept these media-popular inbreds alive, and as such the travesty which was the president was able to make his way up the gangbangplank to meet me, though admittedly with significant help, direction, encouragement and a couple more quietly ignored medijabs from assorted hormonal and chemical cocktail injectors.

Despite my best intelligence, I knew what he was here for. I wanted nothing more than to tell him to stick it, but I knew it would take days to explain my meaning and I would fear where the sticking of the it may end up as a result. Far easier would be to accept his mission. So whatever it was, I was ready to make it happen.

Besides, New Terran or not, I'm a patriot to all things democratic, no matter how inane they may be in inception, conception, execution, retrospect or unwaverable historical perspective hereafter.

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