The lounge was a temple of low light and lower intentions, the air thick with synth-smoke and the metallic tang of cheap lubricant.

Jay stood at the edge of the main stage, the polished floor cool under his bare feet, and adjusted the sheer lace of the babydoll negligee that did nothing to hide the pronounced swell of his belly. Two weeks had stretched and distended the timeline into a blur of identical rooms and interchangeable faces, but the pregnancy was a clock you couldn’t ignore. It had rounded out, firm and heavy, the skin taut and marked with new, faint lines.

“Remember,” Madam Michelle’s voice crackled in his ear comm, a dry insect whisper. “Slow tease. Let them see the merchandise. The… unique condition is a feature for certain clientele.”

Birdie was already on the opposite side of the circular stage, her own bulge evident beneath a matching black chemise. Her eyes, wide and fixed on the middle distance, were glassy with a terror so profound it had cooled into a permanent frost.

The music pulsed, a bass-heavy thrum that vibrated in Jay’s teeth. He began to move, a slow roll of his hips, his hands skimming up his sides. The ritual was mechanical now. Arch the back. Run fingers through the hair. Turn, glance over the shoulder. His mind was elsewhere, in the grease-stained bay of a freighter he’d once called home, tracing the fuel lines of a star-drive that needed just the right torque.

“Look at the breeders,” a voice, gruff and amused, floated from a shadowed booth. “Like paired ewes.”

Jay’s gaze swept the room. Human clients, mostly. Traders. Dockworkers. Then his breath hitched. In a booth near the back, the light caught on scaled, mauve-hued skin. Dracon. One. Then he saw the second. Their vertical pupils were fixed on Birdie.

Her rhythm faltered. Her hands, which had been tracing her collarbone, froze. Jay saw her chest begin to rise and fall too fast.

*Just don’t look at them*, he thought, pouring the sentiment toward her like it was a tangible thing. *Look at the exit sign. Look at the pattern in the floor. Look anywhere else.*

Birdie’s eyes snapped to the Dracons. A full-body flinch went through her, subtle but visible from where Jay stood. She looked like a reactor core about to breach.

The song ended. A different, slower track began. Michelle’s voice was in his ear again. “Miller. Booth seven. Solo booking. Now.”

Relief, sour and shameful, washed through him. A solo booking meant Birdie, for now, was spared. He stepped off the stage, the cool air of the lounge raising goosebumps on his skin, and walked toward the corridor of private rooms.

Booth seven was a standard cubicle: a padded berth, a sanitizer unit, a small table. A man and a woman sat on the edge of the berth. The man was heavyset, with a merchant’ guild pin on his tunic. The woman was thin, sharp-featured, her smile a slash of crimson.

“The pregnant one,” the woman said, her voice bright with curiosity. “Perfect. We heard about the… special services.”

The man grunted. “You follow instructions?”

“Yes,” Jay said, the word automatic. His default setting.

“Good. On your knees. Between us.”

Jay knelt. The floor was hard. He kept his eyes on the worn polymer between his knees. The woman leaned forward, her perfume cloying.

“My husband has a fantasy,” she said conversationally. “He likes to watch. And I like to… facilitate.”

The man unzipped his trousers. “You’re going to eat,” he said, his tone matter-of-fact, as if ordering rations. “What I produce. You’re going to show us how grateful you are for the privilege.”

The meaning slammed into Jay’s gut before the sight did. The man shifted, turning slightly. The act was crude, physiological. The smell reached Jay first—fecund, earthy, utterly human and utterly vile.

*This is a system*, Jay’s mechanic mind screamed, scrambling for a schematic, a diagram, anything. *Input. Output. This is just a broken waste reclamation line.*

“Open,” the woman commanded, her excitement palpable.

Jay’s jaw unclenched. His mouth opened. He felt the warm, foul mass pushed against his lips. The taste was like nothing else—bitter, acidic, a profound wrongness that triggered a convulsive gag he had to fight to suppress.

“All of it,” the man grunted, his face flushed with effort and power.

Tears blurred Jay’s vision. He chewed. The texture was grainy, cloying. He swallowed. The wife laughed, a high, delighted sound that drilled into his ears.

“Look at him!” she chirped. “So obedient! Thank him, whore. Thank him for his gift.”

Jay’s throat burned. His stomach churned. He looked up at the man’s satisfied, sweating face. The words were ash. “Thank you,” he whispered, the mantra now a literal, tasting confession. “For the privilege.”

Later, scrubbed raw in the sonic stall, he could still taste it. It was in the back of his throat, in the pores of his skin. He dressed in silence. When he returned to the rest area, Birdie was already there, curled on her bunk facing the wall. Her shoulders were trembling.

“Birdie,” he said, his voice hollow.

“They took me to a room after you left,” she whispered, the words muffled by the mattress. “Not the Dracons. Others. But all I could see… were the scales. All I could feel… was what’s inside me moving. It kicked during. I felt it kick while he was…”

She didn’t finish. She didn’t need to. Jay sat on the edge of his own bunk, the weight of his belly pulling him forward. He looked at his hands. Grease was forever etched in the lines of his knuckles, but now they were just tools. Receptacles. Like the rest of him.

“You adapt,” Jay said, repeating Kira’s lesson, but it didn’t sound like advice anymore. It sounded like a verdict. “Or you break.”

Birdie let out a sound that was half-sob, half-laugh. “I’m already broken, Jay. I’m a broken jar full of monsters. And they just keep pouring more in.”

Jay watched her shoulders tremble, a rhythmic shiver that had nothing to do with the room’s temperature. “Birdie,” he said again, his voice scraped raw from swallowing bile. “What did they make you do?”

A long silence stretched, filled only by the distant, metallic groan of the station’s life support. When she spoke, her words were flat, emptied of everything but the memory. “Two of them. Dock foremen. They had a betting pool chip. Said whoever finished first didn’t have to pay the extra fee.”

She rolled slowly onto her back, staring at the underside of the bunk above her. Her eyes were red-rimmed and dry now, all the tears spent. “They made me kneel on the table. Said they wanted to see the… the shape. From behind. So they could see what they were fucking.”

Jay’s own stomach, heavy and alien, twisted. He saw it: Birdie on all fours, the curve of her pregnant belly suspended between her arms, the clients behind her not seeing her face, only the target.

“They took turns,” she whispered. “Fast. Hard. Like it was a race. And I… I was just the track. I counted the ceiling tiles. I tried to remember the pattern. And then it kicked.”

Her hand drifted to her abdomen, resting there not with protectiveness, but with a kind of horrified fascination. “Right when the second one was… A hard thump. Right here. Like it was approving. Like it was hungry for more.”

“It’s not,” Jay said, the mechanic in him insisting on correcting a faulty conclusion. “It’s just reflex. A biological response to…” He trailed off. To what? To the violence. To the rhythm.

“It doesn’t matter what it is,” Birdie said, turning her head to look at him. Her gaze was terrifying in its clarity. “It felt like it was joining in. I am a thing that gets used, and the thing inside me is a thing that gets fed by the using. We’re a closed system. A perfect, fucking machine.”

The intercom on the wall crackled to life before Jay could form a reply. Michelle’s voice was crisp, devoid of patience. “Miller. Vane. Lounge. Now. Full showcase. Move.”

The command was a physical jolt. Jay pushed himself up, his lower back protesting the unbalanced weight. Birdie didn’t move for a three-count, then she swung her legs over the side of her bunk with the grim resignation of a prisoner walking to a scaffold.

They dressed in silence, pulling on the standard-issue, stretch-fabric garments designed to accommodate, even accentuate, their condition. Jay caught Birdie’s eye in the smudged reflective panel on a locker door. Her face was a mask of wiped-clean emotion, but her hands were shaking as she tied her hair back.

The lounge was half-full, a low hum of conversation underpinning the music. Michelle stood near the stage, her datapad glowing. She gave them a quick, assessing glance. “Booth three. Group of four. Standard entertainment protocol. Initiate contact, receive instruction, comply.”

Booth three’s privacy screen was opaque from the outside. Jay triggered the entry chime. The screen dissolved to reveal four men in engineering corps coveralls, their faces flushed with cheap station gin. One, a broad-shouldered man with a faded tattoo of a wrench on his neck, grinned.

“Look at that! The breeding pair. Heard about you two.” His eyes roamed over their bellies with a crude, clinical interest. “Alright. Let’s see what the merch can do. You.” He pointed at Jay. “Him first. Show us how grateful you are for the work.”

Jay’s mind went blank, then filled with a static hum. *Standard protocol. Initiate contact. Comply.* He stepped forward, his movements automatic, and lowered himself to his knees on the padded floor.

The man with the wrench tattoo unzipped his coveralls. The other three watched, their expressions a mix of curiosity and anticipatory glee. The taste from earlier rose in Jay’s throat again, metallic and foul. He closed his eyes, but that was worse. The darkness was full of memory.

He opened them. He performed. The acts were a blur of pressure, salt, and the sour tang of gin. Sounds were muffled, distant. A cheer. A rough hand gripping his hair, guiding him. The slap of skin. He dissociated, floating somewhere near the ceiling, watching a pregnant man on his knees service a stranger. *That’s not me*, the floating part thought. *That’s a machine. A badly designed one.*

“Switch!” one of the other men barked, his voice thick. “Let the other one have a turn. See if she’s as dedicated.”

Birdie was pushed forward. Jay, dismissed, shuffled back on his knees until his shoulders hit the wall. He watched as Birdie knelt. Her face was utterly vacant, a doll’s face. She performed the same acts with a chilling, precise efficiency. No hesitation. No flicker in her dead eyes.

One of the men, younger, with a patchy beard, laughed nervously. “Stars, she’s like a fucking automaton. You’d think she’d at least pretend to enjoy it.”

The wrench-tattoo man grunted, finishing with a rough sigh. “Who cares? Does the job. That’s what we paid for.” He zipped up, tossing a credit chip onto the table. “Adequate.”

The privacy screen rezzed back up, leaving them in sudden, silent isolation. The only sounds were Birdie’s ragged breathing and the wet, ragged sound of her spitting into the sanitizer basin. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, her eyes finding Jay’s. In them, he saw no shared horror, no camaraderie. Only a deep, endless well of shame, and the reflection of his own hollow face.

“You adapt,” Birdie said, her voice a ghost of sound. She wasn’t quoting Kira anymore. She was stating a fact. She touched her belly again, a gesture that was now a tic, a confirmation of her reality. The movement inside her had not stopped. It was just getting stronger.

The privacy screen hadn’t been down for a full minute before the intercom crackled again, Michelle’s voice slicing through the booth’s stale air. “Miller. Vane. Main stage. Now. No prep. Audience is waiting.”

Jay’s knees ached as he pushed himself up. Birdie was already moving, her face a smooth, terrifying blank. They walked back through the lounge, the eyes of scattered clients tracking their progress, lingering on the distinct swell of their abdomens beneath the thin fabric. The main stage was a raised platform of scuffed polymer under harsh, white spotlights. A crowd of perhaps thirty men and women, drinks in hand, had gathered around it, their chatter a low, anticipatory buzz.

Madam Michelle stood at the edge of the stage, her expression one of impatient logistics. “Live showcase. You know the routine. Start with contact. Proceed to full penetration. The crowd likes a show. Make it convincing.”

Birdie climbed the short steps first, her movements stiff. Jay followed, the lights hitting his skin like a physical heat. The crowd’s noise dimmed to a murmur, then a watchful silence. He could see their faces: bored, curious, leering. A man near the front nudged his companion and pointed at Birdie’s belly.

There was no music. Only the hum of the station and the sound of their own breathing. Birdie turned to him, her eyes meeting his for a second. In them, he saw a plea, and then a shutter slamming down. She lay back on the cool stage surface, her legs parting in a practiced, mechanical motion.

Jay lowered himself between her thighs. The scent of her, of the sanitizer and the lingering musk of earlier clients, filled his nose. He pressed his mouth to her. Her flesh was warm. He licked, his tongue tracing the familiar contours, a performance he’d done a hundred times. But then his tongue pushed deeper, into the slick heat of her cunt, and he felt it.

A distinct, rolling movement beneath his tongue, deep inside her womb. A hard, alien shift against the roof of his mouth. It was a living thing, turning over. His stomach lurched. Birdie gasped, a short, sharp sound that wasn’t pleasure. Her hands fisted in his hair, not guiding, but clinging. He kept going, the taste of her now mixed with the phantom taste of his own bile, his tongue moving in time with the unnatural squirming he could feel through her flesh.

He didn’t stop until Michelle’s voice cut from the sidelines. “Enough. Reciprocate.”

Birdie pushed him back, her eyes wide and glassy. She scrambled to her knees as Jay rolled onto his back. Her hands were shaking as she freed his cock. She took him into her mouth, her technique hollow and efficient. He stared at the blinding stage lights, feeling nothing, willing himself to feel nothing, as her mouth worked him to a rigid, traitorous hardness. The crowd cheered, a single, rough sound.

“Mount her. Rear entry. Let them see the merchandise,” Michelle commanded, her voice cool over the loudspeaker.

Birdie got on her hands and knees, presenting herself. Her pregnant belly hung low, swaying slightly. Jay moved behind her, his own weight cumbersome and unfamiliar. He positioned himself at her arsehole, prodding against the tight ring of muscle. He pushed. Her body resisted, then yielded with a soft, awful sound. He buried himself in one long, deep stroke, his balls slapping against her, his abdomen pressing against the full curve of her womb.

The sensation was a closed loop of violation. He was inside her, and the thing inside her was between them, a third presence. He fucked her with slow, deep strokes, each thrust jostling the life within her. Birdie made no sound. Her head hung down, her hair a curtain hiding her face. The crowd was louder now, calling out encouragement, crude suggestions.

Jay focused on a crack in the stage floor, his vision blurring. His climax built, a mechanical pressure with no pleasure. He came with a grunt, shuddering, emptying deep into her bowels. He stayed inside her, panting, feeling his own spend leaking out around him, warm and shameful.

Then Birdie screamed.

It was a raw, tearing sound that cut through the crowd’s noise. Her body convulsed, her back arching violently. She collapsed forward, her arms giving out, her face smacking against the stage. Jay was flung out of her as she fell. A seizing, ripping cramp locked his own guts in a vice. He doubled over, clutching his stomach.

On the stage between Birdie’s splayed legs she clutched at her wet cunt, pulling it wide open. Something dark and wet was emerging as not a head. A scaled, pointed snout, slick with blood and fluid. A small, clawed hand followed, gripping at the air. Birdie was screaming, a continuous, breathless shriek of pure terror as the small Dracon body slithered out of her onto the stained polymer, umbilical cord pulsing.

Jay felt a similar, horrific pressure in his own rectum, a tearing fullness that had nothing to do with his own anatomy. He instinctively spread his knees, his body betraying him, pushing. He felt a brutal, wet release, and a second small, scaled creature, coated in his own blood and waste, crawled from his rectum onto the stage beside Birdie’s.

The crowd fell utterly silent for one second, then erupted into a roar of shock, laughter, and revulsion. Jay lay on his side, gasping, looking at the two mewling, alien infants squirming between them. Birdie had stopped screaming. She was curled in a fetal position, her hands over her face, her whole body shaking with silent, violent sobs. Her shame was a tangible thing, a stench in the air worse than birth.

Madam Michelle stepped onto the stage, her heels clicking. She surveyed the scene with a critical eye, then gestured to two attendants waiting in the wings. “Clean this up. Get the product to containment. Scrub the stage.” She looked down at Jay and Birdie, her expression one of mild distaste, as if they’d spilled a drink. “Get them to the med bay. Standard post-birth protocols.”

The attendants moved in with towels and a sealed container. Jay watched, numb, as the two squirming Dracon young were picked up and placed inside. Birdie didn’t move when they touched her. They had to lift her, her limbs limp, her eyes staring blankly at the crowd that was now beginning to jeer and point at the blood left behind.

Jay tried to stand. His legs wouldn’t hold him. An attendant hooked a hand under his arm and hauled him up. As he was led off the stage, the last thing he saw was the bright, accusing spotlight shining down on the dark, wet stain where a piece of him had been born.

The med bay's lighting was a sterile, unforgiving white, bleaching the color from everything. Jay was half-carried, half-dragged through the doorway, his bare feet leaving smeared prints on the polished floor. Birdie was a dead weight between two attendants, her head lolling, her eyes open but seeing nothing.

He heard the voice before he saw her. Madam Michelle stood near a sealed disposal chute, speaking to a man in a broker’s neat tunic. Her tone was brisk, logistical. "—initial depreciation is accounted for, of course. The gestation period put them out of premium rotation for six weeks. But the product was healthy. Two live births. That adds a redemption value to their base."

The broker, a gaunt man with a data-slate, made a noncommittal sound. "And the assets themselves? Post-partum recovery metrics?"

"Standard protocol. Hormone flush, tissue reinforcement, psychological reset. They'll be tender, but functional within forty-eight hours. The vacancy..." Michelle paused, and Jay felt a cold drip of fear trace his spine. "The internal vacancy actually increases versatility. Certain clientele have a preference for it. The emptiness is a feature."

Jay’s legs finally gave out. The attendant let him slump against a cold examination table, his body shaking. *A feature.* He looked down at himself. His abdomen, once taut and heavy, was soft, a deflated pouch of skin. A dull, deep ache throbbed inside him, a phantom fullness where something had lived and torn its way out. He felt hollowed. Scraped clean.

Across the room, they laid Birdie on another table. She didn't resist. Her arms fell to her sides, palms up, like she was waiting for restraints. A med-tech, impersonal in a clear visor, began spraying a cold antiseptic foam over her thighs and groin. Birdie flinched, the first conscious reaction Jay had seen since the stage. A low, animal whimper escaped her.

"Subject is responsive," the med-tech droned, noting something on a wrist-terminal. "Proceeding with internal scan."

Michelle and the broker moved closer to Birdie’s table, discussing her as if she were a piece of refurbished equipment. "This one may require a more intensive reset," Michelle said, clinically. "The emotional volatility is inefficient. But the physical yield was good. The birth canal is intact, minimal tearing."

"Mother," Birdie whispered, the word a cracked, dry thing. She was staring at the ceiling. "I want my mother."

The broker glanced at her, then back at his slate. "Sentimental residue. That can be marketed, too. The broken doll aesthetic has a niche."

Jay closed his eyes. The static hum in his mind was gone, replaced by a razor-sharp clarity. He could see the equations in Michelle’s head. Their value = function minus maintenance. Their trauma was a line item. Their shame was irrelevant noise. He was a receptacle that had been emptied, and now they were checking him for cracks before filling him again.

"Miller," a different med-tech barked at him. "On the table. Now."

He pushed himself up, the cold metal searing against his bare skin. The tech didn’t look at his face. A scanner wand passed over his abdomen, emitting soft pings. A holographic schematic of his pelvic cavity glowed blue in the air above him. He saw it—the distorted, stretched pathways, the residual inflammation highlighted in pulsing red, the void where the Dracon young had grown and exited.

"Rectal tissue integrity is within acceptable parameters given the nature of the expulsion," the tech reported to the room. "Recommend a topical analgesic and a nutrient infusion to accelerate epithelial regeneration. He can take light contact in twenty-four hours, full service in forty-eight."

"See?" Michelle said to the broker, a note of pride in her sterile voice. "Durable design. Even the non-standard plumbing holds up."

The broker nodded, tapping his slate. "I'll adjust the portfolio valuation. The vacancy premium stands."

“I’m thinking of something else.” Michelle muttered quietly. “Make them available in 48 hours… but in the meantime contact the Dracon, tell them what has happened, inform them that the whores will be available for further breeding in 2 days.” She told the broker with an evil grin. “We might be able to make some good money keeping them preminently bred with Dracon spawn”.

A different, sharper pain lanced through Jay’s lower body as the tech inserted a cold, gel-packed syringe into him, the pressure brutal and intimate. It was a sealant, a repair. He bit down on a groan, his fists clenching at his sides. This was maintenance. This was being fixed. *Thank them for the privilege*, his mind whispered, the mantra surfacing from the depths like a corpse. *Thank them for making you functional.*

Across the room, Birdie began to cry. Not the silent sobs from the stage, but a quiet, hopeless weeping, tears streaming down the sides of her face into her hair. The med-tech wiping her down ignored it completely.

"Birdie," Jay said, his voice rough and unfamiliar.

She turned her head slowly on the table, her eyes finding his. The terror and disgust were gone, burned away. What was left was a flat, fathomless self-loathing. "It came out of me," she breathed, the words barely audible. "I felt its claws. Inside. I’m… I’m a hole. I’m just a hole things come out of."

Michelle finished her conversation with the broker and turned her attention to them. "Enough. The self-pity is a waste of energy. You have performed a service. You are empty. You will be filled again. That is your purpose. It is a simple one. Be grateful for its simplicity."

She nodded to the attendants. "Take them to recovery bay three. Mandatory twelve-hour rest cycle. Then they return to the roster."

They were lifted again. Jay’s body felt both heavy and weightless, a sack of broken parts. As they were carried out, he looked back at the spot on the med bay floor where he’d been standing. There was no stain. It had already been cleaned away.