This Other Eden by Ben Elton

invisible threads tethered her nipples to
the ceiling. The woman’s crotch had been waxed by a fanatic. It was virtually
bald. Smooth and shiny as a car bonnet, almost as if it had been laminated.
There was one tiny fringe of pale soft hair hovering above the cleft. This was
a vagina with a mohican.
    Max
felt depressed. How had he ever allowed his life to arrive at a point where
such a gorgeous woman could be a problem to him? Yet she was a problem. The
problem being that Max was married. Very publicly and very recently married to
a fellow movie star. Max was a man of certain principles. He valued his honour.
Certainly he fought and he drank, that was fine, what he did not do was
publicly humiliate his wife.
     
     
     
    Irresponsible
use of drugs.
     
    Fidelity, or at least a
decent pretence at such, was a major pose on the coast, it had been for years.
The place was stuffed with mega-stars assuring journos that they had found true
bliss in marriage and that their hell-raising days were over.
    AIDS
was still around. There was still no cure and no vaccine, no vaccine available
to the public, that is. It had, in fact, been possible to immunise people
against the disease for many years but the drug had been suppressed. The reason
for this being that the vast chemical conglomerate that had isolated the
vaccine had found to their dismay that it was extremely easy to copy and
reproduce, a simple compound, made from the cheapest and most basic
ingredients. Ingredients that a child could reconstruct from a junior chemistry
kit and a bag of household groceries. The conglomerate concerned realised
that, were they to market their new drug, its secret would instantly be wrested
from it. That done, in defiance of copyright, the recipe would be published in
every scabrous, alternative publication in the world. Faced with this wholly
unacceptable prospect, the vast chemical conglomerate had taken the only course
open to it. This was, after all, business. There was no point in them
developing a drug from which it was impossible to profit. They had therefore
decided to withhold the drug until such time as their chemists had been able to
develop a sufficiently complex molecular disguise for it. They would secrete
their simple little miracle drug deep within some intricate atomic structure
that was fantastically difficult to break down, and near impossible to
reproduce. This way their patent would be protected and a reasonable price
could be charged.
     
     
     
    Expensive
bodywork.
     
    Max looked at the
slumbering woman. How the hell had this happened? How had he ended up crashed
out on a carpet with a naked woman? He wasn’t even the sleep around type. What
Max liked to do was get off his face, act like a rich asshole and fall over.
Certainly he liked to flirt, but screwing around was stupid. Getting caught was
stupider. Could he get away with this? Not easily, he thought, and certainly
not cheaply. The  woman stretched out before him had not spent the countless
dollars she clearly had spent getting a body like that in order to hand it out
gratis. That body was a career move.
     It was
too perfect, too calculated, not one centimetre of it had been left to chance.
This was a body that would almost certainly be featuring in next year’s Coscars
(Cosmetic Surgery Awards). Max searched in vain for signs of human frailty.
Just one dimple of cellulite on the extraordinary limb stretched out before him
might have given him hope that here was a straight-shooter. A woman who would
wake up and say, ‘Wow! That was fun and so unlike me, now you go back to your
life and I’ll go back to mine.’ But there were no dimples of cellulite, not the
tiniest stretch mark, hair or crease to suggest that this was a real human
being.
    The leg
pointing at Max seemed to be singling him out, accusing him. ‘There’s the
jerk,’ its stern posture seemed to say. ‘There’s the guy I’m going to be
talking about on every chat show for the next ten years. The