"You're a big one, aint'cha, babe? But just a broad, huh."

The grin said it all. Lori smiled at this comment she'd heard before and closed the door behind him, turning the lock..

And he was definitely weedy, which just made it worse. Dark, wiry hair stuck out the top of his loose floral shirt. She knewthe type - he'd have a backbone like knotted rope. She walked passed him, picked up the chip register. "Can I have your credit chip, honey."

"Jack, call me Jack. And no,” – his voice went cold – “all you can have, bitch, is this…" He slipped a long, thin, sharp piece of metal out of the back pocket of his chinos and held it in front of his stomach, point outwards. His eyes shone like those of some nocturnal insectivore.

The night before, between tricks, she'd been listening to her best friend Sharon tell her the latest horror goss: "In the mouth and the ass, a skewer or somethin'-"

"Spare me the details, Sharon," she'd said. "So how many is that now?"

"How many murdered?"

"No, how many murderd in the same way. With a knife…"

"Counting Sal, three."

Three working girls killed by some psycho, and now he's walked into her room in this seedy hotel where no one cares at all.

He sat down in the tattered armchair near the door, staring at her and grinning. "Take of your clothes, babe," he said at last. If she screamed nobody would come even if they heard. And she would be dead anyway.

She slowly stripped, folded her clothes and placed them on the bedside table, near the holo projector. Then she sat on the bed and removed her high heels.

He pointed the spike at the holo projector. "Holo?"

"Yes."

"Got any snuff?"

"They're the fav choice, sure I got 'em."

"Good. Might watch some when I'm finished with you."

"Look, what is this anyway. I done nothin' to you..."

"You a whore, honey."

"For fuck's sake, there are millions of whores out there. Women don't have much choice anymore, what with the Home and Family laws."

She almost laughed as ther bitterness boild up. "Shoulda seen it coming - first Dickensian economics, a few very rich and the poor can get fucked, and then Dickensian morality. Well it's just like Victorian times - a single, poor woman's gotta sell her ass just to get by. Meanwhile the hypocritical patriarchs come and fuck us, pay us and piss on us."

"Dickensian?" he said, frowning. "You don't sound like no regular hooker."

"Educated, on the net. My parents gave a shit."

"Uh. But you interest me anyway - why you so big?"

"Partly natural, genes. Partly 'cos I been workin' out."

"Workin' out? Ain't you noticed - it's not fashionable any more, fit women."

She felt suddenly even more naked, exposed. "Gonna have an op. Sex change."

"You gonna become a guy!"

"I want to be a human again."

"But how? I mean, you got no dick!"

"Prosthetics, for crissakes, you never heard of those?"

"And ya gonna cut ya tits off?"

"Yes, I'm going to have my breasts removed! I want to be a fucking man! I want to have a real life! Understand?"

"Fuck, man, that's really sick. How much does it cost, anyhow?"

"Three hundred thousand dollars. It's pricey cos it's illegal."

"You got three hundred thousand dollars saved up?" She nodded. "From this?" She nodded again. She figured he'd tried to make her tell him her credit-chip password, but he didn't seem interested.

"Wow, talk about wages of sin," he said finally. "Now honey, turn over and stick your ass in the air. There 's a few things I wanna do to you."

Just then, as she stared at this puny, wire-haired, touseled freak in his multicoloured holiday shirt and baggy chinos - likely some corp technical or something, winner in a world of losers because he was male and employed - something very thin and tensile snapped inside her. Something she'd been living with for way too long...

"You know what I think?" she said, actually leaning towards him, the spike... He suddenly looked surprised, went to say something. "I think your'e a fucking faggot, but you're not allowed to be anymore, 'gainst the laws. So you fuck over hookers, 'cos we gotta give you time, an' you kill 'us for doing what you wanna do. They got you fucked, little Jack, 'cos you don't fit into this puritan male fantasy wank-world either. You're a victim, Jack, just like me and just like those girls you snuffed."

He blinked, his face flushed, and he started to stammer something. Then he stopped himself, breathed deeply a few times, hefted the spike in his hand. "It doesn't matter," he said quietly, slowly. "I still have this, and you are still going to die no matter what you say."

As he tensed to get up out of the chair, she reached behind her with one long, muscular arm, grabbed the holo projector and brought it around in a nice, clean arc, ripping the extension cord from the wall. The machine smashed the spike from his grasp, sent it spinning along the red carpet. He cried out in pain, clasped a damaged wrist with his other hand. "Jesus Christ, you fuckin'-" But she was on him, right knee deep in his stomach, and wrapping the extension cord around his scrawny, straining neck. He batted at her as she pulled it tight, face reddening, eyes bulging, but she just tightened, felt the biceps work like they did at the gym.

Pump... pump...

Blood welled out of the deep grooves the cord made in his neck, his head lolled oddly. Abruptly, she knew he was dead.

She let go and stood back. His DNA prints were all over the spike, but if he had a personal protection contract, under the Home and Family laws it was her that would get the injection. Her DNA was everywhere.

First things first, she decided, trying to breathe down. She would wait a while, then dump his body in the dumpster out back. She'd have to skip town, skip the country, head somewhere, maybe Asia, China or Japan, maybe, where things were different. They weren't comfortable with Fundamentalist America, wouldn't extradite her. No more sex- change op, no more future as a man. Fuck it, who needed that anyway.

She gathered up her clothes, dressed, checked for her creditchip. Nearly three hundred thousand should get her safely away. She glanced back at Jack, thought about what he was, what she had been...

And why. Thye'd seemed funny when she was a little girl watching TV, spouting their religion of hatred and asking for money. But they'd got organised and political, and there'd been nothing to stop them.

He was just the psycho that had turned up in her room; the really dangerous ones were in office. They made laws that sent women to backyard abortionists, that blamed women if they were raped, that sent women back into the kitchen, or into prostitution. That made them second class human beings in the time-honoured Judeo-Christian tradition.

There was hope - those underground movements down in Mexico, up in Canada, people caught up in the Free Trade Area without the centuries of fundamentalist indoctrination to help them accept the social conservatism that went with it in these trying times of Global Warming and equally global recession.

She shoved the creditchip into her handbag. She had enough cash in her pocket for a ticket to Canada, wouldn't even need to touch the three hundred thousand.

She glanced against Jack, and the spike lying at his feet. She recalled the work of killing him, the sense of running out of alternatives, of life long barriers coming down. Violence worked both ways.

End