The room was bathed in soft synthetic light, the kind calibrated to mimic dusk — soothing, calculated. They lay entangled on the narrow bed like two figures from a Grecian vase, reinterpreted by some Freudian artisan. One, her hair cascading over the other’s thighs, moved with deliberate focus — a kind of secular devotion, tongue in place of prayer. The other stared at the ceiling with eyes half-lidded in abstraction, not so much in ecstasy as in quiet wonder that such sensations were permitted, even encouraged, in a society so thoroughly sterilized by pleasure. There was no shame — that had long been abolished. Only a curious awareness of roles being performed, of bodies enacting a ritual more ancient than history, yet somehow sanitized by the very clinical precision of the act. Desire had been reengineered — and yet, in this moment, something almost real slipped through the programmed bliss