She wore the ribbon like a medal from some lost war — pinned above her ribs, naked beneath except for a smear of glitter and stale perfume. The men approached in tandem, bureaucrats of flesh, one entering the front gates while the other pushed past the tongue checkpoint. It wasn’t sex — not anymore. Just a maintenance ritual in the underground bunkers of Interzone. Fluorescent light buzzed overhead, dripping static and old jazz. Her eyes rolled back to a place beyond the ceiling, beyond the room, beyond the body — where pleasure had been outlawed but obedience still paid in cigarettes and synthetic morphine. The act looped, recorded, filed. Nothing was felt. Only performed. Flesh clicking into flesh like code. And somewhere in the corner, a typewriter clicked without a typist, spelling out the last lines of an obsolete instruction manual