Sexual Singularity

Larry Lefkowitz

The time has come, my love, for us to part. Ten thousand years of marital bliss, if descending bliss in the last one thousand years. But all good things come to an end, as the ancient proverb has it.

While it lasted, the ultimate in sex was ours. To think that men and women once had bodies touching in sexual coupling, that sex was a sweaty, secretional affair – eeekh. So inferior to our cohabiting by thinking.

We have the visionary Ray Kurzweil, our spiritual mentor, to thank for our bliss. In a seminal chapter of his ground-breaking work, The Age of Spiritual Machines, he outlined the future that we became: ‘Couples will be able to engage in virtual sex regardless of their physical proximity. Even when close, virtual sex will be better in some ways and certainly safer. Virtual sex will provide sensations that are more intense and pleasurable than conventional sex, as well as physical experiences that currently do not exist.’

How prescient he was. Thanks to virtual sex, I and my little dove could enter into rapture even when separated by great distances. When she went to visit her mother on Mars, we could have wonderful sex whenever she could slip away from the gorgon, whose sharp and incessant tongue didn’t allow anyone in her presence to think.

Alright, we had our ups and downs. The downs mainly from the year I cheated on her with Varda. Varda was something – her thoughts were like a supernova. My wife refused to resume sex signals for seven months. She didn’t buy the idea that I had suffered temporary brain breakdown from overwork. Besides, she cheated on me, too. Only four months in her case, and with an accountant! These lapses occurred in our last millennium together. Our burning relationship went from supernova to dwarf star.

The truth was that it was difficult to retain sexual attraction forever. After nine thousand years it was like a repeating loop. The great tide of mental sexual congress had ebbed. We started to revert to bestial sex. It occurred after we watched the ancient pornographic movies, as they were called, for inspiration. At first, we were put off by the sheer physicality of the effort. But gradually we felt that in engaging in virtual sex we had missed something. That perhaps it was not the apogee that had been planted into our minds. Viewing these movies (as they were called) marked our ultimate virtual sex decline. We began to envy primitive man and woman. The movies were more stimulating than our thoughts had been.

And this led us to question the Kurzweil concept that virtual sex was far superior to physical sex. In short, we abandoned Kurzweil (our great prophet!) and started engaging in physical sex, tentatively at first, educated by the movies. In the beginning we found it disgusting, but gradually, together with our increased skill at it, we came to enjoy it. We had been misled. Virtual sex was nothing compared to actual sex. We swore not to reveal to another soul our so engaging – social ostracism, even physical corporal punishment could result. I did not want to become a eunuch. After all, the old salacious texts had long been banned. ’50 shades of –’ what was it? – and their ilk. Not since I was a youngster did I secretly read that filth. Or what I thought of then as filth. I have begun to prowl the archives to locate a copy for inspiration. I mean, if we are to continue to engage in actual sex for some more millennia, we need variety.