I am humbled.

[elfs]

I don't read a lot of alt.sex.stories these days; even the stuff that gets past the moderators tends to be overwhelmingly cruddy. But I do look out for the SF/scfi/scifi/sci-fi tag. Nobody seems to know which one to use. Although the official tag is scfi, the moderators let just about anything through.

ASSM regular Dr. Unlucky posted The Long Run, a story of dubious morals and questionable content, to the newsgroup. The premise is about a spacer who falls in love with a rich girl, and she leaves him but leaves him a gift as well: enough cash that he can buy himself sex toys. He wants the girl, but he can't have her; he can't even have a copy because

Really and truly they weren't copies of her. Rich girls from Earth have nano security kissing every cell in their bodies, encrypting their DNA. They were just as close to her physically as a medium grade clone tech could get from the holos I took of Kate on my ship.

Damn, that's one of the finest shiny sweet ideas I've ever seen and it gets tossed out in a short story blessing a free newsgroup in an obscure corner of the Internet. It's hard to believe but, with sufficient infrastructure, our civilization has such talent to burn.