After a long day, he wants nothing more than to go home. His muscles ache. His clothes are filthy. He has the beginnings of a headache.
         He unlocks the front door of his apartment and locks it again behind him. He removes his shoes and jacket and walks across the bare unfurnished room to the only other door. This too, he opens, leaving the key in the lock, swinging the door wide and stepping through into the waiting jelly.
         This white room is as bare as the other, but filled, every inch of it, with a quivering transparent substance. He pushes into its mild resistance, briefly holding his breath even though he knows it’s unnecessary.
         After a few steps he stops, fully immersed. The gel is perfectly body-temperatured. When he blinks, it soothes his dry eyes. He lets his arms drift perpendicular to his sides. His feet ascend a few inches from the floor, then further as his body relaxes and gently pivots, until he lies suspended face-up within the gel, his clothes dissolving from him, making a temporary stain in the uncontaminated transparency surrounding him, before even that is bleached away as if it had never been.
         He relaxes his bladder and bowels. His waste floods out of him, the gel reaching inside his orifices some considerable distance to make sure he has evacuated everything. The piss and shit are erased. With a wish, he asks the stuff to obliterate his body hair, and it’s done in an instant. Now he hangs there naked, smooth as a doll, every inch of skin soothed and relaxed.
         For a time he just relaxes, ears filled with a soothing hum, lungs full of something better than oxygen. Eventually he opens his mouth and it fills with textures and flavors: apples, coffee, a vegetable soup hot but not too hot, warm multigrain bread; for dessert a slice of warm chocolate cake with vanilla ice cream.
         He dozes but a residual restlessness remains. His penis, erecting, demands attention. Obligingly, the jelly forms a body, lifelike and full-colored, exactly how he remembers her—or rather, better than that, exactly how the room remembers her, more accurately than any mortal prefrontal cortex could. The image crouches over him, caresses his hairless chest, sucks his cock.
         He ejaculates, the come pluming through the back of her phantom head, and she fades away. His semen dissolves in the liquid atmosphere. He closes lashless eyes, and the solicitous substance smooths his wrinkles, massages his muscles and arteries from the inside out and, saturating his brain, restores him to the proper balance. Later, contentedly he watches a favorite movie, and in the morning the room dresses him again for work.
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