Making Adjustments
The schedule Rico had drawn up was giving him deep misgivings. Kowalski’s word of mouth kick-started a tsunami of demo bookings for the ‘X-5’ by a who’s who of wealth, power, and filth. The money was going to be great, and Crash was just going to torch her cerebral cortex and end up drooling in a corner or whatever it was that had convinced MilitaryCorp to deprecate the dissociative.
But, he had more data now, the last job was only slightly more degrading than the first one with Kowalski; all he needed was to stitch the dosage curves to the jitter in Crash’s monoamine and endocrine spikes. Maybe he could find a sweet spot that allowed her to maintain just enough distance from the ‘job’ to keep her in one piece.
He’d learned a lot from studying the data, but to really squeeze every last drop of blood out of the rock he needed Sensorium playback. He plugged the BodyCast NB-239 neurobridge into the handheld core containing the OS and mod tools, leaned back against the headrest, and slipped on the cranial interface. This was going to be a rough fucking ride.
It was way worse and oh-my-fucking-god so much better than he’d anticipated. He could taste adrenaline on his tongue from the get-go. Nerves. Annoyance. Then pain and terror. The only reprieves were when he… no… she bit down and juiced the dissociative, and that was fucking weird all on its own, but at least it was painless. He could feel Kowalski fingering his… her pussy, he involuntarily locked his knees together and then his body shook. Arousal like he’d never experienced before… and… FFFFUUUUUUUCCCCCKKKKKKKKKKK… when Crash came back, it was like getting kicked through a glass window into a different nervous system. Rico’s teeth chattered, not from cold but from the dissociative. It started like de-realization and ramped up to the point where he felt like an entirely separate consciousness, or entity, from the body surrounding him. But the client’s hand was still inside her, three fingers pushed up hard into her wet cunt, and she wasn’t looking at the room anymore but at the ceiling, a slow pan of exquisite moulding and chandeliers.
She’d stopped flinching. The muscles in her thighs just locked, then unlocked, like she was running a diagnostic on every joint. The man was talking—words crowding together, slurring into a single, tense command, not even meant for the person whose body he was sheathed in. She could taste him on the inside of her mouth, sour, chemical, almost metallic. Her hands were numb. Fingers curled, scraping at the plastic mat, like she was trying, literally, to come to grips with the situation, maybe because it felt like it belonged to somebody else.
Then she started laughing. It was so quiet at first that Rico thought it was just a nerve misfire, a cough or a choke, but then it built, climbed the scale, became a sharp, ugly giggle. “Fuck my stupid whore ass, Sir, fuck me until you break me.” The client didn’t seem to notice, or maybe he thought it was part of the demo. He rolled her over, face-down this time, and the world became a vinyl mat, a cold grid of diamond bumps pressed into her lips, her cheek, the bridge of her nose. The man’s other hand gripped right at the base of her skull, holding her steady.
She was already half-numb, running the dissociative in little bursts like he’d coached her, but the pain still came through: the dry burn inside, the way the cock split her ass open like a can opener, and the metronome rhythm of his thrusts. It was nothing like the old VR sex booths—there was no lube, no easy calibration. The simulated flesh was just raw enough to keep her in the moment, but anesthetized at the edges, like a mild case of strep throat with your head floating six feet above the rest of you.
Her body was ready, or said it was, because now his cock was pushing in, not tentative at all, more like a piston. The NB-239 mapped the sensation incredibly well: the split-second burn at the entrance, the involuntary clutch, almost unbearable fullness, and then the betrayal as her own body decided not only could it accommodate what was happening, but… how about ramming more of that hard fucking meat up my asshole, fuck me so deep I can taste your cock. Or did she say that? It didn’t feel like being fucked—it felt like being measured, like the man was recording her rectal topography for his own records. Her nipples went from zero to a hundred, tight and tingly, but the rest of her felt like it was floating a centimeter above the mat, limbs numb but sensitive, as if each nerve was a pixel on a broken screen.
Holy fuck this was so real. More real than the logs or the raw telemetry.
The man came with a grunt and a full-body shudder, then pulled out so quickly that Rico felt the aftershock in his own pelvis, a hollow ache that lingered behind the firewall. The sensorium didn’t stop there, though. There was a pause—Rico saw the ceiling again and the chandelier, refracting red, blue, and sickly lemon-yellow from the old bulbs overhead. Crash’s arms were still leaden, but her fingers had curled under and left crescent-moon dents in her palms. The ambient whirr of the air scrubbers cut through the silence, a tinnitus that matched the fizz in Rico’s head, but there was something else that Rico didn’t anticipate: bliss. Higher than the poor bastards strung out on ‘ink’ down in Undertown. Was it the sex? The humiliation and abuse?
Crash’s mouth tasted like cum and she felt sick for a second, holding back the nausea until she swallowed the thick, salty load. She rolled onto her side and laughed again, barely audible, and then a shudder passed through her so hard Rico thought the feed had glitched. The man’s footsteps echoed, fading, leaving her naked and sticky on the mat. She lay there for a minute—maybe five, maybe a hundred.
When she finally got up, her thighs trembled, and for a second she thought she might piss herself. She staggered to the little sink and caught her own face in the mirror: hair matted to the sides, eyes red-rimmed but not crying. She washed her hands three times, then her face, then her hands again. The soap was so rich it didn’t even smell like soap, but like some better version of a human being, at least better than she was. She stared at her reflection, trying to piece together what was still her and what the dissociative’s neurogenic faculties had synthesized.
Rico blinked, and the vision collapsed. He was in his own body again, hands gripping the sides of his desk so tight his knuckles had gone white. For a second, he had no idea where he was, or who he was supposed to be. The taste lingered in his mouth, metallic and sharp, and when he coughed it felt like he’d choked on a penny.
Crash’s log had never been that raw. He tried to steady his breathing. The interface left a prickly rash across his forehead, and sweat had soaked through the back of his shirt. He flexed his fingers, working out the static. He’d been in the chair for less than ten minutes, but it felt like hours.
He stood—too fast—and almost toppled over. For a second, the world did this weird rubber-band effect, like his eyes were lagging behind his head. He forced himself upright, blinking at the cheap tile, and noticed his dick was so hard it hurt. The sensorium. It even though he was technically experiencing what the client had done to Crash’s body—pawing at her cunt, forcing his cock down her esophagus, violating her surprisingly tight little asshole—which to Rico seemed like it should have been an utterly repellant experience, the sensorium and his brain maybe had taken a very small step to the right… no it was the dissociative… and it felt like he was writing a character in a novel, or operating one of those antique marionettes like he’d seen at the museum when he was a kid. It was both like he’d been the one fucking her, and he’d been inside her soul at the same time.
That was it. It was the most intimate fucking thing he’d ever experienced. The playback fused their shared consciousness and experience. It was like they shared a soul. And now, when he thought about her he felt a tightness in his chest that had never been there before.
That was when he remembered the cadence of Crash’s thoughts and feelings during the most degrading parts of the playback. If he could throttle and pulse the dissociative to match her high-beta brain activity, he could, in theory, prolong the effect while cutting its consequences nearly in half. He quickly coded a simulation, ran it in the sensorium (this time, mercifully, not on his own skull), and indulged in a little smoke to celebrate the results.
After he’d modded the dissociative to his new specifications, the last thing Rico did was install a kill switch. She wasn’t going to like it, but if the shit hit the fan it beat letting her cortex burn to ash.
