Short story – June 2020 – SciFi with sex and violence
Like a clock made of rusted parts being forced through its motions complainingly, Alison started the day in the dull, bright, grey dawn. Existing in the bathroom in front of the mirror, the morning boomed in her ears and scalded her eyes and she saw her aged, hollow face unblinking in front of her. She piled on moisturizer and makeup and brushed her fraying hair. Her suit rested on her shoulders like an exhausted bird and, almost insensitive, she walked out the door and went to work.
This day was the latest in a horror anthology where every story was the same as the last, as bleak, as unrelenting, as confused as bleak, as bleak, as bleak. As unrelenting and motherfucking BLEAK. Each day started like a blow to the face with a crowbar and a sickening, winding, punch in the gut. Simultaneously an incomprehensible blur of nightmare would be sucked out of her mind, leaving orphan images and utterly nauseating feelings of torture, of degradation, of humiliation. Alison had been thin and pretty, now she was skeletal and hagridden. Grey almost to the point of translucence, people were worried. People had spoken to her and said she could call them, anytime. People had suggested she see a doctor, and she had. And the doctor had been concerned and supportive and clueless and impotent. She took pills now. Nothing else had changed.
Permanent premises for unspecified leisure activities were not as easy to find as a depressed economy should have made them. Blunt persistence and belligerent negotiation had landed a room in the basement of a flexible use space with good connections and poor management oversight. It always took time and some shuttling to get five grown men and their equipment in place for their few hours of recreation. First were the laptops and cables, then the masks and instruments, and finally the cyberframe. Then a good hour of assembly before being ready to start. The men had to take it in turns to run the subject through their treatments. It could be hard physical work, and none of them could keep it up for the 4 hours each night. Sometimes they executed complicated procedures requiring more than one operator, but they planned these in advance.
The cyberframe is an all purpose electromechanical body. At base, an unprogrammed construction robot. At most sophisticated, a full substitute body with sensorium and movement for a remote human mind. It was this that the boys in the basement of the unused car repair shop were using it for.
Virtually the first thing a male will do with any new technology is find a way to use it for pornography or sexual self pleasure. Malekind had always slavered at the thought of lifelike gynoid robots which could be purchased, altered and commanded as the owner saw fit. So when this became a possibility there was a giant industry for it, actually responsible for a great many of the technical advances which made ultra realistic cyberbodies, and all the beneficial uses to which they could be put, possible. However, a willing machine is still just a willing machine. The fantasy of masculine power, domination and destruction projected onto a sophisticated dummy is still just a fantasy. Sophisticated pornography, not a substitute for it.
And so the boys in the abandoned car repair basement said “yes, a fake body which we can mutilate and abuse and torture is what we need, but the mind inside must be unwilling”. And a synthesis of advanced human machine interfacing and tech for dream therapy finished the job. Take the mind of a sleeping woman and put it into the weakened body of a cyberframe capable of full sensory and motor integration but not of fighting back or breaking any of the bonds that held it. And do whatever you want to it for a few hours then put her back in her own body, with only nightmare recollections and exhaustion but no evidence, not even any knowledge of what was actually happening. And do it again and again and again.
The basement boys spotted Alison out on the street. She looked strong, she looked happy and she didn’t look at them. She wasn’t the only one they checked out, but they managed to get into her apartment to fit the dream catcher device under her bed. Then it was all done for her. When their hardons got started her life became horror. And never did they consider stopping. The mercilessness was part of the appeal.
To end it all would require more effort than Alison was capable of mobilising. She sat on the mattress and ran through her daily sobbing before bed. It was more like a drainage procedure than an emotional outburst. The salty fluid flowed out of her eyes for five or ten minutes, her face underneath it unmoving, before she lay down. She didn’t think about how much she wanted to feel different nor how welcome death would be. Those times were long gone. She lay down. She slept.
The cellar club assembled as they normally did. One by one, always plenty of space between each new arrival, they aggregated. Then two of them went to fetch the cyberframe. It arrived in pieces that had to be assembled; otherwise it would look too much like carrying a dead body. Each of the five: the dog, the pig, the cow, the sheep and the lizard masked, set about securing limbs, plugging in computers and power or just waiting for things to be ready. The pig one, who actually knew how this worked technically, poked at a keyboard, setting up restrictions on the frame’s strength and unconscious reflexes so that it would never be able to free itself or stop itself being damaged. And heightened and tuned the sensorium so that it was nightmarish and excruciating. He was proud of the mod which projected the faces of the victim’s family onto the animal masks of her tormentors.
There in the room, as always she now remembered, stood her mother, her father, her sister, uncle and grandfather. She was cable tied to the metal frame bed with the wooden panel underneath. She made limp dream-like struggles and tried to turn her head and curl up, as a rodent squeal wriggled from her lips. Like always in dreams, she could remember all her previous experiences in this place, which all jumped up and down in her. She felt the gravel-like pain in all her body as it did what it could to integrate multiple physical horrors into a single experience. It became staccato, alternating hot and cold, adding an extra strobe-like horror to the relentless tide of memory. Each memory came with it’s own “no!”, as these ran together. The mask wearing apes surrounding the cyberframe set to work.
As the dog, the pig, the cow, the sheep and the lizard did their terrible things and snarled their terrible snarlings, each atrocity added to the howl within Alison, that apocalyptic No. And her biological body, already friable from months of nighttime abuse, throbbed with heartbeats and almost twanged with tension. The final goblin, the lizard mask wearing one, the leader, turned around; held in his hand: a rusty short knife with a bleached handle. This sight brought back to Alison’s mind all the worst of the intimate slashings and electronically enhanced agonies that had been done to her. As her mind spun like a water wheel in a stream of horror, her organic body thumped harder than ever to supply it with energy to spin and more adrenaline to fight. And as it did so it started to throw out a beat and then another and soon contracted without relaxing; an unmoving motor.
The Pig’s window went dark and a “Reconnect” dialog appeared. The cyberframe was unmoving, frozen in expression and pose: mouth open, brow twisted, limbs straining at cable ties. A moment, then every joint and muscle slowly but inhumanly rotated to its default state. The cyberframe rested in a serene pose of lying in state, with its arms by its side. The Pig’s mouth was open and he tapped the key to reconnect over and over, but the dialog just reappeared after saying “Failed”. Then the breathing started.
A cyberframe used for human remoting has a few unsuppressable safety features. The close link between the frame and the human means that to some extent while the frame is operating in this mode the human is in the machine as well as in their own body. The two bodies, or their “brains”, form a single machine in a single state. Highly entangled maybe, at least as far as working out which bit is in charge. When a person gives up remoting a frame, it takes a while to disconnect the two and put the person wholly back in the body. There is no time for this if the person unexpectedly dies. So frames implement a mandated protocol when this happens. They become wholly controlled by the remnants of the remoter’s mind and, apart from the part with the human still in it, reboot, resetting every parameter to defaults and handing all control to the dead person within. This won’t last for long, a frame isn’t capable of maintaining a full human mind for much more than 15 minutes, but for the last 15 minutes of that human’s “life” the frame is totally under their control.
Frames with dead people inside start breathing because the usual suppression of unnecessary behaviour has been wiped. A frame breathes not because it needs to, but because the interface between the person and the frame has become unmediated and direct. The Pig said “Fuck”, because the Pig knew what the Lizard, Dog, Sheep and Cow did not. The cyberframe now had no inhibitions of its self-preservation reflexes, and no weakened motor functions. The sensorium it relayed to the mind inside was clear and unmodified, and pain was optional. The Lizard did the worst thing possible in this situation if it wanted to remain in charge. It went to jab its knife between the legs of the now breathing frame. Reflexes are those motor functions that occur without requiring conscious direction. Frames have them so that things like construction accidents can easily be avoided. Nothing was more a self preservation call for this cleanly booted frame than to break the cable tie securing its right leg and block the jab for its simulated genitals. But the mind inside was very surprised indeed. It now saw the place it was in easily and clearly. There were no nightmarish decorations or demonic wailing. The faces on the individuals in the room were now obviously wearing animal masks, not the faces of her family. She could smell their sweat and even hear their heartbeats. But not her own. The emotional lemon juice which had misted her vision and made her eyes hurt had gone. Her mind was very clear, and now her body appeared to be hers. Though definitely not hers. She moved her right arm and the cable tie holding it snapped more easily than cotton. She snapped the others and stood up on the wooden panel.
The Lizard said: what the fuck is happening? The Pig answered: she fucking died! All the settings were reset. It’s the dead client protocol. – Shit, how long ‘til it stops? – About 15 minutes.
She’d heard it. It was clear as day. Without needing further explanation, she knew she had been kidnapped in her sleep by these mask wearing vermin and placed in this body for torturing for their pleasure. Now she (her organic body) had died and she had 15 minutes left to live in this machine body. She felt cold in a way she enjoyed. Straightforwardness seemed to be something that came from the body. What was she going to spend the last 15 minutes of existence doing? The Lizard and her new body made up her mind for her. He went for the door and the body just jumped in one hop in front of it, blocking his exit. He tried to shove her out of the way, but the body again just slammed him against the wall without any effort. Her emotions were heating up. This new body was cool, but the mind definitely was not. Unlike being awake before, now all the memories of her abuse had stayed with her. Just a small taste of control had ignited an ecstatic anger, an outlet for all that “No”. Fifteen minutes would have to be enough.
New Work 