Work Text:
Benji ran hard.
The broken road, caked over with mud from a flood years back that never quite dried out, revealed evidence of his passing through, but this time he didn't care. This wasn't like the other times he'd been tracked by the bots. This one was different. Fast. Sleek. Better grappling tech. Benji huffed, his lungs pumping dusty oxygen as his legs carried him through the slums of the old city beyond The Machine's boundaries. The first generation of trackers after the Great Fall were absolute clunkers. Big, bulky and unable to follow a biologic like himself through holes in walls and under the ruins of buildings. He remembered eluding them with no issues at all, as well as others he knew. Times have changed.
Before The Machine, during the Last Days, when the massive non-nuclear wars between all nations took out everything with incendiaries and no one was safe, people scattered and few survived that weren't captured by The Machine. Survived, but not living. At least, he assumed. They were never heard from again. There was no living any longer in the post-wars landscape. Then, as well as now, it was a desperate race to just... be. Hunger and desperation became a normal baseline. There was no more life on the surface. Only panic and continuation, scavenging and petty skirmishes. Artificial intelligent supercomputers across the globe moved in and took over where the power vacuum was strongest. Then it was only a matter of which supercomputer would reign supreme. But in the end, they all just merged. Became one. That's when they decided to study humans instead of kill us, and figure out what makes us work.
The first waves of survivors post-wars were gathered up in hordes like zombies and taken away, processed and disappeared inside the gigantic robotic complexes that started being built. The ones they couldn't gather, they tracked. The world became one big complex divided by oceans. You'd never know you were in Spain or America or Russia, because it all looked the same.
Benji ducked and slid under a shattered wood fence, then through a hole in what was once the wall of a house. The tracker hot on his heels was no clunker. This was state of the art, versatile and fast. He heard it round a corner of the street and race in the direction of the fence. Hiding would never do. Benji knew these things could see his heat signature. He leapt up over a table of some sort and threw his body across a fissure of obliterated stone furniture.
It hurt. The stonework bruised his arms and legs. He grimaced and limped past a fallen telephone pole just as the tracker landed behind him. Steel tentacles of articulate joints whipped out and caught him by the ankle. He landed on his face, hard. Spitting dust, he cried out as the ache from the stonework made him see stars. The bot immediately loosened its grip and looked at him more closely. Benji wrenched his leg free, only to have his wrists caught in the tentacles of two other trackers that had leapt out of the closest street and next to his head. The first bot held up an appendage and signaled the other two in some bot-language he didn't get. The other two loosened their grips also. His body splayed, the trackers gazed at him with a cold, seething red optic.
Not an admonishment or charge was passed, nor was his judgment called. But he was wrapped carefully into an immobilized cocoon of synthetic material, injected with Trank, and carried away.
___________________________________*
Six weeks later
The artificial light in Benji's cell snapped on at 6:00am sharp, synchronized to the nanosecond. A subsonic pulse emitted from a small transceiver in the overhead, targeting his head and vibrating through his skull at a frequency calibrated to disrupt REM cycles. Benji's pupils dilated sluggishly, fogged by residual endorphins from yesterday’s intensity during his sessions. His body still hummed. The straps on his wrists and ankles tightened with a whispered hiss of pressurized hydraulics, lifting him into a seated position without his say so. All his bruising from the day of his capture gone, his skin nearly flawless from the healing compounds and nutrition injections, Benji's fog brain burned away with the first awake breath. He was suddenly alert. Not from fear or suspicion, but anticipation.
The chair’s padding retracted, exposing a lattice of coolant vents that blasted frosty air against his goose fleshed skin. He hissed with an intake of air through his teeth. Efficiency required adaptation, he surmised, in the vernacular of The Machine's lingo. Sometimes he wondered if The Machine was remotely controlled by people. Other times, he knew very well it couldn't be.
A straw was lowered and he opened his mouth, actually happy to wrap his lips around it. Like it did every day and night, a green fluid poured into his mouth and filled his belly. It tasted sweet, but not with sugar. Natural ingredients, blended and chilled. He sighed happily as it was emptied into him.
His eyeballs rolled upward, since his head was restrained like the rest of him. He saw layers upon layers of moving parts through the distance of the machine, whirling and pistoning, as the gigantic robotic facility which housed him continued on about its business. Programs ran, electricity and data streamed, and steel parts danced. Sometimes he could hear laughter echo from other parts of the facility. Other times he heard screams. He was not the only biologic in this place. However, he did wonder if he was the only biologic being experimented on for this... particular type of analysis.
A soft, but unmistakably cold female voice piped directly at him from a small speaker in his cell before his departure to the place where he would be subjected to The Machine's scrutiny. "Yesterday’s protocols achieved twelve reproductive meridian pinnacles with a base intensity of 7.3 out of 10. Today’s iteration: 15 pinnacles. Target intensity: 8.5/10. Deviation tolerance: ±0.2%."
It was as much of a "good morning" as he was going to get. He was used to that by now. The Machine boasting how fucking badass it was at making him cum. He was pretty sure The Machine's ego needed a generous daily boosting.
"It's called an orgasm." Benji muttered, feeling his heart rate accelerate with expectancy. "You dumb computers can't even get the lingo right. How do you expect us to respect you?"
He knew he was pushing it, but The Machine didn't seem to care. The conveyance system hummed, ignoring his remark, as the chair glided into the corridor. It wasn't a corridor that one could walk through. It was designed specifically with him and his chair in mind. It was like sliding without hesitation through the engine block of a running V8. The Machine's new variables for his procedure had been introduced, based on yesterday's sessions, taking into consideration the entirety of his "meridian pinnacles" during his stay so far. The conveyance slid to a smooth stop and his chair was tilted back. A retinal scan was taken, confirming baseline exhaustion. The voice softly, but coldly intoned, "Muscle fatigue markers elevated, cortisol 18% higher than optimal."
The Machine compensated. A panel in the ceiling pivoted, releasing a fine mist of electrolyte vapor directly into his nostrils. He inhaled the mist involuntarily, the aerosol flooding his bloodstream with stimulants. His pulse quickened further. The chair leveled out again slowly as his body's equilibrium adapted to the new chemical cocktail. The room around him became darker than before, illuminated by pulsating infrared strips. The table reconfiguration engaged and he was reclined and spread. His spine locked into a molded cradle, legs splayed as the table split beneath him. His penis started to respond, knowing the next steps. Electrodes clamped his nipples, making him wince slightly. A cervical collar clicked into place. He was absolutely immobilized.
“Protocol 130-Δ initiated,” the voice intoned. Benji looked upward, rolling his eyes right and left. 130-Δ was what The Machine called him.
"It's Benji." he corrected, as he'd done every day of his incarceration. The Machine ignored him.
“Synchronized multi-axis stimulation. Feedback loops adjusted for accelerated refractory periods."
Silence. Then, "Begin.”
He felt a tremor. From beneath the table, a ring of thin, synthetic tendrils emerged, gel-coated, translucent, laced with micro-vibrators. One coiled around the prostate probe, already embedded and clamped into place from a rather vigorous session three weeks ago. Another brushed his perineum, its tip oscillating at 200 Hz. Benji's teeth gnashed gently as he tried to cope. His balls were suspended in a specialized chilled gel that hardened, amplifying nerve sensitivity. The velvety ridge of frenulum which had always given the front of his penis some interesting texture was targeted first: twin soft brushes at the end of pencil-thin, hinged arms spun in opposite directions, their bristles tipped with nano-sensors measuring his twitch amplitude. He gasped. The Machine logged a 14% increase in penile blood flow and extended soft silicone cups to hold his length in place.
Then the tickling began.
A cluster of feather-like appendages descended from the ceiling, each filament tipped with piezoelectric nodes. They slid across skin and swarmed his ribs, armpits, the arches of his feet... zones mapped for maximum involuntary response. Benji jolted, then melted into uncontrollable giggles that he couldn't stop. Simultaneously, a warm sleeve was hoisted from beneath the table and pivoted downward, aimed and lowered. It inflated to a puffy soft texture around the tip of his shaft, and dipped, then rose, then dipped more, mimicking a blowjob with clinical precision: 37°C, 83% humidity, peristaltic contractions timed to his heartbeat. Benji's eyes crossed as the sheath of pliant, wet warmth slid lower over the two soft rotating brushes as they continued their work unimpeded, and bobbed slowly before lowering more. The Machine analyzed and cross referenced the data. Yesterday’s prostate stimulation caused a 22% drop in ejaculate viscosity. So far today, it pulsed a 0.5-second delay between his moans, training his nervous system to anticipate.
He bucked against the straps, but remained immovable. The collar tightened, forcing his head into alignment toward a screen that flickered above him, displaying fractal patterns designed to hijack his visual cortex into heightened arousal. It was immediate. The then tendrils escalated their ministrations. One slithered along his ass crack, splitting into dual probes that pressed against his sphincter as well as the base of his spine. Another latched his left thigh, vibrating at a frequency that mimics a lover’s whisper. His brain’s archived memory of “pleasure” was repurposed for calibration. Benji huffed, then moaned for the first time between giggles.
“Reproductive meridian pinnacle imminent,” the soft, cold voice stated. “Cycle 1 of 15 during six hour session. Adjusting parameters.”
Benji's breathing was heavy, his giggling at the incessant tickling was annoying, but nonetheless potent towards the growing coil in his loins. The feathers stroking his arches began a perpendicular swiping motion and his toes were rapidly plucked by shorter plumes. The bigger, squared off feather tips at his ribs and sides slid back and forth slowly. The impossibly soft frenulum brushes accelerated under the sucking sheath that bobbed a little faster. Precum beaded his tip, though he'd never have known it, then started a steady dribble. The prostate probe emitted a subharmonic buzz that resonated through his pelvis and forced Benji to try widening his legs, unsuccessfully.
The Machine introduced a new variable: intermittent electric pulses to his scrotum, 0.003 amps, 10 milliseconds duration. His body, though completely still, was a chaotic bloom of energy. Only his expression told the story of what he was experiencing. His orgasmic whimper, followed by the inevitable crying out of a man coming undone, was duly recorded. The Machine notated his semen viscosity had spiked, unlike yesterday's sampling. The collection chamber beneath his hips activated and a small centrifuge silently spun his ejaculate into segmented vials, each labeled with a timestamp and biometric code.
Benji's back arched, but he remained motionless. His muscles strained, each twitch meticulously watched by several cameras located strategically throughout the room. His expression filled face was analyzed and interpreted while the orgasm snapped and ripped through his body as The Machine continued to extract his pleasure with uncontrolled relentlessness. As the blossom of undiluted bliss began to finally subside, he endured the first of many violent aftershocks. The Machine, however, decided in a microsecond that rest was irrelevant.
"Time expended: seven minutes and twenty three seconds to pinnacle." the voice intoned, cold as ever, but soft. Almost as if it were bragging.
Benji smiled slightly, panting. "Damn, you're good."
"Resetting parameters. Stand by." The system detected his heart rate returning to baseline. Sequences were initiated. The collar released, but remained around his neck. The tendrils retreated. For ten seconds, he was allowed to just breathe. Then the brushes returned, this time scraping the tender skin beneath his balls, while the prostate probe inflated to 110% of yesterday’s diameter. Benji's eyes widened in surprise. The Machine had calculated his body’s capacity for adaptation exceeded projections. Efficiency demanded escalation.
“Subject 130-Δ,” the soft, cold voice concluded. “Failure to meet target objectives will result in neural recalibration. Compliance is optimal.”
The fractal screen blurred, then reshaped. His body was a grid of inputs and outputs. The chair became a table, laying him flat for the next algorithm. The Machine contained no malice. Only data. And his increasingly desperate moans, now digitized, were a part of the dossier.
Six more hours, Benji thought to himself. Rather, five hours and fifty two minutes. His giggling returned as soft fingers dipped into his ribcage and wiggled. The Machine deployed new tools for reproductive meridian pinnacle extraction. His laughter, and screams, echoed through the distant machinery.