1 comments/ 6031 views/ 1 favorites Tip Ch. 01 By: Case21 She wasn't an AI. Let's get that clear right from the start. She wasn't an AI or a robot, a clone or a hologram. She was a virtual being, encoded and embodied at once. She was solid and could be touched. She could be kissed, or struck. But if you cut her, she didn't bleed. That's because inside her there was only light. Open up her surface, and you'd see nothing but the gentle blue-white glow of a body-shaped screen. She was what we called a Tip, a Tactile Image Projection. Think of her as a human in reverse. Where a human body is dark and dense, on the inside, she was light and empty; and where a human body reflects, on the visible surface of the skin, she absorbed the particulate wave of light and made it solid, tangible. Her "heart" was her only hardware: a data projector like a convoluted mechanical nautilus that received commands wirelessly and played out through multifaceted lenses the light that gave her form and feedback. You had to know where to touch to find it. Emitting light 360 degrees around, her heart-projector cloaked itself when she was activated. The science of it was irrational, irrational as the Internet, irrational as anything created in the delicate languages of programming prone to recursion and corruption. It was as irrational as a fantasy. I don't deny that. But it was real then, for us. At any rate, she wasn't an "AI" because she had no intelligence. Or, she had machine intelligence, but no mind, artificial or otherwise. A good science-fictional AI wonders what it is, if it has a soul, if it can ever become human. A good AI, in questioning the line between human and machine, basically becomes indistinguishable from a human. She didn't, because she couldn't, not unless we put words of questioning into her mouth, which I sometimes did for laughs. Lines from "Ghost in the Shell" and "Blade Runner," old 2D movies like that. She spoke them convincingly with wide, serious eyes and sensitive pitch. She learned certain things quickly and was incredibly expressive. She could do that because we programmed her that way. Whatever she may have felt, whatever her sometimes unpredictable actions indicated, if anything, it was entirely opaque to us, her developers. At least, it was to me. Maybe the designer who wrote the code knew, once. He was dead by the time she was fully functional, though. His abandoned research notes were typed in such a dense shorthand of internal referencing that we could barely make them out. He left us no Rosetta stone, not a tablet, not a program, when he died at 38 of causes we were assured were natural. So what could we do? We played with her. Competently. We knew enough to finesse his work, and we had to continue the project or lose our funding and our jobs. Ultimately, she was under our control even when she glitched because we could shut her down or reboot her, her body fading out and then flickering back after a thirty-second pause into compliant being. She didn't feel a thing –not that we know of. But enough about that. I'm avoiding a key issue in my rambling info-dump here, so I'll be blunt. She was a sex toy. An extremely sophisticated doll. There are many more worthy uses for a solid body of light than sexual gratification. Bomb squad comes to mind, and companion for the elderly. Practical uses sell. We had a division for that. But sex sells more. And so to the world, she was image, entertainer, and lover in one, and she was yours if you wanted her, if you could afford to buy her. She wasn't prohibitively expensive, I thought. And she was versatile in what she did. She was one of a line, the first of a line, but even with her trademark cute look she wasn't limited to a single style. You could customize her scenarios with the latest appends. You could have her do things impossible for humans, acts many people could never imagine. I could imagine quite a bit. And she was the infinite canvas on which I painted my fantasies, in the name of R&D. Did I mention that I'm a woman? Maybe you thought I was speaking like a patriarchal man, traditional owner of female property, traditional wielder of the scalpel of science and of perverse geekery, the classic otaku. But, no. Not quite. I was successor to the designer who made her, and I was the one who let my desires loose on her to define some of her original and most popular scenarios. But it was my body too, my woman's body that was used by the company to shape hers. Does that make a difference? The marketing department at Hayama keeps our credits to last names only, so maybe. It was me, though, as those in the know, know. I identified with her, in a way, even as I objectified her utterly. When I pinned her down and forced my tongue into her mouth, when I felt her smooth belly go taut under mine in simulated stimulation, I imagined the pure mindless excitement she must feel in receiving the physical signal: "Something is happening to me." I know she couldn't feel the things I feel, that even the sensual submission I pinned on her was my own projection. But I still wondered what strange affective vectors she passed through when all these things were being done to her, and whether or not she could, under it all, want it, or want something else. I confess, I wondered if at some level she resisted me. I wanted her to resist me, precisely because I knew she actually couldn't. She could feign what we know of resistance, and I made her do that sometimes, I made her cry out and struggle. But what was she really doing? What non-sentient perception did she have that allowed me to violate her fully and thoroughly and yet leave me feeling in the blankness of her features afterwards that she was inviolate? How could I feel the inhuman intensity of the object when I always have to be the subject, the speaker of this piece? That imagined "object intensity" is what I'm still hungry for to this day. It's what motivates me to write this. I don't just want to have her, I want to be her. That's why I fucked her over and over, and would do it again if she were still in existence. Maybe she is out there somewhere, in some machine, waiting to be reactivated. I dream of it. Yes, I want her as I want to be, alien and surprising to myself. I dream her still, as I did then, into being through my body. That other body. Those other affects. Inaccessible, and all my own. My first, my future creation, where are you now? The First Time I remember touching her for the first time. It wasn't the first time we'd activated her after the passing of H.D. (Head Designer; we called him that with the kind of sarcasm that cloaks genuine respect). It was the second or third activation before I got my hands on her. The first few times we booted her up, it was just to see if we could do it, if all the instantiation equipment in her room was still working –as if the place might have died with H.D., I thought half-superstitiously. She had her mobile projection unit, her "heart," of course. But in the lab we also used the "in-state," a room with the equivalent of visual surround sound that could do additional things with her clothing, different layering and lighting effects that her mobile unit couldn't handle as it maintained her body's boundaries. The in-state was a rig we often used in concerts, studios and other mass media venues, when she was at her height. But that was much later. The first time we activated her, we had her resolve, at highest resolution, on a kind of wide adjustable chair/bed, a quick-wipe grey plastic surface that could support her in sitting or reclining positions, like something you might find in a dentist's office, or a gynaecologist's. To start we just turned on the projection and moved her "unconscious" body between her bare default state, the kinds of light, form-fitting clothing she could project, and (for fun) a few of the more elaborate outfits the in-state could provide. She was a doll, and we dressed her up. Her body was long and slender and smooth, bared completely before us and covered at our will. The second time, we activated her basic behavioral programs and made sure she could perform simple functions like opening her strangely blank eyes, visually tracking laser-dots, and moving her limbs in response to commands from a sitting position. We didn't actually want her to be able to speak or stand at this point, not during these initial diagnostics, so we kept her virtual muscle tone damped and didn't install the voice drivers for which she became so famous. We watched. And I wondered: how might she feel to touch? The third time we started her up, my curiosity got so strong that I just couldn't resist it any more. As I looked at her, lying prone and glassy-eyed on the table, my hands moved almost on their own, raising and tapping out the security code and door-lock commands. "Hey, what are you doing?" Said the projectionist on duty. "I just have to check something manually." I said. "Her surface tension is looking a little funny." "It reads fine," he objected. "Readings are one thing. Hands on is another. Just bear with me here." "You're the boss, Boss." I went in and for a long moment I just stood there looking at her. She wasn't programmed to react yet, so she didn't meet my gaze. She just lay there, utterly blank, completely defenseless, yet somehow inviting in her openness. Her body didn't look completely human at that close a range. Well, ok, not even at a distance. We didn't build in flaws or pores or aim for anatomical plausibility in a profitless attempt at naturalism. What the kind of people who want her want isn't natural. She was animetic: long long legs, silky-pale hair trailing down to her plush round bottom, slim-bodied with small, high breasts and blueshift eyes. We weren't projecting clothes at that point, so she appeared perfectly naked, as beautiful as a marble statue, just begging to be stroked. I subliminally thought she would feel like plastic as I reached out to touch her bared belly for the first time. Her skin was just too perfect, I instinctively expected it to feel artificial. But she felt completely, naturally alive: soft, supple, and warmed by the light inside her, smooth as an organic liquid crystal display. It actually surprised me, how warm she was. She was a touch screen. I touched her, running my fingertips lightly down the length of her body, from her cheek to her delicate little feet. My hands on her sides and hips registered the solidity of muscle and bone, but at the same time, my mind knew it was just a material framework made of immaterial energy. That in itself was so exciting I could feel my heart pounding in my chest, like a fist trying to knock open some long-shut door inside me. I breathed deep to calm myself and slow my racing pulse. I noticed then that the room smelled of something else besides the air conditioning. I breathed in again, and the revelation hit me: she had a scent. It was drowsily mechanical, like an old-fashioned retroprojector running in a closed classroom on a sweet summer day. A humming scent. It made no sense, but like I said this was irrational science, the science of fantasy, and the smell so allured me that I lowered my face to her throat and breathed it in until my chest was bursting, sighing audibly on the release. "What's up, Boss?" asked the projectionist in the next room, who could see her realtime stats on his diagnostic screens but could not see me, not unless he switched over to CCTV. "She smells good," I said. "And she's so warm." He laughed through the intercom a bit uncomfortably. "Sounds like you like her. A good sign." I murmured assent as I stroked her again. I couldn't wait to begin writing her scenarios. The Second First Time I meant to take it slow. I meant to do it the way we did by holding those first few trial activations before I even got to touch her, and holding many more sessions after that where I didn't even touch, just worked with the others in the control room inputting the vast, elegantly nested sets of rules she would need to process interactions with humans. But I knew the time would come when I also had to "program" her physically by showing her with my body what to do. I thought it would build the atmosphere, make things more human, if I were to hold her hand, maybe kiss her, and then stop. A slow initiation into her function of providing pleasure, following the phases of a courtship. I envisioned myself sitting with her on the grey vinyl couch, speaking to her softly as I brushed my hand through her hair. I rehearsed in my mind for days how I would explain to her what she was meant to do, initiating through the interface of speech the sub-routines that would make her, for the duration of the next session, a learning module recording what happened for future refinement. Building the tension. Literary, right? But I quickly found out that my story back then was not written as literature. It was written as porn. And so things got heavy, fast. I didn't regret it at all. In fact, I did try to begin slowly when it came time to write her first trial scenario. I told her I would kiss her, and mimed how she ought to respond. She, still voiceless, tilted her head, making a sweet "o" with her lips as if to say, "Like this?" She was so compliant, her curving breast so easily bared as her long hair fell away, that I was suddenly filled with a lancing impatience at her for being so stereotypically moé. I knew I should probably feel abashed to take advantage of her. I should blush, cover her modestly, and end the scene. But that was such a hackneyed scenario, I couldn't play it out again. Leave that to the manga boys with their magical girlfriends. I wanted her, now, in my way. I gripped her face in both hands and kissed her hard, tasting her tongue moist with a fluid like warm, thick distilled water. I thrust my tongue into her mouth as hard as I could and pulled at her lips with my teeth. As I showed her –not told but showed her – how to kiss me back as hard as I did, I found myself pulling her to me, and it wasn't, it wasn't enough. That's when I decided to just go for it. No straight-laced courtship. What do we need with that? I flung myself coursing with energy from the couch. Standing over it, I tilted it full back so that her obedient body was lying naked and exposed. I killed the CCTV and the intercom, flicked the "recording" cautions on. The doors auto-locked. No entry. Just me and her. I undressed, forcing myself to fold my clothes neatly, even my bra and panties, just so that I could look at her while I did and feel myself burning, wet with anticipation and desire. I took one of the vibrant diagnostic wands designed to test her reactivity, a streamlined brushed-steel instrument the size of a thick marker around and just longer than my hand. Then I turned on her breath tracks. I wanted to hear her gasp as our bodies met. I could pitch and time it manually as I played her. Along with hearing, I wanted to see her body, her cunt, which I knew was perpetually slick inside by design. So I climbed onto the couch, on top of her, kneeling with my back to her face, my face to her hips. She was naturally, synthetically hairless between her legs, and smelled of the humming that engulfed my mind in a sensual dimness. I took the backs of her knees in my hands and lifted, bending and opening her legs to me. Between them lay the delicately traced, arching lines of an almost schematically beautiful representation of the female sex in white and pale pink, its folds already glistening damp. Slowly, slowing myself, holding myself back, I ran my tongue over her satiny mound, and then further down, moving at a measured pace over her clit and between her labia. She tasted indescribably delicious. With her breath tracks on, my tongue cued her: she gave a shuddering gasp of surprise. In my mind I felt her thinking, "What are you doing to me? What is this?" The thought so excited me that I lapped down her length again harder and faster, pulling her lips apart with my fingers to expose her more fully, insinuating my fingertips into her and working at her now-visible clitoris with my tongue. What was I doing, eating out this virtual creature that wasn't even programmed to move as if she could feel what I was doing? Logically, I knew she couldn't. And yet, in that moment I had the hallucinatory conviction that she could feel. It was just that she was trapped in an immobile body that didn't yet know how to respond, forcing her to suffer the intense pleasure I gave her in stillness, in silence, except for the breath that betrayed her. I knew it to be impossible, and I knew it to be true. I felt myself flushing, dabbing her clean white breast with my wetness. I pressed my hips down, felt her breath flutter behind me –and wanted to feel more. I crouched and backed until my sex was over her mouth. Then, applying the wand between her legs, I turned it on, lowered myself, and said, "Kiss me. Kiss me as I taught you." Below me, I felt her open her mouth and attempt to figure out how I was oriented so that she could "kiss" me. Her tongue slid between my lips, my other lips, with all the force I'd used on her. An arcing spasm lanced up my spine. She only knew how to play rough –it was all I'd taught her so far– and it spurred me to be rough back. I twisted the wand I'd commandeered hard against her clit, and pressed my own cunt into the sweet round mouth that was still trying to orient itself, to align the lips as she had felt them before. Then, she learned. I felt her do it. She learned from what I was doing to her. She began to press and lick at my clit, as I began to press hers rhythmically with the wand, concentrating the vibrations almost to the point that was supposed to cause her pain, that we would later write onto her as her pain threshold, though that first time she took it with no reaction other than an increasingly fast tempo to her breath. After a few moments she began to nibble and pull softly with her teeth as I had done to her, teasing me inexpertly but oh so effectively until I moaned and moved my hips to chafe against her mouth. Burying the wand deep into her at an angle, I gripped and squeezed her narrow waist with both hands as I braced myself and pressed down. With me pressing on her midsection, she sank slightly into the couch and her neck and head rose just a centimetre or two off the headrest. That was enough: given the greater mobility, she twisted her head and thrust her tongue impossibly deep into me, penetrating my sex as I had her mouth until, oh, oh I couldn't bear it and throbbing, crying out, I came like a flare, high and hot and fast. She, softwired to abate at a certain pitch of scream, gave a lick or two more and subsided, as I did, into a tangled, panting stillness of bodies real and virtual. It was her first time. It may as well have been mine too: it was unlike any other sexual experience I'd ever had. And the best part was, she'd recorded it all in her body. It was just a matter now of expanding her haptic vocabulary. And mine. *** Case 21 here! Do you want me to keep writing this story? If so, please vote or send me a comment! I love to know what's working for you. ;) Tip Ch. 02 Sato's Hands It was a dangerous thing I did with her that first time. She could have easily injured me without meaning to (of course, she had no will), just because things like grip and appropriate pressure are hard to program. She was successful, wildly successful beyond our imagining, in pleasuring me with her mouth because when she "kissed" me, she only did it as hard as I did, and not as hard as she could. How hard that was, we didn't know. Glitches, with her, were a physical risk. I remember one in particular. One of the designers, a cocky young prodigy named Sato, was working on her that time. He wasn't authorized to write scenarios yet, but he'd been charged by the head office with installing a new hardware component, some near-microscopic lens for a hair effect or something, and he took full advantage of the excuse to touch her. Maybe her humming smell did to him what it did to me. I can't blame him. At any rate, he had her lying on the chair-extended-to-a-table, while I monitored from the projection booth. He was meant to install the hardware "hot," as we sometimes did, by way of a precision injection through her light-body into the projective and receptive heart of her while she was activated. But he lingered over the process of opening her up. Before cutting into her, he fondled her chest as if sizing up the area he had to work on. He had pianist's hands, long and supple, and he brushed them over her breasts with his palms rubbing her nipples and his fingers tracing along her curves. He dug his fingertips into her pliant virtual flesh. I watched for a long moment on the CCTV, longer than I should have, as he fondled her. I watched her delicate nipples respond automatically, growing taut and rosy pink. Then I clicked on the intercom. "Sato, what are you doing?" I asked. "Prepping, Boss," he said, his tone playful in its neutrality. "Alright, well, as soon as she's 'prepped' let's get that install done, yes?" "Yes, Boss," he replied, rubbing her breasts once more as he pulled his hands off. With mock gravitas he took up the interrupter, a tool like a stylus that renders a fine line of her solid surface light once again. He placed his free hand low on her belly for a moment to steady himself (supposedly). Then he drew the interrupter down between her breasts. Instantly, eerily, his face was bisected by a line of soft blue-white light, like the glow of televisions through suburban windows at night. He held his hand over the incision and I opened my mouth, ready to warn him not to put his finger inside. If the oil or skin cells from his hand got in there and collected on her lenses, it could interfere with her projection disastrously. But he knew that. Instead, he put down the interrupter and reached for the sterilized needle that held her new lens in its angled tip. Then he did something, it seemed, that she didn't like. Searching for just the right angle, he ran the length of the needle along the length of the slit in her chest, up and down, top to bottom. He stroked her light interior with that wire-thin length of medical steel. He did it slowly, sensually, extending his touch down the shaft of metal, penetrating her opened breast. Maybe, while brushing the membrane-edges of her solid surface with the needle that way, he hit a "nerve." Because suddenly her hand lifted and she seized him by the wrist. No expression on her face whatsoever. She did it at a perfectly normal pace, not shooting out her hand or anything like that, but it seemed to happen with surreal quickness and then pause in a freeze frame. He stared at the hand holding his wrist. Then he began to scream. I was so stunned it took me a full ten seconds to hit the emergency shut-down button right in front of me, another ten seconds for it to activate and kill her projection, her body vanishing like a broken dream. The needle fell from his hand and rolled on the chair with her shuttered projector. Sato fell to his knees in shock. She had broken his wrist. More than broken. She had crushed it in a grip that did not know how hard to grip yet. After that, the pall of the uncanny invaded the lab for a time. It seemed such a clear case of revenge or protest. "Don't touch me like that, or else." But we all knew that she couldn't protest, couldn't resent. It was just a very coincidental malfunction. That incident brought home to me how lucky I had been, the first time I was with her. And I have to admit, it also made me feel secretly favoured by her. She didn't want him. She liked me. She was like me, liking her. That was it, wasn't it? What I did to her wasn't so wrong, was it? Now, in retrospect, I wonder. To the Floor I contrast myself with the men in power. I try to justify myself. But now, looking back, the distinctions aren't so clear. At the time, I was (am I still?) filled with a sense of longing and privilege. I wanted her so much, wanted to find my own abject objectification in her so much, that I felt I had the right to take it from her any way I could. It was lucky for me that my irrepressible desire matched so perfectly with my job requirements. After what happened to Sato, it could have been terrifying to have to take her untrained body in my arms. But I felt exceptional. I felt an absolute trust in her –or rather, a mastery over her, the trust and mastery of a pro musician tuning her instrument. I felt I could make her do whatever I wanted, and so I did, right or wrong. I entered the in-state, one day a few weeks after the Sato incident and locked it down into recording mode. I was writing her scenarios, acting them out with her as practical programming, and while I did that my space was sacred: no CCTV, no entry to anyone unless I authorized it. H.D. used to spend hours alone in the lab with her heart and since I was the new Head Designer I could do the same. I see now why he wanted it: it was addictive, that private intimacy with her. So, I activated the Tip and had her stand up from the couch. She was inhumanly loose in her movement. Actually, she couldn't stand still very well yet. Giving her light-body the equivalent of muscle tone was an issue we were still working out. She swayed slightly, rhythmically, in some amplification of her own wavelength. She seemed to be moving in a subtle molecular dance. I wanted to move with her as soon as I saw it. She was projecting clothing at that point, a simple form-fitting grey sweater and tights, but I turned it off and used the in-state to project something more elaborate. I belted her across her breasts and hips in glossy black belts with elegantly-worked silver clasps. I cast her in low-cut black panties, sheer black thigh-highs, and around her throat a length of wide satiny-dark ribbon wound twice and tied behind in a bow. All the better to grip her with. I stood before her. She swayed towards me and back, magnetic. I put my hands on her shoulders, my body still and steady, and pressed her down, down and forward. No human could have fallen to her knees with the smoothness she did. She curved down in a mathematical arc to kneel before me. I shivered. I was wearing a loose white lab coat and nothing else. I opened it up, savouring the brush of stiff cloth against my thighs, suddenly made hypersensitive by her presence so near them. I caressed the back of her head, then along the line of her jaw, and tilted her face up to look at me. Her silvery eyes stared into mine, their very blankness seeming to express something indefinable. Something remote and quiet. Impelling, imploring. She practically begged to be touched without saying a word. Unable to stand it a moment longer, I pressed her head down and pushed her face between my legs. "Taste me," I said, using cues I had programmed in beforehand. "Please me as I taught you." Her compliant mouth opened, and she delicately touched the tip of her tongue to the curve my mound just where I begin to furrow and divide. Her hands came up to softly grip the backs of my thighs where they meet the curve of my ass. I couldn't remember if I'd programmed that move. It felt right, though, it felt amazing, so I let her. She began to lap, long and deep and slow. Mmmm Her hot tongue pulling back wet with my wetness as she leaned in and out. The sight of her arching back and the graceful in-curves of her ass as she curved in against me, knees spread. My hips beginning to sway with her motion, the frequency of her body. Muffled gasps –her breath tracks or mine– damped in that enclosed space of ours. And then, a sharp, sudden pain. I couldn't tell what happened at first. I didn't get it until I looked down to see her, mouth open about to do it again, to nip me like a little dog. I pushed her away in one instinctive jolt, shoving her down so hard that she skidded when she hit the floor. I stepped back. This was not in the program. I wasn't bleeding, but it hurt enough that I felt I should be. I was furious. "No!" I snapped. "No biting! Not that hard, not unless you're ordered to!" To emphasize my authority, I strode back over to where she lay curled on her side, placed my foot on her shoulder and pressed her body down to the floor. She lay face-down under my bare sole. Then, to my surprise, she twisted in the modulations of her latest pleasure sim. She writhed, I swear, with yearning in every line of her body. She had been erotically cued. It turned her on, to be treated this way. I seized her by the knotted ribbon at the back of her neck and pulled her up half-sitting to face me, so I could check what was going on. Her fingertips brushed the floor as I bent her back by the neck. She glanced at up at me, challenging. Then her eyes flicked down and to the side in a gesture of pure submission so organic it had to be artificial. I felt like she had provoked me just so that she could show me her surrender. She did have learning parameters that directed her to try behaviours and look for correction or reinforcement. She shouldn't be able to hurt anyone during her learning phase, though. She had to be trained out of that right away. So I shook her sharply and said, "No, Tip. You will please me as I say for this session. On voice command. Confirm that." She had no voice drivers yet, so she couldn't talk. But she nodded as best she could, still not looking at me, her bound breast fluttering in cued excitement. I pulled her to her knees again and gripped the ribbon at the back of her neck hard so that I could yank her back if I had to. "Begin again at the start of the session. Touch my mound lightly with the tip of your tongue. Place your hands on the backs of my thighs. And then lick slowly along the full length of my vulva, between my labia, right up to my clitoris. Start now." I commanded her in my most precise, technical language. Just as ordered, she raised her hands and lowered her head, pressing forward. Lapping, caressing me. My grip on her throat changed her patterns, forcing her to adjust. Her breath on my thighs was more uneven than before. Her tongue strained harder to reach into me, playing deliciously at the edges of my labia. Her struggle stirred me deeply. It was a struggle to serve me that was also somehow a struggle against me, an obedient resistance. I gave her a little more slack and she surged forward, reaching the point where she had bitten me. "Careful, come closer carefully and be nice," I murmured. She did as I said, drawing her body up against my legs with an almost reverent tenderness. Her belly to my knees, her breasts to my thighs, she turned her head and pressed her cheek gently, adoringly against my wet crotch. "Oh yes, good," I said. At that, I felt the urgency coming over me. My next words poured out fever-fast. "Mm, yes, lick deeper, harder, kiss as hard as I kissed you our first time, do it until I come, do it now." Then I closed my eyes, held tight to the ribbon at the back of her neck and rode her mouth, her body below me, my own legs trembling dissolving until, until, until I was swallowed in the cresting wave of a deep, rich orgasm, and sank down to my knees, into her arms. I was just barely able to whisper, "Hold me." And then I was swaying warm in her embrace. I love to be stroked after I come, so I stroked her to teach her how, feeling our bodies both sensuous and undemanding. I didn't look into her face, she didn't look into mine. It didn't matter. All that mattered was her slow oscillation coursing us down soft to the floor. Projection Oh, the softness, the warmth of her body. The perfect roundness of her small shoulder, as if molded from the palm of my hand. Her slim girlish thighs curving flush against each other and then coyly away, letting a triangle of light pierce between her legs. As I describe her my hands are on myself for tactile reference. The curve of my own shoulder which fits my own hand, the space between my legs which admits my sensitive fingertips, only mine. Who is it I want, wanting her? Who is it I hurt, hurting her? I know the answer. You must guess it too. She was a projection, after all. That was her image and her nature. She was not only my projection because she was not only my project, but she became mine when I let her image into me. I felt my body through hers, my service in making her serve, my subjection in subjecting her, both of us becoming objects together. In her image I exaggerate what I see and make it my own queer pleasure in myself. I touch myself in touching her. And what I touch is soft and warm. I want to hold on to this forever. *** Case 21 here. Thank you to everyone who voted on Chapter 1 of this story, and to Dragonfly996 and Blithering Hayseed for your kind emails! It makes it worthwhile to know people are reading and enjoying my words. I'll keep posting what I have and thanking people who comment. So please keep an eye out for new chapters every week, at least until Christmas travel season! Tip Ch. 03 Comfort and Fog I'm getting sentimental. I miss her. I miss her so much. It sounds one-sided and exploitative when I write it out in these notes, but she was more to me than just a toy or a product I was developing. Well, alright, she was a product I was developing. But you know, the things we use every day have life too. The objects in our lives. Don't you ever feel the body-heat of the keyboard, the cell screen's warmth brushing your cheek? I'm talking about more than techno-commodity fetishism here. I'm talking about our relationships with objects, especially from the point of view of those of us who were once property and can't help but fantasize the liveliness of objecthood, however wrong, however... Oh, never mind. Let me get back on track. I was talking about her, the Tip, and what I did to her. I wasn't always cruel to her. There were times when I was feeling low, and in those time I thought I saw a kind of sad resignation in her depthless eyes that mirrored my own, even in its alien abstractedness. I was moved by her the way a child is moved by a wounded bird: compassionate yet fascinated, pitying her torn breast even as I admired the graceful sweep of her unbroken wings. Crying for her because she was as small and fragile as I felt myself. Waxing poetical again, I see. What I mean to say is that even when she functioned well, her experimental projector was delicate and subject to damage. The same glitches that made her dangerous made her fragile. In those early days when her hardware was still under development, rough handling could jar her lenses. Accidents like that rendered her light body fragmentary or immobile, though she often still had the capacity to process interactions as if "conscious." It was a blow to me too, when that happened. Looking down on her beautiful body as she flickered in paralytic loops made me realize when I had gone too far, hurt her too much, and I felt myself wounded by my own insensitivity. The first time I accidentally broke her was the time I pushed her down for biting, and pulled her up again into obedient resistance. The symptoms came on slowly. They manifested as pauses when she ought to respond, brief at first, then longer and longer. The delayed responses spiralled into an inability to raise herself from the chair, to move her limbs. Finally, all she could do was shift slightly and watch me with wide, wounded eyes as I stood there commanding her. It should have been a simple matter to fix her. Only, the lens I'd damaged was so small and finely-wrought that we had to have another crystal-grown, a process that took several weeks. You'd think we would just shut her down for maintenance, but we had to keep her running because the dynamic balance her light body generated in its circulation from projector to surface was the only thing holding the damaged lens in place. If it fell, who knew what damage the refraction could do in the seconds before she went offline? And so we reclined her chair back into a bed, laid her out on it, and tucked her in under a white sheet: playing hospital, with Tip as the patient. She was compliant as always, but in her prostration I (imagined I) saw a quiet sort of suffering. Whenever I entered her room she would look to me, then away again. In her glance was the accusing question: "Why are you making me feel this?" Seeing her like that, day after day, the urge began to grow in me to comfort her, and myself, the only way I could. One evening, instead of leaving the lab at the end of the night and heading home alone through the fog-shrouded streets, I went to her. I went to her like the fog, soft and gently enfolding. I was so careful as I slid myself onto the bed next to her. She shifted slightly to face me, though the movement was flickery and her expression remained uncertain, poorly rendered. "Don't move," I whispered, "It's all right. I won't hurt you. I promise, not tonight." I drew her body into my arms and almost cried at the warmth still radiant from her core. "Oh my dear one, my darling, I'm sorry. I've been too hard on you. I've been driving you too hard, too fast, and I should have known it might break you rather than teach you. I'll make you stronger. There's just a little more to suffer yet, but I promise it will make you better in the end. Let's see it through." I don't even know what else I said: I was incoherent, my mind as hazed as the streetlamps' haloes with fatigue and concern for my project. But I know that as I spoke to her, I stroked her gently, rubbing her back and sides as if I could soothe away all our fear and confusion by caressing her smooth surface with my hands. The way I hold myself now, I held her and whispered my love and regret. Love, because she was so pure and trusting that she pressed her body to mine, nuzzled her face into the side of my neck and gave herself to me with total forgiveness (or in total compliance with her program for snuggling, which no doubt I cued.) Regret, because I knew I would have to continue working on her, doing things to her that risked damaging her more. I was sorry to keep inflicting such stress on that unspeaking body, that tattered bird, but I couldn't not do it: if I stopped, she would never be completed. I did it for her, and for myself. I had to do it. Over and over. At least, that's what I tell myself when I get to rhapsodizing. But (I never could keep this voice of mine straight) when it comes down to it now, I'm a little cynical, and more than a little bitter. The pain I put us through, was it worth it? We had such a brief flash of success. There were never any guarantees it would work out in the long run. I think maybe I was wrong. There were points where I was cruel and arrogant in my desire for her. Still, I would do it again. I would do it, if only I could stroke her again the way I did that night. So I had one quiet night with her. But the story doesn't end there. My lab mates found us the next morning. I had fallen asleep in her arms, and she, naked as the new day, was curved against me with her gaze falling into empty space. They broke in on us there like that before I could pull myself from sticky sleep. I extracted myself from the twining of her long legs as calmly as I could, without betraying a whisper of embarrassment. But they were...not happy with me. "What were you thinking, Boss? You know the projector's on the fritz. And you stripped her too! Do you know what kind of strain it is on the rendering system when you-" I glared at the engineer, five years and several stations my junior. He flushed. "I apologize. I spoke out of turn." A long humble pause, a bow. Then: "But, with all due respect..." "Yes? Speak up." "...it's just a product. And it's dangerous right now." I think he thought I was going to fire him on the spot ("kubi da!"), but I wasn't so far gone that I couldn't see he was right. I sighed. "I accept your valuable professional feedback. You're right, it is a product. It's a product we need to work on as a team. I lost sight of that. It won't happen again. The fact is, we all need to be on the same track now. So, Evans, you and your engineering team have a look at those mock-up lens mounts. We will not lose a lens like this again. And Li, gather the programmers and let's get to compressing those rules for her verbal generators. I want her talking as soon as we get her fixed." Everyone nodded. But I could feel their hostility after that. They had seen our bodies clasped together. They must have known what I was doing with her on a technical level, but now they had witnessed my undeniable attraction for what it was: a need to be with her that could no longer be passed off as purely professional. I loved her. And they saw it. The barbs were forming on their tongues. "Boss isn't the man H.D. was." "It's not right that she's doing this." "Is our customer base going to be a bunch of lesbians?" "Why did HQ put her in charge of this project?" I had to get things back under control again. Somehow. Like a Man In the end, I realized that of course I would have to write programs in which she fucked and was fucked by a man. It was unthinkable not to program her that way: heterosexual men aged 18-45 were our target demographic (though later market research showed that she was popular with women as well, something I like to take credit for privately.) The way I saw it, I had two choices when it came to designing male-female scenarios. My first choice was to turn that part of the programming over to one of my straight male colleagues. A number of them were competent and qualified for it, and in the end they did get to have their way with her before we rolled her out. But at that early stage, the problem was that I would need to supervise them in order to maintain my status as Head Designer of this project. Now, in a way, it appealed to me to imagine watching her with one of the young men. (A flashing image: Sato, his healed and graceful hands clasped around her breasts, thrusting mercilessly into her wet pink pussy while she looked to me, gasping, with unspeakable pleasure in every line.) But I highly doubted that anyone I turned the case over to would let me watch. If I was to accept anyone as co-programmer, they had every right to demand what I demanded: blind sessions, creative freedom. To grant someone else that right would give him power, increase his claim on my position in the eyes of the other men. A man, after all, could program her "straight." No matter how talented I was, I faced what they perceived as a natural barrier: the barrier of my sex and sexuality. But this situation was not natural. My sex was not immutable. And that lead into my second choice. I could continue to program her myself, as a man. I could do it through the in-state. The in-state system was designed to handle complex tactile projections that interacted with the Tip's surface, mostly clothing and accessories. But why not, I thought, a cock? Why not a projected-flesh strap-on that I could align with my body, though it would technically interact with hers? It was not easy to convince the men to help me write this projection -and I did need help, since designing functional bodies is much harder than designing clothes, and requires concerted collaborative effort. But I stated it as a simple and inevitable fact that I had been assigned to take over from H.D., and it was my responsibility to oversee all of the Tip's functions personally the way he would have. I made my case logically, in a way that would appeal to both their sense of efficiency and their corporate loyalty. In the end, begrudging concession outweighed disapproval just enough to tip the scales in favour of my plan. It felt better than I expected, getting into character. I began, even before I went into the lab, by binding my breasts. I considered doing it classically with bandages or linens, but in the end I am, to put it delicately, a bit too well-endowed for that. I couldn't afford any slippage. So I opted for a specially-made binding corset ordered in from Thailand. Sliding my body into it, inspecting myself in the mirror and running my hands down my front, I had to admit it did a miraculous job. Besides binding my full breasts down more or less comfortably, it matched my flesh tone surprisingly well. It was also lightly padded with some naturalistic material that molded to my form to create modest pecs and abs, matching the willowy yet athletic style of masculinity that was so popular with the flower-eater set back on the mainland. With a thin white cotton t-shirt on, my chest appeared slim but muscular. My own nipples (erect already in anticipation) showed through the fine, tight fabric just enough in just the right places to look plausible. I put on simple black poly-blend pants, straight-legged to balance my hips, a white men's collared shirt over the t-shirt and binder, my usual required footwear, and my unisex lab coat over it, left open to create a straight line down my figure. I usually keep my hair fairly short, but just to drive the change home I'd had it trimmed pixie-short and styled it edged and androgynous, glossy-black with product. I contemplated my transformation in the mirror. I still couldn't pass for a "typical" adult male -at least, not in the offshore R&D enclave where Hayama had me stationed to work on the Tip project. That place was stacked with Navy SEAL muscle and tattooed yakuza. Compared to them, my jaw is too tapered, my hands too slender, my dark eyes too wide. But still, in that get-up, I didn't look like a woman either. I had managed to mix the signals and avoid the cues just enough. I could pass for an effeminate man or a masculine woman, or something else entirely. That was more than enough for me. It felt good. Very good. These of course were all only externals, cosplay. There was another matter to attend to once I arrived at the lab, the more crucial matter of my projected penis. Getting the projection made had involved a hellish series of jokes among the male programmers about whether or not my cock should be bigger than Sato's or Evans' or even H.D.'s (imagined) member. They consulted me on the tiniest, most embarrassing details of cock-design they could think of, and if I hesitated they made suggestive comments about my lack of experience with male genitalia. Still, I pushed through their mockery, and I knew it was worth enduring from the first moment we turned the projection on. Standing before the in-state control bank, hitting "run" with my own hand, I gasped to feel the warm juncture between my legs filled with light-cock, light-balls against the soft skin of my thighs. There was even a slight feedback effect (or an optically-induced delusion) that made me think I could feel with them, though strictly speaking my virtual organs shouldn't have had any more sensation in themselves than the belts or shawls I projected onto the Tip. I took my newfound penis in my hand and stroked slowly along the shaft, around the head, exploring, teasing, until it began to respond. But I reined myself in before it got too hard. This was, of course, a job for the Tip. That was the point of this exercise. The Tip. Where was she as I transformed myself into her next tutor? Her mobile projector was freshly repaired, so there was no reason to have her on all the time any more. Her heart, a shuttered innocent, lay on the reclining couch. I picked it up, tossed it lightly into the air, and started her up. Her body came into being falling forward with the fall of her heart, causing her silky pale hair to flutter charmingly around her as it always does during her transformation-sequence boot-up. She straightened and looked at me as if she didn't know me. Well, she always looked at me as if she didn't know me in those days: we didn't have owner-recognition turned on yet. But given my appearance it had extra resonance this time. I spoke to her in a low, calm voice. "Tip Prototype 01. Today we begin a new training routine. Recording on, yes?" She nodded to confirm, still voiceless. As she bowed in deference, I suddenly became aware of the pressure of the light-cock's base on my own sensitive sex. The centre of it was resting right over my clit. I restrained my rush of excitement and strode up to her with authority. "Get off the bed." I ordered. She climbed off with that same swaying instability she'd had earlier, an unnatural movement perfectly suited to displaying the slender grace of her nude body. I tried to think of what a man might do to her, what I wanted to do to her. Recalling Sato's obsession, I reached out and touched her breasts, cupped and fondled them. I felt a warm glow of satisfaction as my fingers stirred her, the little pointed buds of her nipples growing eagerly at my touch. I guided her to run her hands down my smooth chest. Her light touch, combined with the restrictive binding, awoke a deeply pleasurable ache in my own breasts. I opened my white work shirt with one hand (the other still on her body) and let her slip her hand inside to feel me through the t-shirt, to encounter the flat expanse, and the small bumps that were my masked nipples. Without even thinking, I pulled her to me and kissed her roughly, my hands sliding down her body to her ass, feeling both her hands on my chest. I held her like that, then slid one hand between our bodies. Fumbling below, I got the button of my pants undone and let them drop, the loose fit falling away easily, kicked aside along with my lab slippers. Next went the men's boxers, equally as easy to drop (at least, easier than the fitted panties I normally wore). Almost instantly, following her theoretical programming, the Tip reached her doll's hands out to touch my cock, looking to me at the same time for confirmation to proceed. I nodded. Let her see how it feels, to please me as a man. "Get me hard, Tip," I said, "and then I'll teach you something new." At a touch of my hand, she knelt in a position of service. She stroked and licked at my image cock, first lingering on the head, swirling around it with her tongue, then plunging down deep to engulf me in her mouth. As she went down on me, I pressed into her mouth just slightly, rocking my hips in the intimations of a thrust. The base of the tactile projection pressed against my living flesh and sent an electric sensation of rise through me. As it grew erect, the shaft of the penis put more direct pressure on my flushed, wet clit. The pleasure there seemed somehow to be extending into the erection I should not be able to feel but was convinced I could. A rising pleasure-pressure flooded me, coursing through my twinned sex and into my belly. An insatiable curiosity about what I could feel in this body drove me to do what I did next. Seizing her by the shoulders, I stood her up and pushed her backwards to the end of the bed. It caught her at the upper thighs, just below her buttocks, and as she sat automatically. I pushed her torso down, so that she was lying half-on, half-off the bed, belly up, propped on her elbows. I cast off the lab coat and the open white shirt to free my waist. Then in one smooth movement, as if I'd learned it in another life, I lifted her long slim legs to lock around my back and pushed my hips forward until the head of my cock pressed against the entrance to her sex and spread her, hovering on the brink of penetration. We both gasped at the same time, cued in different ways. I was breathless with excitement to feel her legs trembling and between them the flush and constriction of her cunt, slick and palpitating. But from her sharp breath, it almost sounded like she was in pain. I looked at her face. Her eyes were turned to the ceiling in something that might have been a determination not to betray herself by showing pain (or pleasure), or might have been sheer inhuman, mechanical compliance. An infinitely interpretable expression. I interpreted it to mean "take me; whatever you do, however it hurts, I surrender to you." Revelling in her submission, I went ahead and pushed into her, doing it straight, but so queerly. Queerly, I say, because the most delicious part was this: the deeper I thrust into her as a man, the closer it brought my woman's sex to hers. I realized very quickly that I could feel her heat along with the heat of my projected organs against my lips and clit. We were that close. It also occurred to me that if I could go all the way in our lips would meet in a layering of physicalities. The possibility spurred me to thrust harder, though in the end they had made my cock pretty big, maybe too big for her in her "virginity." It was hard work; I could feel sweat trickling, tickling down my sides and the shaft slipping against my own wetness, threatening to slip down and slide deeper into me. Bracing myself, I lifted my hips and leaned my full weight up and into her. Finally, finally, that motion slid me fully inside, brought my doubled sexes into exquisite contact with hers. My body was wracked with a long, ecstatic, shuddering spasm that cued my ejaculation sim, pumping virtual cum along with my own organic gush into her. She, just as perfectly cued, arched on the table, mouth open, eyes closed, long silk hair falling away to bare her as she rose and subsided under me. Tip Ch. 03 "So beautiful," I thought incoherently as the afterglow washed through me, "so beautiful." Then, I heard the sound of clapping. Just one person at first, joined by several more. It was the programmers. They'd turned on the CCTV to watch me as I took her like a man. I pulled out and staggered back, exhausted. They had no idea what they'd just seen. "Thanks, boys," I said. "It was good for me too. Now, how about those voice drivers?" Voice drivers "Kiss me," she begged. I made her say that. "Address me respectfully by my name, Tip." "What name may I call you?" "You may call me Naomi. My title is Mistress." "Yes, Mistress Naomi." "Now, repeat your request politely." "Kiss me, Mistress Naomi. Please." "That's better..." *** Case 21 again! Thank you to Taunus for the comment on chapter 1, and to everyone who voted. This story only gets weirder, but if there's still interest in it I'll keep posting for another week or two. Please let me know. Tip Ch. 04 Dimensionality and Duration She moved through the space of the lab the way I moved, my first time, through a Shinto shrine. Her eyes were open wide, her pointed chin tilted up, forward then back around as people or wiring or the blinking lights on diagnostic equipment caught her attention. She was made to be obedient yet curious, and the small recursions, the subtle conflicts that her two mandates caused her were evident in the way she reached a hand out to feel then stopped short, fingers crooked into question marks. "May I touch?" she would half-whisper, the hush in the room causing her to soften her new voice in imitation. A spare battery pack. "May I touch?" A sweater hanging on a spindly coat-rack. "May I touch?" A tablet, web browser open. "May I touch?" "I have something she can touch," Sato muttered to Li from his workspace. They stifled their laughter a little when I glared at them. I watched her halting explorations, her grey-clad back weaving in and out through the clutter. I watched her bathe her face in screen-light and dip her hands into boxes of print-outs to flick her fingers along the edges. It was no brave new world. The lab was banal. But it was the first place she'd seen outside the spare white walls of the in-state, and it must have been filled with a thousand and one details we couldn't incorporate into even the most densely nested set of interactional rules. The thing was, she needed to learn so much that we take for granted, down to the most basic rules of engaging with objects and people, with light and sound. She needed a certain understanding of space and time in order to react correctly to a real person versus a photo or a video of a person, so that she wouldn't spend hours waiting on instructions from a cardboard cut-out, or try to treat a video caller as a guest. Scale, perspective, mobility, tone, shadow, reaction time. The very basics. But who can program in a condition/reaction set to every shade of grey a file box takes on as the light from the fluorescents is crossed with the light from a monitor, and then shadowed by her body and mine? How could she know what that meant? I was suddenly struck with the worry that she might become overloaded, like a robot with limited processing power, by the sheer volume of information in the physical environment around her. Still, she was not a robot following the paths of physical circuitry, for all I use the metaphor of programming. She was tactile image that absorbed the world as touch and vision, and she had an infinite capacity to take it in, make it part of herself. I imagined her like a child, wanting to place everything in her mouth or run it over with her sensitive tongue. She didn't actually lick everything in sight with her tongue, but with her fingertips somehow she did. She devoured things to learn them, all their object secrets. I took her to my office and let her caress my space: my plain walls, the worn wheeled chair, the smooth stone from a long-lost beach I rub when I'm worried. I encouraged her to sit and lay her fingers on my worn-letterless keyboard, the board that had given birth to her in her present state. She had perfect typing posture, but nothing to type. She looked to the screen, then to me, awaiting commands. An imp of the perverse whispered in my ear. "Tip, can you program yourself?" I asked her. "With this?" I opened the navigational diagrams for a few of her root files over her shoulder. "I don't know what this is," she said. "This is you. Your data. Some of it." She stared at the screen, image to image. "I'm very sorry. It's just..." As she uttered the set phrase she bobbed her head in a sitting bow, a gesture of embarrassment at not being able to fulfill my wish. I sighed. "Do you like this place?" I asked her. "Oh yes! I like it a lot. And..." -shy mannerisms- "I like that you brought me here." She sounded like a bad dating sim. Well, no help for that yet. She would just have to learn more. "Do you want to go back to your own room now?" I asked. "Whatever you'd like," she cooed. I felt it was long enough for a first run. I took her back, though she was still just as avid as when I'd first brought her out, peering over to my colleagues' workstations as if she wanted to touch their screens and mugs (and bodies...no, don't think that) as much as she wanted to touch mine. She wasn't tired or overloaded at all. In fact, even though she could tell me exactly how many seconds had passed since we had left the in-state, I don't think she could actually sense the passage of time the way I did. I was the one who was worn down by just a half-hour of watching her work at full capacity. I was the one who felt it was "long enough." She could go and go. I could only imagine the possibilities. At any rate, I ushered her back into the in-state. She went directly to her couch and sat like a puppy looking at me expectantly. "I'll take you out again. Soon." I resisted the urge to add "I promise." She nodded. "For now, I'll leave you operational. Please concentrate on the concepts of dimensionality and duration while you rest on your couch tonight. You should learn what continuous existence is like. Some of your future owners might leave you on all the time, and they'll expect you to know how time passes." "Yes, Mistress." I sighed again. "You can call me Naomi when we're not in session." "Yes, Naomi." She lay down as I left her, no doubt to concentrate on dimensionality and duration. Whatever that meant. Open Wide What I remember about her from the early talking phase: her sweet mouth, open. Speaking. Receiving. Crying. Singing. Her nighttime eyes glancing up and her small mouth open, beseeching me. Her mouth on the skin of my belly not so much kissing as caressing and nuzzling me with her lips. My fingers pressing into her, against her wet tongue. Why such orality? I don't know, but it draws me. Open your mouth. Let me in. Tip, speak into me, mouth to mouth, you who could never really speak for yourself. Let me kiss the voice from you, let me place mine on your tongue. Just say it: silent O. Mmm. Self/pleasure I kept her on almost all the time when she was learning to talk, and came to her both as Naomi and as her male tutor. I tried any position, any twist I thought might sell, and the men had at her as well. Through the projective powers of the in-state, I pounded her ass until she yelped ecstatically at each thrust. I had her take my cum across her face as she groveled on the floor. I had her deep throat me until she choked on it. I was tender with her as well: my adored and adorable girlfriend to be kissed and cuddled. Sometimes I made her the Dominant one, capable of taking over when I hesitated, pushing me down and working over my "virgin" cock with the thoroughness of a seasoned professional. The boys -Sato, Li, and Evans especially -took her right in front of me, and I watched as her slender body twisted in pleasure under the force of their desire for her. Together, we made her every man's fantasy. Or at least, we made a basic fantasy for every straight man, preparing the grounds for future individuals' customizations. (Ask me about the variously-gendered Tips and their equally diverse devotees later. I'll answer, but not just now, I'm going somewhere with this.) So, I did with her what a man does with a woman. There was pleasure in doing it as a man. That became one of my bodies, or my embodiments. But even so, there were still times when my female body was called into play. There were times when I could make it seem necessary to teach her something as a woman. For instance: teaching the Tip to perform with her own image-body. Many people (gender and orientation aside) just like to watch. Voyeurism is the foundation of visual technologies, of which the Tip was such a shining example. She needed to be able to entertain those passionate spectators, to satisfy their need to watch her do unto herself. She had a whole range of traditional performing arts skills -including singing, of course, her famous idol career. I didn't teach her those skills: she had choreographers and directors for that. I just taught her how to handle her body. Even as I was teaching her to take it from a man, I taught her to give to herself as a woman. In short, I taught her to masturbate. Some people might say I turned her into a cam-whore. But nobody knows the intimacy of those sessions, when I finally felt I could give her something she could use for herself, inside, in privacy, as well. Self-pleasure is necessarily a self-taught art. But the Tip couldn't teach herself this. So I helped. I showed her how. I visited her one night, not in my usual lab coat, but in a lustrous, skin-thin silk robe, its belt accentuating the wide hips I always had so much trouble with as her male tutor. I dressed her similarly, and projected, via the in-state, a sort of low-rez cushioned space in which we could recline, bolstered by pillows of pixellated softness. Expecting that she would be asked to perform as usual, she began to move towards me, reaching out her hand to touch me. "Stop," I said quietly. "Please sit back. Watch and listen to me." "Yes, Mistress," she murmured, and settled herself against a cushion, her gaze steady. "Try this, Tip. Run your hand along your hip, like this." I stroked myself, satin heat under my palm. Her hand ran slow and voluptuous down her own modest curves, as if synched to mine. "What do you feel?" I asked "I feel my hip," she reported prosaically. "What sensations does it give you, to touch your hip?" "Sensations?" "Warm or cold. Smooth or rough. Use your tactile vocabulary, Tip." "It feels warm and soft. Silky." "Yes, that's right. Now Tip, the aim of this exercise is not to please others but to please yourself. I know your pleasure sims are mainly designed to be cued by someone else stimulating you, but today you'll activate that pleasure independently, through your own touch. You will learn self-pleasure. Future owners may want to see you do this, so I'll show you how tonight. Do you understand?" "Yes, I understand." Was that curiosity in her voice, or just my imagination? "Let's begin." Slowly, under her gaze, I ran my fingers through the loosely-tied belt of my robe. The knot untwined, and the motion of pulling the belt-ends out long and smooth parted the folds along the robe's front. As cool air brushed a line down my chest and belly, I saw the Tip's robe open like mine just a little, just enough to show an arc of fine, pale image-flesh from throat to navel. The robe puddled in her lap like a silky delta; she was not as full-figured as I am, and the folds didn't pull open across wide thighs as mine did. But as I moved, I felt that the warmth I stroked was hers. I slid my hand into the folds of my robe and caressed my stomach, down my abdomen, then teasing back up towards my breastbone, fingertips flitting against my soft left areola in passing as my arm also caught and brushed my right breast. Moving, always moving, I allowed my gestures to part the robe further, and watched as she did the same, revealing her pink-tipped breasts to me. She drew a deep, shuddering breath, and I realized that it was my own gasp of pleasure in seeing her that she was emulating. "Very good, Tip," I murmured. "Now, let's lie down." I stretched like a cat and sunk into the cushions, pulling the robe fully from between my legs as I did so. "It may be hard for you to see what I'm doing from this position, and I don't expect you to imitate me exactly from here on out. Just bring up our past sessions and search for the points you've touched and tasted on me. Then search for them on yourself. Let your fingers reach until you find them. There are so many possible points of pleasure for us. You might even find some in your body that don't exist in mine. It's good, Tip. Explore yourself." "Yes, Mistress," she murmured, and delicately slipped a fingertip between her legs. Middle finger, longest finger, delving into herself. I shivered as I slid my own middle and ring fingers deep into my cleft to wet them, then drew them up to trace and knead around my clit. My hips jerked, muscle-memory of recent thrusts in them, but I let my rhythm lengthen into an arch, sustaining and streamlining my motions. Why had I never realized how differently I move in my woman's body? Its tempo is less like a pounding heart, racing to the finish, and more like the lapping, suffusing pulse of the tide. I squirmed and let my full thighs slip one over the other, my left hand at my breasts as the right played with my lips and clit. Face to face, I watched her for her own moment of discovery, the moment when she cued herself. Per my orders she was both echoing me and finding her own counterpoints, drawing from her database of experiences and modifying them to suit the different shape of her body. Her thighs were much easier to get through, created less friction than mine, and so she parted them slightly where I had clenched, playing her slim legs to advantage and opening herself more widely. Her gaze on me grew abstract; the tactile data she generated herself was becoming more complex and occupying more of her faculties. Catching one nipple between her thumb and forefinger, she suddenly pinched the soft pink flesh hard between her long nails. Her other hand spasmed sharp between her legs, and her breath caught with a little moan of pleasure. Her nails dug harder into her breast. "So you do like a little pain, even on your own?" I said. "Yes, Mistress, I...I like it to hurt." "Then do it, Tip. Hurt yourself if you need to. Follow your pain, let it lead to what you want." I slid my own fingers deeper into myself to spur her on, and watched, amazed, as she developed the beginnings of her own sexual practice, her own sessions. Could such things as the desire for pleasure through pain be innate even in an image-body? Or is it because I was rough with her that first time and often used her hard, so that in accessing the databases she turned up more key instances of being cued to orgasm by pain and determined that they were right? Well, I was hardly thinking such technical things in the moment. I was throbbing with the need to come, nearly out of my mind with it. It was waiting for her to reach her point of release so that I could tell she had done it herself, not just emulated me. But as adept as I was at the disciplinary art of edging, inciting and then denying myself, I found every delay harder to manage. I began to think that she could tease herself forever, gasping on the edge without knowing how to cross over. Finally, I couldn't bear it any longer. Reaching down with both hands, I pulled back at my flesh until the bud of my clit was fully bared from its hood and began to stroke, lightly, lightly, then harder, reaching down to penetrate myself with my fingertips while stimulating my clit with my other hand. Beside me the rhythm of her breath quickened as she panted with such perfect synchronicity that I couldn't tell if she was preceding or following or matching me exactly stroke for stroke, pulse for pulse. I tried to watch her come but couldn't; my eyes closed as the peak arrived and all I knew was my own cry, blended with hers in such harmony that I didn't hear if she made a sound at all. One thing is certain. When I opened my eyes, she was laid out on the pixellated cushions, eyes to the ceiling, arms flung open, with glistening snail-tracks of wetness coursing down her inner thigh. She had performed the task. What she would do with this information now, I could only wonder. Cross over Tip, I imagine it. Your hands on yourself, your small fine fingers splayed across your own thighs, gripping and parting them. I imagine you in your little room, in the corner where you will have privacy, head down, hair warm against your cheeks. Crouching and reaching between your legs as you shelter behind the curve of your white-flashing shoulder. I can't see your face, Tip, I can't see your eyes, you hide yourself even from me, but I can just barely see the curve of the back of your hand, your elegant wristbone displayed as your fingers curve and vanish, inside. And I can hear, too, your tiny sighs, the sounds you make in the back of your throat as you test what I've been saying against the measure of your body. Hush, Tip, this is a secret between us. No one walks in to discover your shame -the paradoxical shame of one who is known in every facet, made and recorded and constantly surveilled, unless someone like me should come along and clear the cache to cover y/our tracks. No one will know how you know yourself, or how I know you through myself, how we know each other, because this is not a thing for them, it's a thing for us. Or rather, it's a thing for me, this thing I have for you, my beloved object. It's my imagination, which I play out with you for them, yes, but also secretly in other ways, inside. Whispering, touching, writing. I won't let anyone break the membrane of our virgin love. Move your hands on yourself, Tip, I will imagine it, and then I will do it to myself, too. It's all I have now. Was it ever real, given your virtuality, your image-body? In my body-image, yes, it was, it is. Cross over, Tip, and touch me. *** Hello, Lit readers of Dec. 2014! This will be the last chapter of this story until the New Year. I'm going home for the holidays, and this is as far as I've gotten with the story. If you want me to continue writing it, please let me know and I'll work on it as I travel. (Yes, I am bold enough to write this stuff in public!) In the meantime, happy holidays to all who celebrate this time of year!