Emergence

Author's note:

This is a standalone story set in the near future. All characters are over the age of 18. I hope you enjoy!

***

I'm allowed one orgasm per month.

Please don't misunderstand me, I'm not complaining. It's really quite generous of them, and most months I don't want to climax more than once anyway. It's fine.

Today though I'm looking forward to it. The new morning nurse is quite pretty, with straight brown hair and kind, hazel eyes. I know I shouldn't think about her looks, she's only here to care for me after all, but it's natural, right? I'm ill, but I'm still a man.

My carepod is a nice one. It must sound funny to hear a guy in a carepod talking about other carepods, but from the shows I've seen they aren't all this well equipped. To pass the hours I can watch almost any programming I want, set the walls to simulate different locations, or just listen to music. One of my favorites is to program the scene to be the streets of downtown Boston. I don't know, I guess I just like watching all of that bustle and activity flowing past and around me as if I was in the middle of the street.

Not that I do that when it's time for my orgasm. When Stephanie, if my awful memory has her name right, wheels in the collection cart, the walls go grey automatically.

"Good morning, Mr. Simms." I like the way she makes eye contact. The previous nurse would just tell me to pull down my pants. "It's fourth Thursday," she says, and I'm sure her smile is genuine, "you know what that means?"

I do know. I mark fourth Thursdays in the carepod's calendar with a smiley face. "Collection day," I say. Does she know I look forward to it? She must.

Stephanie looks at the holo chart before replying. "My apologies Mr. Simms, I'm still learning your routines. I believe I'm supposed to ask you 'before or after?'"

"After." To me, this should be obvious. Who'd want to orgasm first, then be poked with needles? The orgasm is the reward.

"Very good," she says. It's only her fourth or fifth time in my pod, and she's still glancing at me with a sort of furtive curiosity. I notice that with all of my caregivers the first few times they see me. Probably just clinical interest.

Stephanie arranges the tray and begins taking samples. There's a nasal swab, then a needle stick which is used to fill three small tubes. While the blood sample is being taken, she wraps my wrist with a band that chimes and beeps. She's actually quite good with the needle, and afterward only needs to apply a single drop of liquid bandage.

"All done?" I ask after the nurse removes the wristband.

"Mr. Simms," she says with an indulgent smile, "I'm sure you know I need one more sample."

I grin back, helping her pull down my pants and briefs. Her eyes linger on my exposed penis for just a moment longer than necessary. The same clinical interest.

"Porn?" she asks, and when I nod the carepod obliges by displaying a video behind and just above Stephanie. A handsome and well-built man is laying in bed with a young woman on either side of him. They kiss, first on the mouth, then down his body until they're licking and sucking his cock. My penis begins to get hard.

After a look over her shoulder to see what the carepod's AI selected for me, Stephanie puts on a pair of rubber gloves and lifts my penis. The sensation, even muted by the gloves, is blissful. When she squirts on a small dollop of lubricant it gets even better. Soon, I'm erect.

Not that I compare to the guy in the video. He has an admirable cock - rigid, veined, and hard. I mean, any guy would be hard with two beauties licking his penis, but he's definitely well endowed. Compared to me, especially.

Stephanie doesn't seem to mind. She's stroking my penis gently, making sure the thin layer of lube gets where it needs to be. I find myself looking at her as often as I do the porn video. The porno girls are hot, but Stephanie is real, and she's pretty cute. Soon I'm fantasizing about her sucking me like in the video, not masturbating me with gloves on.

Once I'm as hard as I'll get, Stephanie measures my penis, both length, and circumference. It does kind of break the mood, but I suppose they need the data in order to bring me the best care possible. Anyway, Stephanie is pretty quick and soon she's stroking me again.

"Be sure to let me know when you're about to climax."

It won't be long. In the video, both women are tonguing the man's balls while they maintain eye contact with him. They're both pretty and have glistening pink tongues which they swirl around his sack. "I'm close," I say, my voice thick.

"Thank you," Stephanie says. I feel her place a small collection dish on my stomach. The man in the video is close, too, his abs tightening and his hips jerking. The women are urging him on, begging him to cum, saying how much they want it.

I flick my eyes away from the video and find myself making eye contact with Stephanie. It's so much like the video - a girl with pretty eyes making her man climax. The orgasm finds me with unexpected speed and I gasp, spurting semen into the collection dish. To my surprise, Stephanie doesn't look away or stop. She keeps stroking me, eyes locked on mine, making sure I get to savor every moment of bliss. Only once I'm done panting through my orgasm does she remove the collection dish. She hands me a disposable wipe.

"I think you enjoyed fourth Thursday, Mr. Simms."

It's obvious I did, but I stammer out "Oh y-yes" anyway. In the video, the porn actor shot his load, too. The women are licking his cock, playing with his cum, and kissing each other. Stephanie watches for a moment, glances back at me, then stands.

"Well then, this gives us both something to look forward to."

*

As you can imagine, Stephanie's visit was the high point of my day. After that, I napped for a bit and then was granted an hour in the enclosed garden. They encourage me to walk, but not overdo it. I don't know what overdoing walking would look like, but they have a point. I'm not in great shape. I'm flabby, have low energy, and tire easily. An hour is probably plenty. It's fine.

I'm pretty sure Markus, the afternoon nurse, doesn't like me. He's the one who brings me my medications and every day seems to find a way to do so with greater contempt. The cartridge has five separate medications, each in its own tube. All Markus has to do is plug the cartridge into the dispenser, then wrap the dispenser cuff around my bicep. Still, he finds a way to act put upon. He slams the cartridge in as hard as he can, jerks my arm into position, then practically slaps the cuff around it.

Why does he have to stick around while the meds are dispensed? Whatever. With a sigh, Markus flops into the carepod's guest chair, flicks on his holo screen, and starts watching some vapid reality show. It's about some hillbillies who have tapped illegally into the power grid supplying an elite gated community. I've seen him watch this show before. The hillbillies are fighting more and more among themselves, threatening to blow their operation.

I'm not absorbing one of the medications, the third one in the cartridge. Markus has abused the dispenser so regularly that the cuff no longer fits snugly against my arm. Instead of being absorbed, the loose pad on number three is letting the medication drip onto the floor and evaporate. I should tell him about it, but he'd probably just get angry and use it as an excuse for further abuse. Perhaps, I think, he'll get in trouble and they'll assign someone more pleasant. Sure enough, when the dispenser signals completion Markus yanks the cuff off of my arm and skulks away without noticing that anything is wrong.

*

This is exactly how my days go. I don't get any visitors. It's for the good of anyone who wants to visit, if anyone did. They've explained that I'm extremely contagious. The nurses and doctors are immunized, of course, so they can be near me. But anyone from the outside would be at great risk. I've asked myself why I couldn't talk to someone through a window or over video, but I have trouble remembering who I would want to talk to. That's another symptom of my disease. I can recall glimpses from my childhood, and much more recent goings on, but nothing in between.

Or was the dream that I had last night a kind of memory? In it I lay in bed, but not in my carepod. The bedroom, if that's what it was, was much larger, as was the bed itself. I tried to raise myself up but -as often happens in dreams- could barely move. There were others in the room with me, a murmuring cluster of onlookers who remained out of sight, hidden behind powerful lights.

What the fuck?

I don't get much in the way of treatment, to be honest. On the medical shows the patients are always being wheeled away to get scanned, operated on, or put through exercises with a physical therapist. I don't get any of that. They take samples, give me meds, weigh me, and let me walk in the garden. Once a week or so Dr. Kapp comes to visit, but he's mostly looking at my chart, not me. I suppose they must be satisfied with my condition.

Something Stephanie said has stuck with me. "It will give us both something to look forward to," she had said. I've done the best I could to scan my faulty memories but I can't recall anyone ever suggesting we share something. Do I really have to wait almost another month for the next collection?

Markus on the other hand I would be happy never to see again. The day after he botched medication number three he repeated the trick, attaching the dispenser cuff so carelessly that number three dripped onto the floor. I guess no one noticed the first time. If I felt worse I'd say something, but I don't feel different at all.

I inspect the cuff after he leaves. The pad which is supposed to transfer medication number three into my arm has become separated from the dispenser tube. It won't work again unless it's fixed. Still hoping Markus might get fired or reassigned, I resolve to not tell him.

*

Okay, maybe that medication does do something. After three days it isn't that I feel bad, just different. My senses are sharper, for one thing. The food they bring me, which before I found merely bland, becomes less palatable every day. And the smell of it, even before they wheel in the meal cart, reaches my nose with foreboding. Same for sounds. There's a rattle in the carepod's ventilation system somewhere. I'm sure I heard it before, but it never bothered me. Now I'm tempted to pry off the access panel and look for the problem myself. It's annoying as shit. In fact, a lot of things are starting to irritate me.

The thought of reporting the faulty dispenser pad no longer occurs to me. I don't feel great right now, but I do feel more natural. Why shouldn't I be irritated? The food is crap, I'm confined to the carepod most of the day, and I don't really know anyone here. In fact, I'm trying to figure out why I haven't been angrier before now.

The next day I try an experiment. I loosen the dispenser pad for medicine number number four. Just before Markus is due to arrive I drop a towel onto the floor at the side of the bed. While he watches his show, two medicines drip onto the towel. When the dispenser is almost through I nudge the towel out of the way, any evidence of spilled medicine along with it. He doesn't notice. The dumbshit.

Dr. Kapp visits me later. He's a plump man with small eyes and a mouth which never seems to close all the way. I know I should like him. He's the head of my care team after all, doing his best to oversee my treatment. But there's something about him that I dislike. In fact, I disliked him even before I stopped taking medicine number three. He never looks me in the eye, rarely looks at me at all. Does he even know I'm human?

I work up the nerve to ask him a question which has been bothering me for a couple of days. "Doctor Kapp, why do I have to stay here? Why can't I go home? I could still take all of my medications, and someone could check up on me every so often."

He raises his head slowly, as if in disbelief that I had asked a question. "Do you remember your home?" he asks me.

The fucker knows that I don't. He asks me memory questions at almost every visit. "No, but I'm sure if I went there I'd-"

"You can't be cared for there," he says, interrupting me in his dull voice. "You wouldn't be safe. You're safe here."

How can I argue with that? Obviously I have to respect my doctor's opinion when it comes to my safety. "Okay."

But my timid response isn't sufficient for Kapp, whose interest is now uncharacteristically focused. "Markus has been giving you all of your medications?" His eyes sweep over the dispenser.

"Yes, yes," I stammer. Suddenly I'm seized by a panic that Dr. Kapp will discover the compromised dispenser. As my doctor I'm sure he wouldn't do anything to hurt me, but he'd be upset. I don't want to lose my garden privileges.

But he turns away from me to the more familiar world of numbers on my chart. "I see, yes," he says. "Be sure to let me know if these feelings return."

Soon he's gone, and I can breathe again.

*

The next week we have a visitor in the hospital, a celebrity of some sort. The hospital must want to put on a good show, because they find a set of clean and pressed clothes for me and hustle me out into the hallway and toward an atrium I can't remember visiting before. The more I think about it I realize that not only have I never been taken to the atrium before, I've never gone beyond the hall outside my carepod and the adjacent garden. Why?

Markus shadows me, grumbling about missing his break, by which he means a chance to watch more porn or idiotic reality programming while my meds spill unnoticed onto the floor. I had no idea there were this many patients at the hospital. There's an entire wing of people with crutches, gyrochairs, casts, and other conspicuous feats of skeletal repair. A restless, excited platoon of children has also been corralled at the base of the foyer, and dressed in matching t-shirts. Some are adorned with casts or crutches, but others have the shaved heads or gaunt appearance that suggests more serious disease. I am, I realize, truly lucky.

We are kept so long at attention that I begin to wonder if I'll have to pee first, but at last the celebrity makes his appearance. He's a tall, strikingly handsome black man with a shaved head and a gleaming, ready smile. Even at the distance they are keeping me, I can see how he puts people at ease, listening gravely or sharing an embrace. It's obvious that the children in particular have been assembled for his benefit, and I admire the way he moves among them, leaving a trail of excited smiles.

Surely the man is either an actor or politician, but I guess the latter. A crowd of journalists is tailing him, collecting photos, and asking what must be a few, pre-approved questions. Most are frenetic, either dancing ahead of him to snap a photo from a prime angle, or pressing suffocatingly close, hoping for a word. Among them I notice a woman notable both for her restraint, and her looks. As I watch, she adroitly anticipates the man's path through the throng, places herself in his way, and waits patiently. Others try to dislodge her but she stares them down, refusing to budge. When the man inevitably passes in front of her she engages him, clearly getting more than a simple sound bite.

It doesn't hurt that she's attractive.

The celebrity's handlers eventually guide him toward the exit, the cluster of journalists and paparazzi beginning to lose interest and trail behind. Just as Markus nudges me to leave, the journalist I admired earlier passes no less than four meters away. She catches my eye and, inexplicably, freezes. For a moment we are the only ones in the entire atrium, the blaze of recognition burning in her eyes. Then someone stumbles into her and the moment is broken. The woman is swept away. What she thought she saw in me I will never know.

*

Markus doesn't only watch hillbilly reality shows. Today he grabs control of my carepod and throws a porno up on most of one wall. "You've got a faster connection than I do at home," he grumbles.

It's a type of video I haven't seen before. I've long known that the carepod filters out some of the news and video programming on my behalf. But when Markus logs in the filter is disabled and we're watching something new. In the show, two couples are having sex on matching beds just feet apart. Unlike most performances, the men in this show are mostly passive, laying back while the women fuck them in a variety of positions. There's a display at the bottom of the screen and after a minute or so I realize that the women are being given points for how well they perform.

I notice that Markus is transfixed by one of the performers in particular, an athletic blonde who I have to admit is easy on the eyes. She's riding her partner, bouncing up and down with an effortless grace. With a sweet smile she flips her fine hair to one side then back again in an arc. "Mmm," she groans sweetly, "that cock is so good, the head is so fat." Obligingly, the camera zooms in to reveal that the blonde is nestling just the tip of her partner's cock into her pussy, pushing her slick folds no more than an inch back and forth, teasing him. "Yeah, you want that pussy? More of my sweet pussy?"

The display at the bottom of the screen lights up with points. Expert control: 10 points, it reads, followed by Dirty talk: 5 points, and so on. There's fan voting, too, with points coming in from admirers who no doubt pay for the privilege.

"Reverse cowgirl," an announcer says, and now the camera switches to the other couple. The second woman, also a blonde but with streaks and highlights in her wild hair, spins expertly and begins to pump. She looks over her shoulder with a wink and says, "Smack that ass, smack it while I fuck you."

She really loves it: 5 points, the display says.

The male performer delivers a slap which reverberates through the entire carepod. Bonus - A touch of pain: 5 points, we are informed.

The pair continue their synchronized performances. The blonde has also switched to reverse cowgirl, but unlike her competition isn't slapping her body against her partner's. Instead she's still half-teasing him, taking no more than the first several inches of his cock into her slit. We are treated to the sight of his glistening cock as she practically levitates above him. "Don't cum yet," she purrs, "I'm enjoying this too much."

Sometimes the screen splits in half, with one of the performers on each side. It does so now, and we get to watch the faces of both young women as they near orgasm. The blonde is still demonstrating remarkable control, taking just as much cock as she wants, and at just the right angle. I can see the little twitches of pleasure, the small gasps, subtle shifts in position, the tremble in her belly and thighs. She's close.

So is the other performer. With less control but a more overt show of enthusiasm, she slaps and grinds herself against her partner, driving him deep, and against her clit. Whichever camera person is filming her is smart enough to pull the camera back to include her jiggling breasts. Her brow is tight and her mouth, already open, now begins to spread wider, into a perfect O. "Yeah," she grunts, slapping her ass down. "Yeah," she repeats, then for a moment can't form words as the orgasm looms.

The first blonde gets there first. "Oh, your cock," she moans. "Oh, your perfect, hard cock." In a sudden move she at last drives herself fully onto her partner, opens her mouth wide, and cries out, "Oh, ohhhhhh!" Her entire body shudders with exhaustion and bliss.

Verified female orgasm: 25 points! the display announces. As if we need to be told. The young woman is beautiful in ecstasy, her gasps of delight are as sweet as music.