Ghost in the Machine Ch. 05

As always, a big shout-out to bikoukumori, for a stellar editing job.

Also, a big 'thank you' to all you people who are reading and voting on my stuff. Seeing you enjoy my story is one hell of a boost.

This time, the story is a bit darker, involving several instances of non-consentual sex. Consider yourself warned.

As always, there's only adults in this story, and no artificial intelligences were harmed.

Have fun!

#5: Cat to the rescue

Golden pools of shimmering light, reflected by the gently lapping waves of the nearby pool, played over my skin. Gentle hands were rubbing sunscreen into my naked back, the fingers occasionally brushing against my sides, trying to feel me up. I didn't mind that one bit. The tasty, muscular form of my companion, clad only in a sleek green speedo struggling with his constantly growing manhood, was just what I wanted. I purred and wriggled my bikini-clad bum under his questing fingertips. Getting the hint, he undid the laces holding the flimsy triangles of neon-orange fabric together and pulled them off me before resuming his thorough application of sunscreen. Invitingly, I spread my legs but he ignored my damp folds; instead he teasingly, almost lovingly, rubbed the sunscreen into the backs of my thighs and my calves. Eventually, when he was done worshiping my toes, he said in a thick spanish accent, "Turn around, por favor. I'm done with this side, senorita."

Smiling, my eyes covered against the stinging rays of the sun by expensive Porsche shades, I turned around, presenting my ample breasts to him. Unperturbed by my nakedness, the slightly spread thighs and the thinly veiled invitation in my smile, he squirted another handful of sunscreen into his palm, rubbed his hands together to spare me the sting of the cold liquid and resumed oiling me up. His strong, dexterous fingers easily massaged the sunscreen into my shoulders. I couldn't wait to feel his fingers on my tits. Silently, I urged him to get a move on and, finally, he cupped my breasts into his strong hands, dropping all pretense of applying sunscreen to me. Soft, electronic music began to waft around us as his hands kneaded my breasts, his palms rubbing over my nipples. He bent down, his lips easily finding mine, and kissed me passionately, taking my breath away. My hand found the strings of his speedo and undid them, before pulling the tiny piece of fabric off his hips. I nearly choked when my fingertips brushed against his now free hardness. His meat was massive. Long, thick, veiny. And he obviously wanted me, because his tip was already oozing precum when my exploring fingers brushed it. I gave his dick a pump or two, causing him to moan into my mouth before he came up for air, the fires of passion raging in his eyes.

"I want you. Now," he rasped.

"Oh, I can see that," I purred in return, pulling him closer by his dick.

When he was close enough, I turned onto my side and wrapped my lips around him, savouring his taste. His hand slipped between my thighs, his fingers brushing against my slit. I placed one foot onto the lounge chair I was lying on, giving him easy access to my willing snatch. His fingers went to work, at the same time gentle and demanding. I knew that he wanted to bury his meat up to the hilt in me but I wanted to play a little longer, to enjoy the feeling of control I had over this gorgeous, but stupid man. But then things turned sour. The fingers of his free hand laced themselves into my long, silver hair and he impaled my mouth onto his monstrous dick, fucking my throat without regards to my well-being. I choked around his meat, tried to cough it out. Then I bit down.

He snarled, more in annoyance than pain, but thankfully, he took his dick out of my mouth. I coughed, spitting his precum onto the tiled floor. He yanked my head up, forcing me to look into his eyes.

"I told you, I want you NOW, bitch," he snapped, releasing my head and pushing me onto the lounge chair. I was confused. What the fuck was happening? I opened my mouth to protest but a mean backhand slammed my head back into the chair, nearly toppling it. Then he climbed between my thighs.

"No, stop! That's not how..."

Smack! Another stinging slap hit my face.

"Shut up, you dirty whore! You do as I say now!" One hand pressed my helplessly flailing body onto the chair while he lined his dick up with the other. Then he pushed and I felt like a goddamn subway car was trying to fit itself between my pussy lips. I screamed and clawed at his arm but to no avail. He pushed forwards, ignoring my complaints. When he was all the way inside, I was helplessly sobbing, my tear-filled vision swimming. That can't be happening!

He began to fuck me, hard, rough, accentuating his strokes with slaps everywhere, my sides, my breasts, my face. My head was ringing.

"Stop! Goddamn it! Execute..." I tried to invoke the interrupt sequence but as soon as I said the first words, his hands clamped around my neck, cutting off my air supply. His thumbs pressed down onto my windpipe. He grunted, spittle flying everywhere, while his rod plowed me over and over again. Then, as my consciousness was reduced to only two pinpoints of white light, he came inside me, flooding my insides with his sticky goo. Then I died.

***

I managed to turn onto my side, just barely, before my puke burst from my mouth. But it was bad enough. My cluttered coffin was barely large enough to turn onto my side. So, instead of barfing all over me, I spewed the meager contents of my belly onto a heap of clothes doubling as my pillow. My head felt like it was going to explode any second now, my body was cramping all over and I felt totally dizzy.

"That goddamn FUCKER," I gurgled helplessly between retching my insides out. My foot found the door handle and kicked down. Squeaking, the old, mistreated pneumatics pushed the square door open and the noise of the coffin motel drifted into my home. Someone had the latest terrorcore chip on, blasting just below pain threshold volume, babies were crying, people were arguing. The smells weren't much better. Overseasoned food, sweat, old bricks and mortar, rusting metal and a subtle hint of mildew wafted into my space but compared to the stench of my vomit, it was the smell of roses.

Groaning, I pushed myself out, taking care to catch the wobbly rung affixed to the lower cubicle's front door with my foot. Falling down two cubicles' height and spraining my ankle would just be the fucking icing on the cake. I pulled my barfed-on clothing out as well and fired it onto the grated walkway below. Hopefully, I could cough up another Euro to feed the laundry machine. Then I slid downwards, landing on unsteady feet, breathing heavily. Everything was still spinning. Two kids ran by, one of them carrying the multi-barrelled play replica of a Cybernator arm cannon, going "Pew! Pew! Pew!" as they ran up to me. They stopped dead, their mouths opening in wonder, their eyes fixed onto my face.

I brushed my fingers over my chin, my cheeks... No, I didn't barf over myself. Then I remembered and my hand tried to cover my right eye. A futile gesture, the StimChip jutting out of my right eyesocket was longer than my middle finger, hardly concealable.

"Did you hurt yourself, Miss," one of the boys asked, his voice trembling.

What should I tell him? That one of my cybereyes was doubling as a crude Mindlink implant? I couldn't risk exposing the illegal mod Fleischer did for me, so I just nodded, trying my best to appear stunned. The kids gave me a sympathetic look but sped off nonetheless. When they were away, I pulled myself up to the lip of my cubicle and got a small, square box from a built-in shelf. Then I pressed a hidden button next to my eye socket, invisible under a patch of vat-grown skin and released the fake eyeball holding the rape chip, replacing it with my working right cyber-eye.

I looked at the chip after popping it out of the implant. It looked like "Caribbean Dreams XXII," the latest of glossy StimPorn. As I knew now, it was not "Caribbean Dreams XXII," but a bad copy, a snuff chip that could, had it been connected properly, have fried my brain and killed me. I knew I had a drug habit but could you blame me? I went from living in the Ceiss Tower at Neu-Alexanderplatz to selling my pussy in a filthy coffin hotel in rotting Berlin-Kreuzberg in just four years.

I was really happy when Fleischer gave the chip to me, even singing a little "Happy birthday." Today was my 18th. He was one of the few people I could call "friend" in this urban jungle. He was the one who had the ingenious idea to build a Mindlink interface right into the shell of a cybereye, his reasoning being that since cybereyes were connected to the brain, he could hijack the connection and use it for other things as well. The first couple tries were nauseating but, a good year ago, he finally made a breakthrough and I was able to access the 'Net through this eye-connection. Fleischer mainly built it so I could try to finish my education online but to his dismay I mostly used the jack to slot StimChips.

Sadly, the people cooking them knew most of their clients were poor schlocks like me, with hardly a chance of returning business, so at first they limited the number of times these chips could be used. A clever programmer could circumvent those DRM measures, so the drug guys found another way of keeping illegal, unlocked chips off the streets. They simply jazzed the signals up across the board so that sooner or later the poor receiving brain would fry through. And to show their poor clients just how much they cared, these chips tended to feature heavy snuff material. And how the fuck did I end up on the receiving end of one?

But first things first. I wiped my mouth on my sleeve, grabbed my silver-coloured baseball jacket from the peg inside my door, pushed the door closed and entered the lock code. The weight of the gun in my inside pocket felt reassuring, although I knew that I probably would only hit a target by pressing the cheap plastic holdout against my target's stomach. But you could always hope. Then I grabbed the bundle of stinking, wet clothes and looked around. Grinning wickedly, I made my way over to one of my regulars, who was just now chatting with his lovely, overweight wife. I always wondered how she managed to fit into one of the coffins anyway, at easily two-hundred and eighty pounds.

"Hey Ceylin, hi Yilderim, how's it hangin'," I asked, swaying my skinny hips seductively. His eyes widened in panic, those of his wife narrowed in fury. She knew he was fucking around her back but so far had no clue who he was drilling. I didn't like Yilderim that much; he was always rough, he wanted me to call him "Daddy," and he tipped poorly. Plus, he still owed me one ride's pay.

"Who is this... girl," Ceylin asked. Of course she knew me. There weren't too many bald, skinny, silver-wearing girls in this coffin motel. Thanks to the flash fire that cost me my eyes, I didn't have any facial hair and the frontal half of my scalp refused to grow hair as well. And since I didn't want to look like a female Jean-Luc Picard, with wispy hair around a bald top, I had taken the habit of shaving my head completely.

"Erm... she's just... that kid, you know," he stammered, trying to deflect any suspicion away from him.

"Yeah, I'm that kid your husband is drilling every payday. Oh, and some days inbetween too." If looks could kill, Yilderim would have turned into a pair of smoking sneakers just now. I didn't particularly enjoy completely fucking up his marriage but I needed money, now. Going to Fleischer's would require me taking the S-Bahn and I didn't fancy a tangle with the S-Bahn-Cops. Plus, the ball of clothes needed to go too.

"Yilderim, how could you! Haven't I been anything than a faithful wife to you? Why do you have to humiliate me so?" Now, that was quite some change in tone. From fury to bawling diva in 12 seconds? Perhaps she figured if she would forgive him, she might get some dick later?

"Anyway, 'Daddy,' your little darling needs a little baksheesh for the last time you had me all over your dick. I hope you remember," I said, fixing him with my most unnerving stare. I recently figured that most people were severely turned off by the silver spheres with the gently whirring optics within staring at them where normally a pair of expressive, wintry-grey eyes should be.

"Why does she call you 'Daddy,'" Ceylin asked, going back into indignant fury mode.

"It's not what you think it is, darling," Yilderim yammered, raising his hands in self-defence.

"Hey, before you rip his head off, could you at least pay what he owes me? One blowjob, once through my pussy and once up the ass. That's sixty Euros, please," I said sweetly. Yilderim had turned chalk-white, Ceylin beet-red.

"Hey, what can I say? I only do it because you won't let me..." he whimpered as his wife turned on him. I nearly fainted as she slammed her meaty fist into his stomach. He doubled over, coughing. Then she grabbed him by the shoulders and, with surprising agility, rammed her knee into his groin. Wheezing in agony, his eyes screwed up, he sank to his knees, clutching his privates. Ceylin yanked out an ornately stitched purse and, with a disgusted look, threw me a bundle of crinkled Euro bills.

"If I ever see you near my husband again, I will kill you," she hissed. After that display of female rage, I simply grabbed the bills and high-tailed it out of there, her rapid-fire Turkish echoing off the coffin motel's interior. I exchanged a fiver for a handful of coins, fed a laundry machine with both my clothes and the money and then, breathing in the clammy night air, made my trek to the nearest S-Bahn stop.

***

Riding the tram, my eyes invariably were drawn to the looming spires of Neu-Alexanderplatz. I wondered why my parents wanted to leave there so badly. To me, it looked like the fucking promised land. But four years ago, a nondescript car picked us up at a restaurant. I was a little confused why Dad had a huge briefcase with him when we were out for a night of luxury food and VR movies. But then things turned ugly. On our way to the airport our car got attacked by a car from Ceiss security. A crazy chase ensued; during which, one of the security guards shot our rear wheel just as the car was doing an evasive move. The heavy limo crashed into the security car and spun like crazy. Somewhere during these spins, I hit my head on a door strut and blacked out. When I came to, I was in a hospital room and everything was black around me. The doctors told me that the car I was in had caught on fire and I was the only one the securities could save.

When I asked about my parents, the nurse only gulped. I was still far too confused to feel the impact of my parents' death. The nurse promised that they would do anything to return my eyesight to me, the only promise they kept. Ceiss was the pioneer in eye replacement, using the technology of their miniscule spy cameras and a patent licensed from Mindlink to produce the world's finest cyber-eyes. And since my parents were valued employees of Ceiss, I was entitled to the full benefits package.

While I recovered from my injuries, stern men and women from Internal Affairs questioned me if I had seen any suspicious activity before that fateful night but I could only bawl. Didn't they know my fucking parents had just died? What were they implying?

As it turns out, my parents wanted to leave Ceiss. Badly. And my father, a brilliant optical engineer, took some very valuable papers and prototypes with him. My parents and I hadn't been kidnapped, the people from IA said, they tried to defect. And since they could prove it all, I wasn't welcome within Ceiss Tower anymore. I didn't have any other relatives, especially not in Germany, and so I found myself, with a token "compensation package" of 500 Euros, on the streets of Berlin.

"Next stop: Tempelhof," the synthetic voice rattled, yanking me out of my reverie. The area around the abandoned Tempelhof airport was just another sprawling slum, not unlike Kreuzberg. Clutching the grip of my gun inside my pocket, I hurried down the deserted platform. Despite the alleged network of security cameras, hardly a day passed without another corpse on an S-Bahn platform and I certainly didn't want to join that esteemed club. Leaving the station, the noise of Tempelhof Market surrounded me. In spite of Berlin's best efforts to clean out the place, to make room for urban improvement, the market persisted. You could buy practically everything here. Pirated media and knockoff electronics were everywhere, the smells of food, exotic or domestic, were overpowering. Booths, tents and crude tin huts crowded the place, stacked with all kinds and makes of firearms, from the lowly plastic holdout up to the fully-integrated, implant-controlled IntelliGuns that only needed a thought to fire. I passed one stall where naked men and women were on display, some adorned with arousing, fluorescent tattoos, others bodysculpted almost beyond recognition. I shook my head at a pathetically meowing Asian girl, complete with cat ears, whiskers and a tail. Our eyes met for a moment and I recoiled at the depth of her self-loathing. This thing wanted to die, badly. Only the chips hard-wired into her brain, the chips telling her to please her master above everything else, kept her from doing it. I briefly toyed with the idea of granting her wish but the bulky Russians with their heavy artillery flanking the stage discouraged me. Despite how fucked-up I felt right now, I didn't have a death-wish. Shivering, I strode on, looking for the mobile home Fleischer operated out of. Yeah, worst pun ever, I know.

I opened the door. The smell of blood assaulted me, nearly causing me to puke again. On the operating table, inside a plastic-wrapped area of relative cleanliness and hooked up to a faintly beeping life support system, a guy was being worked on by Fleischer. The floor around the table was awash with blood and a muscular arm was laying in a puddle of gore. Fleischer stood between me and the guy, at shoulder level, and I heard the whine of mechanized tools and operating equipment. Suddenly, Fleischer turned, the spider's nest of bloody operating tools jutting from the sleeve of his right arm twitching.

"Oh, it's you, Katarina. I'll be with you in a second." Peering past his hip, I could see a silver joint sticking out of freshly-fused flesh, cables and receivers for bolts jutting out of the mutilated shoulder too.

"I told you a thousand times to call me 'Shine,' Fleischer," I hissed, both in annoyance and in shock. Seeing Fleischer doing his job was never easy on the eyes but witnessing a man sacrificing a perfectly good arm for a cybernetic replacement was freaking me out.

"To me, you'll always be Katarina. Now hush, I need to concentrate." Returning his attention to his patient, he lowered the writhing mass of instruments that constituted his right hand at the moment to the shoulder. In a mixture of revulsion and fascination, I watched as the terrible wounds were desinfected, stitched up and coated with a generous helping of synth-flesh. A few minutes later, Fleischer left the operating theater through the plastic curtains on the other side and disappeared into the depths of his RV, only to return a few seconds later with a shiny, chromed cyberarm, which he hooked up to the reconstructed shoulder. Replacing his medic hand with a regular, almost human-looking one, Fleischer fixed bolts, hooked up cables and finally placed a plastic cover onto his handiwork. Then he threw a translucent sheet of plastic foil over the whole body and joined me in the entrance of his rolling clinic, flicking a few switches on a control panel near the door.

"Isn't he going to choke under that," I asked, pointing.