Parallel Lives Pt. 01

"How did they manage that? If you couldn't get hard?" young Kevin asked.

"Simple, they give you an injection to coax the ol' chap into life," the older man answered ruefully.

"Right into the root of your penis, in case you're wondering," Rupert added. "And yes, it is as painful as it sounds, apparently. Fortunately I've not had that particular joy yet."

"I have," the older man said with a shudder. "It's like being jabbed in the cock by a red hot poker! Mind you, it bloody works - it got me hard alright, for six bloody hours! And let me tell you this, sunshine, after six hours of walking around with a massive stiffy that just won't go down, the novelty certainly wears off!"

Just then an attractive woman in a white lab coat entered the room.

"John Elliot?" she asked the three occupants of the waiting area.

"Well, this is me," the older man said with a sigh as he stood up. "Wish us luck, lads."

"Yeah, good luck, my friend," Rupert responded.

"As long as I can get a decent erection this time I'll be fine," John said as he prepared to follow his assigned screening assistant out of the room. "And good luck to the two of you, I hope you both get to go home today."

And with that he was gone, leaving Rupert temporarily alone with the younger man. Rupert did not have long to admire the physique of the attractive Adonis however, it wasn't long before Kevin was collected by his own Evaluation Technician, who in contrast to John's was a woman in her late fifties. Nevertheless, she seemed to treat the lad with a comforting matronly demeanour. Another man entered the waiting area just as Kevin departed - he was somewhat overweight and wore plain blue boxer shorts, but Rupert didn't even have time to introduce himself before his own name was called.

"Rupert Stephens?" asked his assigned Evaluation Technician for the day, a woman in her mid twenties with chestnut brown hair and an attractive figure. So much for being assigned a male technician today, he thought to himself. Oh well, there's always next time.

"Call me Roo, everyone else does," Rupert said as he stood up.

"Hi, I'm Alice, I'll be your Evaluation Technician for today," the young brunette greeted him in the friendly manner that all employees of the Evaluation Centre were obliged to maintain in order to help the men feel at ease during what was always a stressful and embarrassingly intimate experience for them.

Alice took him down a corridor lined with a number of doors spaced at roughly five metre intervals, each one bearing a small plastic sign upon which was written the legend "Collection Room 1"and so forth. But they went past these rooms and instead Alice took him upstairs towards the examination rooms for the first stage of his semen evaluation - an exhaustive top to bottom (literally) physical examination. Alice invited him to take a seat beside her desk.

"Right, well first off could you confirm your name, registration number and address please," Alice said as she sat at her desk.

"Rupert Charles Stephens, registration number AE41733D, and my address is Apartment 7, Coulthard Court, Haywards Heath, West Sussex."

"Thank you," Alice said as she cross-referenced his details with the IMRHC's global database. "Now, before we get started I just need to ask you a few questions. Firstly, do you masturbate? And if so, how often?"

Rupert sighed - he hated being asked about his self-pleasuring habits, but there was no point in trying to be evasive.

"Yes, I masturbate," he replied flatly. "Once a day usually, though sometimes if I'm tired I'll abstain for a day or two."

"And when was the last time you ejaculated?"

"Sunday evening."

"Okay, that's fine," Alice said as she tapped away on her keyboard. "And what about sex? Are you sexually active right now?"

"I haven't had sex in over a year," Rupert responded sadly. "My last relationship... let's just say it didn't end well."

"Oh, I'm sorry to hear that," Alice replied with genuine sympathy.

"That's okay - the guy was a dick! Screwed another man behind my back - I think I'm better off being single," Rupert said with a sigh.

"And what about your sexual orientation?" Alice then asked him, though it was simply a formality following Rupert's previous answer.

"I'm gay," Rupert confirmed for the record.

"Okay," Alice responded, ticking the appropriate box on her online form.

"I don't know why I keep getting asked if I'm gay or straight or bisexual or pansexual or whatever every time I go through this routine," Rupert huffed. "It isn't like I'm going to wake up one morning and suddenly start fancying women instead of men!"

"I don't write the form," Alice said with a shrug. "I just have to ask you the questions on it and tick the boxes. Now, do you check your testicles regularly?"

And so the personal questions went on as Rupert sat there in his underwear and answered them, giving the exact same answers he'd given on all the other previous occasions he'd attended his semen evaluation.

"Right, well that's all the questions out of the way," Alice said after she checked off the last box on the form. "Time to make a start on your physical examination. Please stand up on the scales over there so that we can record your weight and height."

Rupert stood up and stepped over to the scales. At the same time the machine recorded his weight, a laser trained to point on the top of his head automatically measured his height and used the two measurements to calculate his body mass index.

"Good, a nice and healthy BMI," Alice said as she ushered him off the scales. "Now then, let's check your blood pressure."

The initial tests of his physical attributes went on as Alice took measurements of his arms, legs, wrists, ankles, biceps and his thighs, all the while with Rupert knowing what was coming next.

"Right then, let's take your pants down so that we can take a look at your penis," Alice announced as she knelt before him.

Before he knew it, she had quickly pulled his underwear down, revealing his genitalia for her assessment of their shape and size.

"Okay, let's see now," Alice said as she unfurled a tape measure. "Uncircumcised, four point two inches flaccid length, with a girth of..." Alice wrapped the tape around his penis. "Exactly four inches," she continued as she recorded the statistic. "A nice, normal, average size - nothing to be ashamed of there!"

"That's good to know," Rupert said drily. "That my cock is exactly the same size it was this time six months ago!"

Alice ignored his remark and pressed on with her examination.

"Any issues with your foreskin?"

"No."

"Any difficulties getting and maintaining an erection?"

"It's never let me down so far... touch wood," he deadpanned with the same double entendre he'd uttered on so many occasions before.

He could never resist making the same pun every time he was asked that question. The expression on Alice's face however, signalled that she hadn't got his joke.

"No, I've never experienced any difficulties in getting and maintaining an erection," he confirmed.

Rupert sighed - it was going to be a long day.

"Okay, now I'm going to check your testicles next," Alice announced as she picked up an orchidometer, a rather low-tech but faultlessly reliable instrument for measuring the volume of a male's testes, which consisted of a number of increasingly sized ovoid shaped wooden beads on a length of string.

She palpated his left testicle first and held up the string of testicle shaped beads beside it until she found the one that approximately matched the size of the real thing in her other hand.

"Twenty millilitres, a good, healthy size," she said as she recorded the result. "Now let's check the other one."

She repeated the exercise with Rupert's right testicle, reaching the same result as before.

"Forty millilitres total testicular volume," she noted as she put the device back onto her desk. "You can pull your pants back up now."

Grateful to be able to make himself decent again, albeit only temporarily, Rupert duly bent down in order to pull his underwear back up.

"Right, all good and healthy so far," Alice announced as she picked up a pillow. "Let's get a blood sample next. Just pop yourself back on the chair and rest your left arm on this."

She handed him the pillow and then picked up a small metal tray, upon which was a tourniquet, a cannula and a couple of collection phials. Rupert dutifully sat while Alice took his blood, and once she'd finished and withdrew the needle from his arm she handed him a small piece of cotton wool to hold against the minute puncture wound the cannula had left behind.

"Urine sample next," she announced as she picked up a small sample pot. She took off the lid and handed it to him. "Use the urinal in the corner there, and remember to pull your foreskin back."

Rupert sighed, took the sample pot from her and stepped over to the far side of the room where a urinal bowl was set into the wall. He lowered the front of his underwear, pulled his foreskin back as instructed and held the sample pot in place just below the head of his penis. He relaxed and let his urine flow into the plastic pot. It only took a second or so to collect enough to fill it, and so he interrupted his flow by clenching his inner sphincter, took the sample pot away, unclenched and then finished peeing into the urinal. Once he was done it flushed itself automatically as he tucked his penis back into his underwear. He handed Alice the sample pot, and after sealing it she wrote a few details onto a self adhesive label that she then affixed to the pot.

"Right, we're all done here," she said as she rose to her feet. "Time to head upstairs to measure your stamina."

Alice escorted Rupert upstairs to the building's second floor where a gymnasium and a small sports hall had been set up. As part of the semen evaluation process, it was deemed necessary to test a man's overall level of physical fitness. The rationale was that should a man be found to be producing viable sperm he would need to be fit enough for the marathon twelve months of daily sex that awaited him at the Fertility Centre. Rupert knew the routine of exercises by heart, having been put through it all so many times before.

The first test was for physical strength, which consisted of a series of bench press exercises in the corner of the gym set aside for weights. Rupert managed to equal his previous best from six months earlier, causing him to smile that all his lunchtime workouts at the gym opposite his place of work were not a waste of his time and money after all. After the weights, the tests moved on to a series of press-ups, pull-ups, squat thrusts and sit-ups to establish his stamina and aerobic capacity - this time he managed to improve slightly on his personal best.

The final stage was a "bleep test" - an exercise that involved running up and down the length of the sports hall and touching the far wall before a bleep sounded. The bleep would sound more and more frequently until he was sprinting to keep up with it - as soon as he failed to touch the wall before the bleep sounded the test would be over and the result calculated from the number of times he'd outrun the bleep. Again, he managed to equal his personal best.

"Well, you certainly pass the stamina tests," Alice said as she tapped on her tablet and updated her checklist. "Right, let's get you showered and then downstairs for your first semen collection."

Rupert followed Alice toward a room marked "showers" just as another Evaluation Technician was ushering another man into the exercise room. Rupert sighed and slipped his underwear off as Alice looked on. Observing him as he showered, Alice admired Rupert's physical form. Pity he's gay, she thought to herself as she brazenly ogled his nakedness. I he were straight I'd totally have him!

After he'd showered and dried off, Alice led him downstairs back towards the ground floor of the building where the semen collection rooms they'd passed earlier were located. As he always did at this moment, Rupert felt cold and humiliated as he was made to descend the stairs in only his underwear, his feet emitting a soft slapping sound on the cold linoleum floor with each and every step. Above each door was a light - green for vacant, red for engaged. Two of the doors were already illuminated in red - presumably John and young Kevin were in them, as they were slightly ahead of him in the process. Alice opened the third door along and ushered him inside. As soon as they were both in she closed and locked the door, and once more Rupert was confronted by a machine that had become a fact of life for men the world over.

Officially it was known as the Semen Extraction Apparatus, or SEA for short, but among the general public it had come to be known by numerous colourful colloquialisms - "Suck-o-matic", "Autoblow", "Wankotron" and "CyberGina", to name just a few. It had been invented by the IMRHC's technicians for one singular purpose - to extract semen from a man in the most sterile conditions possible by using mechanical and electrical stimulation. The machine itself resembled an old fashioned weighing machine, with a pad upon which the subject would stand, and an upright section that incorporated a small display screen. But there the similarities ended - just below the screen was located an opening, within which was a pastel blue coloured orifice made of a soft silicone material. On either side of the upright section were two grab handles for the man whose semen the machine was collecting could hold on to during the collection process.

"Right, by now I'm sure you're familiar with the routine," Alice said as she slipped on a pair of sterile gloves and picked up an item contained within a sterile paper wrapping. "Take your pants off, make yourself erect and come and stand in front of the collection machine."

Resigned to having to do as he was told, Rupert pulled his underwear down and placed the jaunty black and yellow garment on a nearby plastic chair. He then reached down and started stroking his penis to coax it towards erection as instructed. He tapped his shaft in an effort to make the blood flow into the organ, in a manner not dissimilar to a heroin addict tapping their arm to find a suitable vein. He waggled it around, tapped it some more, gave himself a few experimental strokes, and after some further encouragement he gradually brought himself to a suitably firm erection.

During all of this, Alice had been busy. She'd unwrapped the item in the sterile packet and fed it through the machine from behind so that it protruded from the pale blue orifice. It was a specially designed semen collection catheter that would be inserted into Rupert's penis so that his semen would not come into contact with any micro-organisms in the air.

"Please step onto the machine," Alice instructed him as she squirted a small amount of sterile lubricant onto the small plastic tube.

Rupert hated this part - and he suspected pretty much all men did - but he did as he was told and stepped onto the pad at the foot of the machine, whereupon Alice then took hold of his penis, gave it a couple of quick strokes to check it was sufficiently engorged, and then quickly retracted his foreskin to reveal his soft and light pink coloured glans. Rupert gnashed his teeth as he felt Alice bring the end of the catheter towards the tiny opening at the tip of his penis.

"I know this bit feels uncomfortable," she said as she prepared to insert the catheter. "But just take a deep breath and it'll be over in just a second. You can hold on to the handles if it helps."

Rupert inhaled deeply and girded himself, gripping hold of the two handles. He then felt the sharp sting as Alice pushed the lubricated tube into his penis - a full four and a half inches entered him until she stopped inserting it. She used a syringe of saline solution in a small port on the catheter to inflate a small bladder near its tip which prevented the catheter from slipping out of his urethra - whether he liked it or not, Rupert was now effectively tied to the machine.

"Okay, now we're ready to start," Alice said as she squirted some lubricant into the machine's orifice and smeared some more onto his penis, and then slipped her gloves off and binned the sterile packaging, setting the saline syringe aside for her to use again later. "Just wait a few moments for me to adjust the machine's height, and when you hear the bleep you may proceed to insert your penis.

The machine's height adjusting motors hummed and whirred as Alice used a small joystick to centre the orifice until it directly faced Rupert's penis. As soon as it was at the correct elevation it emitted a bleeping sound. Rupert pushed his hips forward and penetrated the machine's inner workings. Once he was fully inside the machine a small flap opened up below the orifice and a small shallow metal dish shaped object on a little robotic arm whirred out. The arm moved itself until the metal dish gently cupped his testicles. Whilst all this was happening, Alice unwrapped a couple of electrodes that she then placed over Rupert's nipples, and plugged their wires into the back of the machine. The metal dish, coupled with the nipple electrodes had two purposes - to sense his level of arousal and to provide a little mild electrical stimulation.

Only once Alice was satisfied that Rupert had been fully engaged within the machine did she press the "start program" button on the device's touchscreen. Immediately, the machine's motors came to life, causing the silicone sleeve within it to pulse, vibrate and rhythmically squeeze Rupert's penis in an electrical approximation of a woman's vagina. The shallow dish beneath his testicles meanwhile gently massaged his scrotal sac with soft waves of electricity that caused his sensitive skin to tingle, and the two electrodes on his nipples mimicked the action of a woman kissing and licking them.

Rupert could not deny that it was a pleasurable sensation to be subjected to the semen extraction device's electronic stimulation, but at the same time being naked and forcibly aroused in the presence of the fully clothed woman overseeing the procedure with a plastic tube lodged in his penis, made him feel embarrassed and ashamed. This was why he hated his twice-yearly semen evaluation so much. But there was nothing he could do about it except to bear it and get it over with. It was either that or face an eye-watering fine, or worse, prison.

"Good chap, you're doing fine," Alice said, gently patting his bare bottom with one hand whilst adjusting the machine's settings with the other. "Just come whenever you're ready."

The machine sped up a little with each minute that passed, and its rhythmic whirring increased in volume and tempo as it coaxed Rupert towards his climax. The sensors attached to his nipples and cupping his testes communicated with its central processor and constantly monitored his gradually increasing arousal and adjusting its level of stimulation accordingly - it was the very cutting edge of masturbatory technology.

After some time, Rupert finally felt his climax welling inside him, a climax that the machine had already detected was oncoming, and the tempo and the intensity of the stimulation it gave him escalated towards a crescendo. Rupert gripped hold of the handles until his knuckles went white, and he gnashed his teeth as the urgent fire deep within his pelvis heralded that he was approaching the point of no return.

And then, he erupted.

"Hnngh! Hahh! Ahhh! Ngghh!" he grimaced primally as he climaxed.

The machine automatically applied a little vacuum to the catheter in his penis, sucking his semen out of him and into the little plastic pot at the other end.