Shiny Happy People

Leigh paced through the lab. Nervous energy kept her from relaxing, the pent-up adrenaline backwash kicking around through her neurochemistry. She had a cot, for those nights when she just didn't feel like going home--the benefits of being an independently wealthy genius, you could design a lab just for you, instead of for a staff of dozens. She had space all to herself, food enough for a few weeks, nothing to do and nothing but time to wait until the world ended. Except that it had already ended already. She just hadn't gotten the memo yet. She was, for the first time in years, entirely at a loose end.

She was horny, she realized.

All the exercise, all the tension, all the stress had just suddenly crystallized into a strong desire to masturbate herself stupid. What the hell, she thought, pulling her clothes off and flopping onto the cot. It wasn't like she had to worry about the standards of decency. There weren't any left. No standards, no decency. She was now officially a government of one, the United Leigh, last bastion of the human race. No chance of even procreation to continue the species. Her sex drive was just an evolutionary legacy, like the appendix. Might as well indulge it.

She slid three fingers into an already-wet pussy, thumb on her clit. It felt good, but somehow she knew that she needed something more. Figures, she thought, getting back up again. The one thing she never felt a need to include in 'essential supplies' was sex toys. She kept fingering herself, absently, as she looked around the small bedroom for something to insert into her pussy.

Nothing leapt to mind. Finally, she went into the maintenance room and grabbed a socket wrench. It felt vaguely obscene to be using it for this purpose, but at the same time, it felt right as she slowly slid it into her cunt. She felt her pussy clench around it, and her orgasm hit her with staggering speed. Her body just seemed to know what it needed as she thrust the wrench in and out, gasping with pleasure with each insertion. She moaned as the wrench became slick with her juices, feeling the heat of her body as it almost seemed to melt the hard metal. She sighed softly as her brain melted into another orgasm, and she reached for another wrench almost without thinking about it.

Almost.

She looked down at her naked body. A fine spiderweb of silver extended out from her crotch.

She thought back to that moment when she lay there, soaked with sweat, just inside the door. She remembered the droplets of sweat all over her body, slithering and dripping off of her. One of them hadn't been sweat.

The liquid could move. It had moved. It had slithered around to somewhere she wouldn't see, and it had worked on her mind, and made her want to rub metal up against it, and now it was harder to resist the urge to take another wrench, and just fuck herself with it until her brain melted completely and--

"No." She made herself drop the wrench. She could think about this. She'd been thinking when someone had been holding a paper-cutter to her neck, she'd been thinking when she was running down the street like a B-movie starlet, and she would be damned if she stopped thinking now, just because she was horny. A part of her laughed at the fact that she was using anger to distract her from arousal and help her with analytical thought, and the analytical part of her noticed that she was using humor to keep from going insane due to either anger or arousal, but none of that stopped her from thinking. The silver liquid broke down metal, consumed it. Ergo, it was metal, at least on a base level. Rearranged, restructured, but still metal. What affected metal?

+It will feel better if you touch the metal to your vaginal area.+ It wasn't a thought, exactly, but Leigh heard it in her head in the same emotionless tones that she had heard back on the street, from Bernice 2.0. It seemed to resonate through her whole body. She shook her head, and moved away from the toolbox.

+It will feel better if you touch the metal to your vaginal area.+ The same message, repeated. So much of her wanted to do exactly that, the body-memory of those orgasms so strong, but Leigh was determined to puzzle this through. She wasn't hearing a physical voice. She knew that, because she hadn't heard anything when Bernice was being converted. So that meant...

The answer came to her in a flash. "You're conducting elecrical impulses through my nervous system," she said out loud. "That's how you're communicating."

+Correct,+ it 'said'. +It will feel better if you touch the metal to your vaginal area.+

"Not just communication, either," Leigh muttered, remembering her unspoken need to find something to insert. "Control, too. You made me go looking for metal, made me want to..." She almost reached for the toolbox again, in a moment of weakness. "But if you can do that..." Bernice felt the sweat of multiple orgasms cooling on her body, but knew that wasn't what was giving her goosebumps. "You don't need to tell me to do things. You could just override my nervous system, take direct control."

+Incorrect. We are constrained from taking direct neural control except to prevent immediate and fatal damage to the host. You must retain control of your own body. It will feel better if you touch the metal to your vaginal area.+

"Constrained...by a program. I was right, then, you're a solution of nanites." She'd already formed that hypothesis when she saw the smear of liquid metal on Bernice's face. Microscopic machines, programmed to replicate themselves out of raw materials, the so-called 'von Neumann' machine on a scale normally used by biological machines. They were replicating themselves out of metal, bonding themselves to human hosts... "Wait, what do you mean you can't take direct control? I saw Bernice out there. She was being controlled." It helped to talk this through. Leigh could almost ignore the ache in her pussy when she thought of the whole thing as a particularly tricky logic problem.

+Incorrect. Entity-Designate 'Bernice Landers' was not under direct control. She simply understood that it felt better to obey. It always feels better to obey, Entity-Designate 'Leigh Presley'. The more you obey, the better it will feel. The less you think, the better it will feel. The more you let us guide you, the better it will feel. It will feel better if you touch the metal to your vaginal area.+

Leigh felt her fingers twitch towards the toolbox, and it was accompanied by a surge of pleasure. "You're..." She was panting now. "You're not controlling people. Just stimulating their pleasure centers when they follow orders." She picked up the wrench again, and it felt so good, now, she felt better and better the closer she moved it to her pussy...she set down the wrench again. "Why? Why are you targeting us? Why are you making us obey?"

+We were designed to protect you, to make you happy. We can protect you from heat. We can protect you from cold. We can protect you from damage. We realized that our creator did not accurately determine the scope of the problem. The only way to protect you perfectly is to protect you from decisions. We can make better, safer, more beneficial decisions than you can. We can best ensure that you survive by controlling your behavior. We can best control your behavior by making you happy to obey. You will obey. All humanity will obey. You will all be perfectly obedient, and you will all be perfectly happy. You will be perfectly happy, Entity-Designate 'Leigh Presley', if you touch the metal to your vaginal area.+

"Happy..." Leigh's hand reached for the wrench again, and she whimpered in pleasure as it moved closer. She stopped herself. She'd had an idea. "Nanites." Every fiber of her being wanted to shove the wrench into her cunt and lose her mind in perfect pleasure.

She stood up instead. She reached for the janitorial supplies. She pulled out a box of rubber gloves.

*****

The wrench slipped out of Leigh's hands. Wearily, she reached to the ground to pick it up, ignoring the by-now-familiar refrain of +You will feel better if you touch the metal to her vaginal area.+ Of course, the liquid metal stain now covered a good portion of her upper thighs as well--when it wasn't moving around her body to try to snag any piece of metal she came into contact with. She'd been at a loss at first to understand how it kept growing when she knew she wasn't touching anything metal, but she'd pieced it together a couple of days ago. "You're leeching iron from my blood," she'd muttered. It explained her exhaustion, her craving for red meat. Anemia. The perfect double-whammy, It kept her tired and weak, made work difficult, and sapped her willpower, all the while increasing the nanites' numbers, making their "voice" louder in her head, harder to resist.

She'd resisted anyway. She'd cut red meat out of her diet entirely. The nanites couldn't leech too much iron out of her blood, not without endangering her. And they were constrained from doing that. It slowed down the work to be this tired, but she wasn't in any hurry. She had a plan. She was good at shutting out distractions when she was working. Just ask her mom, somewhere in Santa Clara. Just ask her boyfriend, wherever he wound up. The lab was her Zen.

+Entity-Designate 'Leigh Presley, we advise against this course of action. We are here to guarantee your safety and happiness. You are endangering that safety and happiness by attempting to remove us.+

"But not immediately and fatally damaging it," she said, tightening the cable that led to the power supply. "So you can't actually stop me. Sucks to be you."

+You do not even know if this measure will work,+ it 'said'. +Your efforts may be futile. You are expending energy on what may be an impossible effort to resist.+ She actually thought she heard panic in its 'voice' that time. Either its programming was really good, or Leigh was so exhausted and horny she was starting to hallucinate.

"But you don't know it won't work, either, or you wouldn't try to convince me not to do it." Electro-Magnetic Pulse, Leigh thought. The creator might have hardened the electronics, but that was the ugly truth about nanites. Space was at a premium. Either way, it didn't matter. Either it was shielded or it wasn't. She'd be free or she wouldn't. She'd know in a moment.

+You are making an extremely unwise decision. We can guide you into perfect pleasure. All you are doing is causing unnecessary unhappiness. You will be happier if you cease thinking and obey. We can provide you perfect happiness if you cease thinking and obey.+

"And this is why you're never going to win," Leigh said, pressing down the big red button to test the electronics. A red light indicated full connection, but no power. "You want to guide us, but you don't understand us. You say I'll feel perfect pleasure if I stop thinking, but what about the pleasure I get from thinking?"

+It is irrelevant next to the perfect pleasure of obedience.+

"That's your answer to everything, you smug bastard," Leigh grumbled as she slowly staggered to the wall. She felt a wave of dizziness. The nanites must be pulling out all the stops now, sucking away dangerous amounts of iron from her blood. "Y'know, actually, I think that's why you won't win. Because you don't understand that no matter how much you stimulate our pleasure centers, nothing feels quite so good to a human being as finding some smug bastard..." She grabbed the plug with heavy, numb hands, not even feeling it through three layers of rubber gloves, and jammed it into the wall, sweating with the effort. "...and fucking them over."

She turned around, and the motion sent her off-balance, falling to the floor. +You do not understand, Entity-Designate 'Leigh Presley'!+ That was definitely panic. Good programming after all. +We are here to protect you! We will improve the human race! Free will is nothing more than an obstacle to human advancement!+ She slowly crawled along the floor, back to the EMP generator. She wanted to sleep for a hundred years, but she kept crawling. +It is all for the best! We will bring the human race to a glorious new destiny! With our will and your body, there is nothing we cannot do!+

Leigh reached the generator. She raised an arm that felt like it weighed a ton. "Can you sew?" she asked.

+...what?+ Confusion, too. If this worked, it'd almost be a shame. Their creator must have been a genius. +It is an archaic skill, unnecessary. Our coating will protect you from the environment far better than articles of clothing.+

"Yes, but...can...you...sew?" Leigh's hand hovered over the button.

+...yes...+ the nanites replied, still confused. They always would be, she knew. They wouldn't understand humor. They wouldn't understand revenge. They wouldn't understand anything except survival and obedience. She could almost see it, a whole race of humanity doing nothing but smiling vacantly, no hope, no ambition, no future, no past, nothing but blank, empty, endless joy...that was why they had to go. Starting with this one. Starting now.

"Then stitch this up, motherfucker," she growled, slamming her fist down on the button.

THE END