Vitality

This is a short science fiction story and depicts extreme, bizarre, or unrealistic acts and experiences. Sexual enslavement, bondage, non-human partners, pain, and loss of autonomy/consciousness/personhood are featured heavily.

--

"Something stinks."

"Copy, could you... do you mean it literall--"

"Yeah, yeah, I mean it literally smells bad down here. Yes. It's smelly."

"...Your vitals and immediate surroundings are fine, Tala."

Safe in the cockpit of the landing craft, Lucie, the youngest graduate of her Retriever class, muted her mic and clicked her teeth. Tala, her friend and mentor, had a rep for condescension and had employed it increasingly liberally during their time together. Among Retrievers, Tala, at 30, was definitely senior. You couldn't qualify for training until you were 18, and most graduates didn't finally make the cut until around 3 years later. "Retirement" usually happens within 2-5.

Lucie had been out in 1 year. On the flight over, Tala had snuck her a soda - contraband - to celebrate her first mission. Anything distinctly pleasurable was banned on mission days, during training, and in most cases, during free time as well. Retrievers were, officially, mandated to practice stoical and ascetic habits. A paradoxical mandate, in that the majority of training they underwent was Endurance and Exposure: a Retriever must have the total fortitude to be completely, utterly unaffected by any physical pleasure or hardship, with an exact and emphatic focus on sexual experience.

A Retriever's actual job was singular: get as close as possible to Lethal Plant 18 specimens, agitate, and extract. LP18's most notable secretion -- one of several -- was a thick, oily substance known as Venom 322. The plant secreted Venoms 318-322, all of which were incredibly potent against humans, but 322 was notable in that, when processed, it could be turned into an extremely potent and high-yield biofuel.

"Isn't it supposed to smell?"

"This is more like something's rotten." Tala surveyed the corridor. "It's a really old stone house, that's all. Could be anything."

"Acknowledged. Are you seeing any signs of the specimen?" Lucie peered through the craft's thick glass at the bare remnants of stonework that barely passed for a building to anyone above ground. Tala was beneath the earth now, working her way down what had been the structure's ground floor, and towards the basement. "I have trace signs in the air up here. Could be just a blip."

Tala placed a hand on the brickwork, dripping wet and covered in thick moss. She spread the carpet of plant matter apart, identifying a single vein-like root tendril.

"Nope, it's down here somewhere."

It was hoped that a Retriever would never have to directly interact with LP18. Years of training would be conducted on a just-in-case basis, to create, if it was even possible, the slightest chance that a Retriever could withstand the plant's assault.

In a century, no survival in such an event had ever been documented.

In Lucie's solitary year of training, Tala had seen the potential, and the young woman had personally been taken under her wing. They became inseperable, both sporting jet black crewcuts, Tala a lean, muscular 5'10", Lucie 5 inches shorter, and wiry. Tala, the veteran, had personally repeated every last training exercise alongside Lucie. Ostensibly to "stay sharp", but Lucie had always suspected that her mentor had stayed by her side to watch over her, to keep her strong through solidarity.

Retrievers were notorious in wider society for their training alone. Keeping them confined to Barracks became the norm about ten years after the Division For Energy was established, with good cause: the stigma around their regular training, and the rumours of their daily habits, were both darkly legendary.

LP18 is a predatory plant organism whose numerous venoms variously work on pain and pleasure receptors and possess a strong psychoactive component. Prehensile vines attack via the orifices, and are drawn to the shape and scent of the human pelvis and reproductive system, which is the main focus of its attack. If you are trapped by the plant during a Retrieval you will be considered Retired. I cannot stress this enough. No matter what you've learned, how hard you've trained, no matter what you are officially or unofficially recorded as being able to withstand, your objective is to retrieve a clean yield of Venom 322 without making physical contact with this plant.

If you do, nobody will come to help you. Nobody will answer your distress calls. Your crew will abandon the Retrieval and go home. It will be the immediate end of your life as you know it.

The words of Lucie's instructor on her induction day had been, near verbatim, boilerplate for all inductees. And yet, the next year of training had been gruesomely predicated on the ability to withstand a powerfully violent, mind-altering assault on the senses.

--

For the first month, Lucie had been required to spend all of her time naked, under the influence of a rotating cocktail of hallucinogens, conducting all of her business on the 24-hour basis that her body was freely subject to the whims of anyone around her, without refusal, without reaction. While hallucinating vividly, her thoughts surging through dozens of iterations every minute, she had experienced more than she could possibly remember, or cared to. Full-body whippings. Being made to drink the collected semen of her instructors. Burned with chemicals and then tickled with feathers. Calmly and silently eating breakfast while a fellow Inductee was pinned to the table in front of her and fucked to insemination by a Documentarian who had visited to cover the conditions of the Barracks. Being fucked to completion in every orifice by every colleague even slightly senior to her. Lucie took the training and became numb to all of it, carrying on her duties around, or sometimes during, the endless procession of bizarre assaults. She learned to completely dismiss the effects of the drugs, even those she had never taken before, by force of will alone.

--

At the base of a set of stone steps, surrounded by moss and vines, Tala obliterated the last remnants of a wooden door with her baton. She ducked under the overhanging vegetation, careful not to make contact with anything that might touch her in response, and let her eyes adjust to the light.

There was light; this was it. LP18 possesses numerous bioluminescent bulbs. The glow reflected on the glossy surface of her skintight suit of acid-resistant flex armour, and illuminated the sharp angles of her emotionless face. The vines, thick, were woven into the moss on every surface of the basement. Completely integrated into the brickwork of the far wall, there it was: a vascular, trunk-like stem, bearing several enormous flowers with fleshy petals, stamens the size of fingers which drooped from the weight of fist-sized bulbs of poison. Dozens upon dozens of them; not just on the trunk, but spread across the wall itself. Droplets of poison oozed down every surface of the plant. It bristled at her presence; reddish-brown vines, some noodle-thin, others as thick as her upper arm, twitched slowly. Like all Retrievers, she knew that made its home in the vicinity of more violent flora. The likelihood was strong that if she stepped too close, she'd be trapped by whatever caused the thing to nest here in the first place.

She let her backpack fall to the floor, and knelt to peel it open, removing a cumbersome flesh-coloured shape.

"Lucie? I've got it. Getting ready to deploy."

Lucie had been watching the readouts as the sensors all over Tala's suit lit up.

"I can come and do it. I need the experience."

"You stay right there until told" Tala shot back. "First trip, you stay put. Be good and I'll let you look at the next one."

"Acknowledged."

--

The next month of training was somehow more brutal. After the hallucinogens wore off and any injuries and afflictions had healed, Trainees began an immediate regimen in what the Officers and Instructors referred to as the Fuck Chamber: a complex, articulated, intelligent machine mounted inside an anechoic, soundproof pod with no light. Initially with breaks for sleep, this was where the advancing Trainees would spend all of their time. The Chamber was spherical, with no floor, and covered in panels from which robotic appendages would emerge. The Trainee would be restrained at the wrists, ankles, waist, and neck, and posed as the automated system dictated; poses that threatened to snap limbs and spine, to cut off circulation, to cause endless agony while snake-like protrusions sprayed litres of slippery lubricant over the Trainee's orifices and burrowed inside; filling the intestines and throat, and curling up inside the vagina. The protrusions would vibrate, violently, and in addition to sliding in and out with speeds from tauntingly slow to unbearably fast, as expected, they also possessed the ability to thicken and shrink, threatening to tear even the most elastic of openings. After the initial week of daily use, Trainees were mandated to spend another 3 in the Chamber without breaks, their nutrition delivered via feeding tubes, their sleep disturbed, or forced upon them without warning by chemicals while the mechanical onslaught continued.

Lucie, like every other Trainee, had been broken in the first week. She'd staggered, trembling, from her bunk every morning to be brutalised by the Chamber. She was already unresponsive and bewildered, barely able to will herself upright each day. Once she shifted to full-time, she was gone. Very little was remembered from that particular stretch; pitch blackness, and without drugs, her brain would invent sights and sounds to accompany the perpetual unyielding penetration of her holes and torture of her joints that claimed weeks of her life and much of her consciousness.

She had never asked why Tala had signed on to do that trial all over again, in the Chamber next to hers, the two of them unable to see or hear one another.

The rest of the time spent in training was open-ended, and mandated Therapy. The very last step in preparing a person to become a Retriever is to rebuild the person the process thus far had destroyed. To integrate the resilience, the immunity to cataclysmic levels of physical abuse, with the habits and mannerisms of a functional human being. And therein lies the reason that most people would spend years in training. This was where Tala and Lucie's friendship was forged. In talk sessions conducted side by side, they brought each other back. They learned to walk, and regained their strength, in physiotherapy. And during the highly unofficial but strictly mandated Orgies, bound tight by rope and simultaneously counselled and fucked in turn by the same Therapists, they remained side by side.

This was the process that Lucie had aced in a year, to become the youngest Retriever seen in decades, and to have the honour of going out on her first mission with Tala herself, not only a legendary Retriever, but now the only person in history to have ever completed Retriever Training twice.

--

"Deploying Dummy."

"Acknowledged."

LP18 would only secrete, but also would only manufacture, Venom 322 in the presence of the human reproductive organs. Who knew how it was even discovered, but the earliest Retrievers had the stroke of ingenuity to manufacture Dummies -- lifelike silicone pelvic regions that mimicked the appearance and scent of a prostrate human. After years of training, all a skilled and hardened Retriever had to do was place the Dummy in front of the plant, and stand back until the deception was detected, by which point a mechanism inside the Dummy would have secured and sealed a generous sample of 322.

"Ah, shit."

"What's up?"

"Unresponsive."

"What?"

"It's not doing anything."

"Is it dead?"

"It's alive, I can see it moving."

The Dummy sat on the moss-strewn floor like a corpse. Tala gingerly shoved it forward with her foot, and then jumped back. She'd watched these monstrosities fall for the fake buttocks and pudenda hundreds of times.

"Maybe move it closer?"

"I did that."

"Um... maybe it's not dead, but it's just really old?"

To Tala, it made sense. The thing was everywhere. It was likely a lot larger than this room; the soil all around them might hold roots going for miles in every direction.

Lucie tried to offer some optimism. "If the plant is unresponsive then it's an obvious candidate for research. Suggest we petition for special exemption to return with equipment to sever and seal the specimen itself."

Tala didn't respond. She stared, thoughtfully, at the plant for a minute.

"Lucie, we both did the same training. You must have wondered why they'd put us through all that just to dump a fake butt on the floor once a week?"

"I... yes, because we need 322 to generate energy. All of our energy comes from 322 now. We did the training to make sure that if there was a chance someone could escape, one day, they would."

Tala fixed her gaze on the main stem. "Average energy yield from a gallon of 322."

"It's imprecise," Lucie said, "best estimates show a gallon of 322 could power a large city for 100 years."

"Average yield of 322 from a single Retrieval."

"0.1 Gallons."

"Total 322 reserves as of last count."

"200, 243 Gallons. No, hold on, for that to be true, the number of Retrievals would--"

"It's accurate. Remaining habitable and active human settlements."

Lucie paused, somewhat bitterly. "345."

"Of which could be classed as cities?"

"12. You're saying we have more of this stuff than we can ever use."

"Unless we plan to demolish a planet, yes."

"So what?"

Tala took a breath that came down the intercom as white noise. "So... why are we risking our lives for a tenth of a gallon of this goop?"

She stood alone in the cold and mouldering damp, bathed in faint white light. "Lucie... I've been thinking about this for a long time. The reason we were commissioned to be living sex dolls and get the shit kicked out of us so hard we'd never recover. The reason we're made to withstand anything."

"For a chance at survival."

"No. No. No rescues, remember?"

"I meant survival as a species. Two centuries ago, the population was a hundred times what it is now. Encroachment of hostile plant life has decimated us, if gradually."

Not as gradually as it felt in the present day, but as more cities had fallen, records became patchy. Most such regions were, by now, impossible to enter. Aggressive Flora of the Lethal Plant designation -- of which there were over 50 -- had made their homes wherever humans lived. Those that moved swiftly, laid gigantic traps, grew colossal orifices over a period of weeks and swallowed buildings, or emitted clouds of psychoactive spores -- LP18 was comparatively tame. The sluggish plant had piggybacked on others' predations, drugging and violating those who became ensnared. More still fell prey to the Doomer cults who craved the fate that the plants offered. Curiosity around this particular plant was powerful; in their last moments, victims had been recorded screaming, begging onlookers to sacrifice themselves in kind and join them in orgasmic chemical oblivion. The lack of comprehensive data on the organism could be explained by the fact that so many tended to listen. The cascading effect was legendary.

"I have a theory of my own. They put us through all this to test the idea that someone even could survive these things. It's to find that person. And then... who knows, study them, I guess."

Lucie's control panel lit up with alarms as the biofeedback monitors on Tala's suit disconnected all at once.

"Tala?"

"I'm still here, Lucie. I took off my suit."

"You did what? Tala."

Tala stood motionless, naked in the chilling wet air. She took a step forward, kicking the Dummy off into a far corner with her bare foot. The vines bristled, ever so slightly. She stood in front of the stem, her stance wide, square, reckoning with the thing.

"Tala."

Tala sighed. "Lucie, I needed to do the training over. I needed to give myself a fighting chance. I've been looking for a specimen like this."

"You're not..."

"Look, maybe... if it's weak enough, and if I'm strong enough, we can finally learn a little about what these things are. What they really do to us, maybe... maybe why they do it."

Lucie was already ripping her seat restraints off. She ran to the utility chest and pulled out a spare flexsuit. "I'm coming down there. Do not do anything unt--"

"Stay" Tala snapped. "Do not interfere with this."

Lucie paused. "Are you a Doomer?" Tala's suit was still active. She looked over the readouts for any slight indication that insanity-inducing spores had a role to play in Tala's behaviour.

Tala caressed herself in front of the organism, arching sensually, as if teasing it. Whenever she moved, petals flexed, and fresh blobs of variously coloured, glowing venom dripped from the bulbous anthers.

"Like you said, it's probably too old." Tala dropped to kneel upright on the floor, turning her back on the thing. "It didn't go for the Dummy, it probably won't go for me, either."

"You can't--"

"Or maybe it'll be just weakened enough that I make it out of this. We bring the sample back in my pussy, and we all learn something new."

"...I don't want you to."

"That's nice" Tala leaned forward, folded her arms on the floor in front of her, and rested her head on them. She shuffled her knees outwards, and lifted her posterior up off of the floor, spreading her vulva and displaying her real, human holes to the ancient plant. She didn't look behind her, but the light in the room grew brighter. "But you're not supposed to care."

Lucie stared at the intercom, silent.

Tala, perfectly trained, felt no trepidation at the familiar sound of vines detaching from the walls and ceiling, the patter of stone dust and dried plant matter falling to the floor. Her breathing and heart rate stayed constant, normal. She heard the dry slithering, and then they came into view, snaking all around her on the floor. She rocked her head left and right, casually regarding the new friends who'd come to bid her hello.

They were very gentle. Very little pressure at all, as they found her skin. Her limbs. Twisting around her arms and legs, establishing their growth over her body, searching for a way in. Had she not been trained, she would have jumped at the cold touch as it found her neck, and the small of her back. The grip tightened a little, holding her in the position of prostration she'd taken. There were three vines looped around her neck, and another three around her waist. A network of smaller vines criss-crossed the whole of her skin, and a rather thicker appendage was snaking its way down the crevice of her buttocks, over her anus, and towards her vulva. Moisture transferred to her at every touch, icy, the perspiration of the plant and the humidity of the room collecting all over her skin, shimmering under the floral glow. A landscape of cold dewdrops forming beneath the rhubarb-like limbs.

"Lucie?"

"I'm here."

"It's got me."

"You're...?"

"So far, so good. I think it's going to penetrate me next. In fact... ah..."

Tala experienced no sexual feeling whatsoever. She had been brutally conditioned to feel nothing when penetrated, fucked, kissed... even voluntarily, she couldn't. But she had nonetheless willed herself wet, and the dense vine slid inside her hole with an audible trickling sound. She judged... 7, 8, 9 inches... it kept going. "Lucie, it's got about a foot and a half inside me right now." Lucie did not register shock, or surprise, either. They'd both done the Chamber. "It feels like a growing mass... I'd say it's curling up into a ball or spiral." Had she not been bound, she would have reached down to check by touch; but she was sure that she was becoming slightly distended. "This is the appendage that secretes 322." Lucie nodded. They knew it was anatomically distinct from the other vines, the ones that first restrained and then burrowed into the skin with microscopically tiny needles, but the specifics were still a mystery.