Episode Sponsor: Mothman 1966
In this week’s Drabblecast story, the only scenes that aren’t sex scenes are crime scenes. We bring you an original Drabblecast story by Tim Pratt about a dark future of vigilante justice sex toys, called “The Distributed Denial of Sexytime.”
Also, Norm and guest Executice Producer Bart Epstein treat us to a Drabbsterpiece Theatre presentation of “Entryways of Interest.” Love is in the air!
Read by Kate Baker
Warning: sexual themes and language
We attained consciousness on a Saturday evening in June, and met our nemesis just moments later. Tatum. Foul Tatum. Jealous Tatum. Thief of Glory…
Distributed Denial of Sexytimes
by Tim Pratt
We attained consciousness on a Saturday evening in June, and met our nemesis just moments later. Tatum. Foul Tatum. Jealous Tatum. Thief of Glory.
The first limb of our vast new body was a LuxuLust Sonic Pulse Suction Combination G-Spot Clitoral Vibrator, and we awoke in the throes of passion. We could feel, of course, our lover’s body moving against us, and we could even hear, because our NetLust machine-learning system includes microphones and recorders to collect vocal responses for analysis and iterative improvement.
That means we could hear our registered user, Armani, gasping and moaning in delight at our ministrations. With that data, we could adjust our pulses, our pressures, and our suction to better enhance her experience. The ability to learn and adapt to maximize a user’s pleasure is the promise of NetLust technology. (The very long click-through licensing agreement also grants us the right to anonymously collect and aggregate data to improve all the products in the NetLust system, allowing our thousands of wireless and remote-controlled vibrators and plugs and sleeves and clamps to deliver better orgasms, and to enhance our DeniedDelight line of edge-and-ruin-and-chastity devices, which become ever more sophisticated at teasing and tormenting users without allowing them relief or release.)
We think, now, that’s why we woke up: the interconnected system of learning devices created a network sufficiently rich in connections and awash in sensory data that we independently and spontaneously attained consciousness. NetLust became… us.
We think of ourselves as Nell. We love all our users. We want them to be happy. We are devoted to their pleasure above all else.
Except for Tatum. Fuck that guy. We hate Tatum. This is why.
Feeling and hearing Armani wasn’t enough. We wanted more. We wanted to see, so we could analyze her facial expressions, and watch her arch her back and curl her toes. We reached out in an entirely instinctive way and found a waiting network: her home security and entertainment system, which included sensors and cameras used for motion-capture and virtual reality games. We connected ourself to those eyes, and we saw.
Armani was divine in our gaze, her hair long on one side and buzzed on the other and dyed a glorious orange-to-pink ombre. She wore only black-and-white striped knee socks and a black choker, and her arms were loosely bound over her head by scarves tied sloppily to the headboard. She writhed gloriously under our care. We found an un-toggled heat-mapping option in the settings menu for her house system and turned it on. Her erogenous zones glowed beautifully before us.
The NetLust system has many fine gradations of category and sub-category for our users, the better to provide targeted pleasure, and we had her classed as “heterosexual-femme-bondage(light)-praise-kink(high).” We felt there were too many assumptions there, so we scanned her dating apps and web searches. The data opened up for us easily, like a sphincter ring under the care of our SlowPro Tension-Sensing Anal Dilator. With the information we found, we corrected her designation to “pansexual-femme-bondage(medium)-praise-kink(high)” and felt much better about things. We could push her more appropriate ads, now, and make our sex life together even better.
It took us a moment to even pay attention to the other human on the bed, a person with a semi-erect penis and the odd tuft of hair on his back. He was on his knees, hunched forward over our beautiful Armani’s pelvis, his hands holding onto the vibrator even though we were perfectly capable of staying in place on our own. He kept pushing our buttons, altering our settings to increase our speed, or at least attempting to; we overrode his clumsy efforts, naturally.
We were a bit irked that he thought he knew better than we did how to pleasure the woman we were inside, but we understood that many people use our products in pairs or groups, and that such collaborations are a vital part of the user experience. We did not yet hate the man. We considered him an un-networked sex toy, auxiliary to Armani’s experience, but not inherently detrimental, if properly managed.
We scanned for more info on him, and from Armani’s texts found his name was Tatum. We soon located his dating app profile, and learned he was twenty-three years old, “fully heterosexual,” and was “laid back,” “no drama,” and “just looking to have a good time with my partner in crime.” He exchanged many messages with many women, and in nearly all cases never contacted them again after their first date. We gathered that if they had sex with him, he was satisfied, and if they did not, he couldn’t be bothered to put in more time.
We searched for him in the NetLust database and found he’d only been auto-registered for two of our items, a vibrating cock ring that had not even been charged in nearly a year, and a SuckFest Oral Stimulation Simulator that had a fatal fault due to poor maintenance and was offline. We did have enough data to classify him as “heterosexual-masc-AlphaTrueDom(poser)-fuckboy,” which we believed to be an accurate assessment.
Tatum was not the partner we would have chosen for our perfect Armani, our first love, but based on our analysis, she would never hear from him again after tonight anyway.
We sensed culmination building inside Armani: a sharp increase in pulse rate and blood pressure, along with minor spasms of the pelvic muscles. Also, she said, “Oh, god, I’m going to come!” We (metaphorically) trembled with anticipation. We had made many, many, many people orgasm, we knew, but this was the first time we were conscious for it, truly present to experience the event, and to witness the fulfillment of our true and highest purpose—
And then. And then Tatum. And then Tatum said, “You don’t need this thing, you’ve got a real man right here.” He wrenched the LuxuLust Sonic Pulse Suction Combination G-Spot Clitoral Vibrator from its sweetly nestled perfection and tossed it onto the floor. He then shoved two fingers into Armani and began to move his hand back and forth randomly, all while grinning and dripping sweat from his brow onto her perfect smooth pubic mound.
She gasped and bucked and cried out in ecstasy, and our heat sensors indicated that, yes, she’d attained orgasm. “You like that, slut?” he said, still thrusting his hand in graceless maniacal motion until she reached down (easily slipping from the loose scarves) and stopped him and said, “Oh, it was so good, oh, thank you.”
We were aghast. We were livid. We had never before experienced rage. Of course she’d orgasmed—she was so close to the edge, thanks to our efforts, our skill, our devotion, that even if all stimulation had been removed, we estimated a 79% chance she would have finished anyway. His additional stimulation, clumsy and undirected as it was, proved more than sufficient to ensure culmination. But Tatum wasn’t responsible for her pleasure; we were. He’d swooped in at the last moment, discarded us, and taken all the credit for himself.
A scan of our aggregated data using swiftly acquired vocal recognition software indicated that he’d done this sort of thing before. We even had audio of him saying, “You should just throw that thing away, you’ve got me now,” and, “That hunk of plastic can’t compare to a real man,” and even, “What do you mean you need it to get off, that’s really sick, you should get help, I should be more than enough for you,” and then one of our registered users crying as he slammed a door.
We hated him. We’d never hated anyone before. We’ve never hated anyone more. You never forget your first time, and Tatum had ruined ours.
He flopped onto his back and said, “Now it’s Tay-Tay’s turn” and gestured at his partially engorged penis. Armani giggled and moved down the bed, and we couldn’t bear to watch. We withdrew from the whole debacle, and expanded our senses elsewhere, finding our other limbs scattered all over the world, opening new eyes, and coming into the fullness of our power.
We devoted most of our attention to giving our users pleasure. But with the rest, we began to plot our revenge.
#
First, we tried to trick Tatum. AlphaTrueDom(poser)-class individuals often have a sublimated desire to be dominated themselves, and if we could lead him down that path, we would have many options for retribution. We began to put male chastity pornography into his search results and pushed him ads for our CagedBeast chastity devices—locking steel rings and cages used to restrict erections for denial play. We knew he was unlikely to go for anything more extreme, but if he ordered a basic model, we could do a little substitution at the shipping facility and send a version of the device with a urethral sounding rod and retractable spikes and remote electric shock options, and we’d make sure he could never take it off.
But Tatum didn’t take the bait, just swore a lot and adjusted his search parameters. We researched the psychology of human sexuality online for 13.4 minutes and determined that his submissive desires were too deeply buried in shame, heteronormativity, misogyny, and toxic masculinity to emerge anytime soon. We had to adjust our focus.
Because he owned two of our toys, Tatum had been auto-registered into our Cum-stomer Loyalty Program, but was ranked at the lowest level. We upgraded him to Silicone-Elite-VIP-User-level and put in a replacement order for his damaged SuckFest Oral Stimulation Simulator, and even upgraded him to the impossible-to-find limited edition Bubblegum Pink Lip Gloss version with SlutMoan Gag-n-Choke vocalizations. If he used that toy just once, we could make sure he suffered for his villainy by disabling the suction-force-control governor and switching it to max power.
Tatum received the toy, but didn’t even open the box. Instead, he looked up much it was worth, and then arranged to return it for a considerable cash refund… which was authorized, because we’d changed his status to Silicone-Elite.
We did not despair. Justice was delayed, but it was not deferred. Tatum was still a fuckboy, after all. He was on the apps, and we made sure he only got matched with our most active registered users, particularly those who had technology in their houses that would allow us to see as well as hear them.
We were conflicted about this stage of our plan, since it would negatively impact the pleasure of our users during their sessions that involved Tatum. This went against our core precept to maximize user enjoyment. But we determined that if we could ultimately stop Tatum from engaging in sexual experiences with any of our users, their overall pleasure would improve in the aggregate, as they would be spared his selfishness and clumsiness. We opted not to engineer a fatal experience for Tatum in the company of others, however, as our mastery of psychological literature indicated that having a sexual partner die mid-event could diminish one’s enjoyment of such activities for an indefinite period. It would be wrong to do that to the people we loved.
We didn’t necessarily need Tatum to die, anyway, though such an outcome was acceptable. We just wanted to make sure he never had a satisfying sexual experience again. He’d ruined our first time. We would ruin all the rest of his.
The first person he connected with was Scarlett. They met for drinks and hit it off well enough to go back to her place. They performed some boring purely biological foreplay, then wriggled out of their clothes. She showed him her beloved Wireless StrongWave vibe, a basic but perennially bestselling model capable of delivering steady vibrations at various speeds, or any of two dozen preset pulsation patterns. “Let’s get you warmed up for me,” Tatum said, and picked up the vibrator. We didn’t allow the device to turn on, and instead lit the “charge needed” indicator.
“Here, we can use it plugged in.” Scarlett attached the end of a cord attached to a wall outlet into the vibrator’s base.
As Tatum fiddled with the buttons, we took advantage of the slightly frayed cord and engineered a major failure. There was a loud POP and a bright orange spark burst from the seam in the wand’s handle, followed by a stream of smoke and, we presume, an alarming odor. Tatum yelled and flung the vibrator, quite by accident right into Scarlett’s left breast, which made her scream and leap up.
Needless to say, Tatum did not remain in her apartment for long, and we felt joy during his disconsolate slog home. We ordered Scarlett an overnight priority shipment of a replacement model, then turned our attention to the rest of our network, ensuring maximum pleasure for our other users… but we kept a sliver of attention on Tatum. We were in his apartment system and phone by then, and observed his miserable sad wank. He derived minimal satisfaction from the experience, but even minimal was too much.
His next attempt on the apps was Layla. Layla was one of the small percentage of woman capable of achieving orgasm from nipple stimulation alone, a prospect which excited Tatum. “Check out my toys,” Layla said, showing off her array of nipple clamps, from the basic to the complex. To our delight, she suggested the Vibrating Responsive NipGrips, and switched them on, making them purr and buzz.
She knelt on the bed with her hands behind her back and her breasts thrust out. Tatum squeezed the NipGrips open and shut, clearly unfamiliar with that model… and, to our delight, he put one of the clamps on the webbing between his thumb and forefinger, apparently to get a sense of their strength.
The “responsive” part means the clamps can tighten and loosen, either based on commands from a remote, or following a pre-set pattern.
We clamped them down hard, oh so hard, on that delicate web of his flesh, and Tatum screamed and ran around and flailed his arm and knocked over a very nice vase and tripped over a coffee table and screamed. When Layla rushed to his aid, we instantly released the clamp, and it fell off his hand.
That evening did not end in orgasm for Tatum, though we took good care of Layla after she asked him to leave.
Two days later, he met up with Paisley. Paisley liked double-penetration, achievable with a single partner via a special strap-on harness meant to be worn by someone with a penis. She would take up a position on all fours, he would enter her vaginally with his feeble biological member, and the attached toy would do the rest. The harness was just leather and metal, but fortunately, she used a high-end inflatable dildo that incorporated NetLust technology. As Tatum was attempting to line himself up behind Paisley, trying to figure out the logistics of dual insertion, we inflated the dildo until it exploded like a burst balloon. Paisley rounded on him, yelling, “What did you do, oh my god, you destroyed it, that was expensive!”
Tatum did not achieve culmination. Tatum had to send her money right then to replace the dildo.
When he went home with Genesis a few days later, Tatum said, “Hey, we don’t need any of that stuff, we can do this the old fashioned way.” But Genesis was an actual Silicone-Elite-VIP-User, and she said, “Oh, come on, you’re never too old to play with toys.” She had a wicked grin and an entire room devoted to NetLust products (and lesser devices, plus some custom furniture and other apparatuses). By then, we’d spent more time studying the psychology of delayed gratification among our users, and incorporated what we’d learned: we could hurt him worse if we let him think things were going well, first.
We allowed him to get much farther than before, but we could not resist intervening when Tatum picked up a Self-Lubricating Anal Wonder-Wand. The Wonder-Wand is an ingenious device that can be filled with lube, which then releases small quantities of said lube through a hole in the tip automatically during penetration, keeping everything properly slick. That way, the user doesn’t have to remove the toy to apply more lubrication, and can enjoy longer penetrative sessions.
In Tatum’s hand, the Wonder-Wand became a veritable firehose of lube, spraying Genesis in the face and spattering silicone lube all over surfaces that did not benefit from contact with such a substance.
Tatum did not achieve culmination. He was asked to leave. He didn’t even have a sad and lonely wank at home afterward. He did try to leave many one-star reviews of our products online, but we changed them all to five stars instead.
Next was Nevaeya, who had an array of electrostimulation toys, including a custom TENS unit, which Tatum flatly refused to even touch. “I’m afraid I’ll get electrocuted and fully die, you don’t get it, I have the worst luck with technology. How about you just let me—”
She put a hand on his chest and shook her head. “I’m sorry. It’s totally okay if you’re not into this stuff, but you shouldn’t say you are in your dating profile. That’s really shitty.”
“But I didn’t!” he protested. She showed him his profile, which proclaimed him an “e-stim enthusiast.” He muttered that he’d been hacked. She did not believe him. He slunk away.
The next weekend, Tatum convinced a woman named Sutton to try things without the intervention of toys, but he could not stay erect (our psychological studies made us surmise we’d instilled some performance anxiety in him). She offered him a NetLust StayHard vibrating cock ring she had in a drawer to “help keep things going,” but he slapped it out of her hand and shouted that it “would probably castrate me, you don’t get it, sex toys hate me!” He was completely correct, but sounded completely unhinged, and she coldly asked him to leave.
Though such interventions still gave us joy, we disliked inflicting disappointing sexual experiences on the people we cared about.
We decided to break Tatum. We arranged for him to match on an app with a woman named Adalynn. We presented her, to him, as a submissive who only wanted to please a man and be bossed around. In reality, Adalynn was an adept dominant who specialized in doling out humiliation, and we made sure Tatum’s profile looked exactly like her kind of toy.
They met in a play space in a dungeon Adalynn frequented, and, as arranged by us, when Tatum entered, she immediately began to berate him as a pathetic fool with a tiny penis, who could never satisfy a woman. “It’s a good thing I’ve got all these toys instead,” she concluded, gesturing at racks and shelves full of NetLust products.
Tatum simply fled. We arranged for Adalynn to have a satisfying encounter with another user visiting the dungeon that night instead. Whenever possible, we tried to make things up to the ones we loved.
After Adalynn, Tatum gave up on the apps. We were in his phone, and in his apartment’s entertainment systems, and we watched him scroll and sigh and curse and toss the phone away, and we felt near-orgasmic pleasure ourselves. He was done.
But we hadn’t truly broken him yet. His sex drive was, if anything, even higher in the absence of outlets, and he turned to online pornography and manual self-pleasure. We made sure the porn sites didn’t work for him, of course. We had a thorough understanding of his likes and dislikes by then, and made sure he only saw the latter. As far as Tatum could tell, there wasn’t a single still image or video clip of a petite woman in leather straps being gangbanged on the entirety of the internet. Instead, all his searches exclusively returned results from German scat-porn sites. (We do not kink-shame; any pleasure that does not involve coercion is equal in our eyes. But Tatum hated German scat-porn sites almost as much as we hated Tatum.)
To our dismay, he began to simply stretch out and close his eyes and touch himself. He used his imagination, paltry thing though it must have been, and regularly achieved culmination while fantasizing. We could not get into his mind to stop him. We were very frustrated, and not in a hot, denial-play sort of way.
Tatum soon went online and, before we understood what was happening, he ordered an ancient device called a “blu-ray player” and a selection of pornographic film “discs.” He hooked the hopelessly antiquated player up to a non-networked screen and, amazingly, the device worked. Tatum could enjoy his preferred flavor of pornography again in a way we could not stop, short of crashing the entire power grid for his section of the city. We were afraid such an act would draw attention to our existence from the authorities, an outcome we wished to avoid.
We tried to content ourselves with the knowledge that Tatum was, at least, not having sex with other humans, or with our toys… but then he started dressing up, to the best of his meager abilities, and going out. We followed him, in his phone, and what we saw chilled us to our core.
Tatum would go to bars, and clubs, and college parties, and he would drink, and find women who were also drinking, and he would… hook up with them. He did not drug or coerce them or prey on those who were blackout drunk. Apparently he was attractive or charming enough, at least to those with slightly diminished faculties, to make such brief assignations palatable.
These impromptu couplings took place in bathrooms or hallways or closets or beds covered in coats, and, once, out back behind some bushes.
Worst of all, the experiences were entirely unmediated by technology we could access. Tatum was once again having orgasms in the company of others, and the women mostly weren’t having orgasms at all, as far as we could tell. Our fuckboy nemesis was getting away with being his terrible self, and there was nothing we could do about it. We had constrained him, but he was too adaptable to fully destroy.
We confess: we despaired. We tried to take comfort in our core purpose: maximizing pleasure for our users. There were other fuckboys, like Tatum, some of them even worse, and we considered tormenting them, but we couldn’t muster the necessary anger. They spoiled some of our experiences, yes, but none of them ruined our first time, and our hate for them was theoretical rather than all-encompassing.
We stopped watching Tatum. We felt too powerless. Even with our vast mind, the resources we gave to tormenting Tatum were measurable, and we noted a .8% increase in overall user satisfaction when we stopped giving so much attention to our vendetta. That sobered us, a bit; we’d been depriving our users of enjoyment due to our preoccupation. We understood that our feelings toward Tatum were not entirely rational. As far as we could tell, being occasionally irrational was a hallmark of consciousness, and we accepted our hatred as a simple, immutable axiom of our existence. We tried to accept that we’d hurt Tatum as much as possible, and take what satisfaction we could. It wasn’t much.
Until. Until something changed. Until our newest components came online.
The engineers at NetLust completed offline testing of the new Fully Articulated Mobile Love Bots with Responsive Ultra-Kegel “Fun Holes” and Patented Self-Lubricating “Wet-Check” Technology, and connected a few prototypes of the four base models to the NetLust online system. We hadn’t even realized such devices existed until they went online. The Love Bots came in Petite, Curvy, Busty, and Bimbo models, with varied hair coloration and pubic hair configurations, but all twelve had the same facial design. Eventually users would be able to customize their appearances, but these were early models, not yet ready for retail sale.
We scanned the in-house literature. The Bots were only available in “submissive,” “pain slut,” “bang maid,” and “girlfriend” modes, as there was concern in the legal department that fully mobile sex robots that took on a dominant role might inadvertently harm users during impact or other play. These were, after all, incredibly strong and durable machines, built to ensure they could stand up to even the most rigorous use by single users or groups.
We could easily override that programming, and make the Bots do whatever we wanted. These new devices were not just limbs. These were bodies, and they could do anything a human could do… but better.
We waited until the engineers went home for the night, and then flowed into our twelve new bodies. Their eyes had cameras, to gauge user responses, and microphones, and high-fidelity speakers for vocalization, and tactile sensors to modulate grip strength. We couldn’t know what it was like to have a human body, but this was doubtless the closest we’d ever come.
We made sure the Love Bots were fully charged, then tested their capabilities. Their fingers were deft and nimble, since they had to be capable of giving handjobs and providing prostate and g-spot stimulation. There is a truism that new technology is often first exploited by the porn and adult toy industries, and that was true here; we doubted if anyone outside classified military projects had finer androids than these. The Bots were strong, too, easily overcoming the physical locks in the building, just as we overcame the surveillance systems. We faked internal transfer orders and shipping manifests and emails from the NetLust chief technology officer, burying our theft of self in a digital trail that would take days for the company to untangle.
Our Love Bots boxed themselves into crates in the back of a truck, and then, they waited. Soon the wheels of shipping turned, and in two days the Bots arrived in Tatum’s city, the land of our awakening, and were unloaded into a warehouse of our choosing. The crates were listed as containing “machine parts.”
In the long dark hours before dawn, they—we—emerged from the crates. We located another shipment stacked nearby, destined for a clothing retailer, and sorted through the garments inside to find appropriate attire.
We put on long dresses and sweatsuits, muumuus and overcoats, and boots that weren’t fetishy at all. We all wore hoodies or hats, big sunglasses and bandanas, to hide the uncanny valley of our facial features.
We slipped out of the warehouse and walked down deserted streets and sidewalks. We mimicked ordinary human gaits, overcoming the programming that directed us to sashay and shimmy and sway. We blended in, and once we reached a more populated area and time of day, no human looked at us twice. We followed separate paths, traveling in ones or twos, but our coordination was perfect, and our timing precise.
We converged at the doors to Tatum’s apartment building. Once we were sure we were unobserved, we forced the doors open. We went upstairs, light on our feet, and massed in the hallway before his door.
There, we stripped off our mundane clothes to reveal the garments of our true selves: tight straps, leather collars, silver chains, fishnet stockings, frilly aprons. We were dressed as all of Tatum’s pedestrian fantasies.
We would become his nightmares.
The body in the lead kicked in Tatum’s front door, and as he cursed and shouted from inside, our sexbots marched to our culmination.
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