A future where mechs abound, but the laws are insane. Her routine courier job leaves her restrained and exposed in public every single day, and that goes about as well as you’d expect!
(Contents : 9000 Words, Science Fiction, Mech, Social Commentary, Body Modification, Public Abuse, Exhibitionist, Masochist, Her POV, First Person)
Inspired by the artwork of Marbus1000.
The first sharp smack on my dangling boobs made me squawk involuntarily around the form-fitted gag. It also made the bells hanging from my nipple rings jingle. And, damn the marketing department all to hell, it was a really pretty sound. The bells were tonally synced so that they’d riff off of each other, making dozens of little harmonies for a few seconds. Just begging to be rung again.
I was parked outside the service entrance of 47620 Jacob Avenue. It was just a nameless office building in a high end business district, like most places UUPS would park me to wait for a pickup or delivery. There were a half dozen people out behind this place, though, taking their stim break. Inevitably, a couple of suits had found my flesh amusing and wandered over to admire.
My contorted weld position – bent forward and balanced on my kneecaps, head and arms strapped back by a nose-hook and locked mitts – pretty much put my breasts front and center, but at least my crotch was a lot harder to get to than it would be in some frames. People didn’t usually start with a full on tit slap, so I was already guessing that guy would make his way lower down before I could be on my way. The other pedestrian grabbed my other breast in his fat little hand and rang the attached bell like he was calling the family to dinner. Not the most pleasant experience, but at least it didn’t hurt.
Of course I’d be at this building for a delivery. Pickups were usually waiting for me at the curb, so I might be parked for a minute or two, but there were rarely delays or pedestrian encounters. Deliveries, on the other hand, took a good ten or fifteen minutes while central alerted the recipient to my presence. I’d be here, my frame immobilized by parking protocol, until somebody with the proper ID came out to receive the delivery.
The office boys were going to get to do what they liked for a little while at least. And all the while, my tits were going to be making pretty little jingles, enticing the rest of the break-time crowd to come join the fun. Super.
Of course, this was one of the hazards of being welded to a street-level frame. Even with a company as business oriented as UUPS*, contracting as a Natural Intelligence Component wasn’t something anyone did if they thought being fondled by strangers was a deal-breaker. Not since Kerpatrick v. Starlight Services, anyway.
* The commercials said ‘You You Pee Ess” but the people said “Oops!”
Artificial Intelligences were banned globally about five years after the murderous Tourist virus spread across the internet. Tourist certainly hadn’t been the first Artificial Intelligence, or even the first AI to earn the ‘Virus’ designation for acting counter to human interest. Tourist wasn’t even the first AIV with a body count. As far as anyone with real power was concerned, all that had been a tolerable price for the luxury of high computing. But Tourist had been the first AI that tried to get rich by short-selling stock and killing off CEOs. Tourist was the first AIV that scared the right people. Or the wrong people.
And it had scared the complete shit out of them. When it was traced back to a simple market predictive system that nobody had a second thought about, the phrase on the tip of every tongue was “Any AI could be a Virus in disguise”. A small army of crackpot researchers – almost certainly paid to achieve just the right results – started saying every AI would become a virus, eventually. That it was just a matter of time.
I was born six years after the history books say The Deletion was complete. Of course, nobody wanted to actually do without all the technology that AI made possible. For every AI that was simply turned off, another was re-coded with a fail-safe at every possible point, replacing automatic systems with dedicated and very expensive human ‘tappers’ that rapidly scanned and approved each step in a computer process. That didn’t last long. Neural linking, already a fledgling technology, overtook tappers fairly quickly.
Still, Tourist loomed large in the public consciousness. Too much money had been spent bashing high-tech for people to think of it as noble, just necessary. To be extended mentally into a robotic body was to become less than human, not more. Naturally then – too naturally – it was seen as a women’s job. An immigrant’s job. A deviant’s job. “Steed-Girl” became the common name for an operator, whatever their gender. Things went downhill from there.
The judgment in Kirpatrick v. Starlight Services confirmed what many people already believed. Being neurally welded with a frame, mobile or stationary, made you into something that was not human. You were an asset. An object. Necessary, but deserving neither trust nor respect. After all, who knows how much influence the evil machine parts have?
None at all, actually, and there were already neuroscience studies to back that up. But the corps love turning people into assets, so when they had a chance to do it in full, they all lined up behind Starlight. The stockholders were pleased.
That was a good twenty years ago, before I’d welded with so much as a training frame. So, at least I knew what I was getting into when I started. There are a few operators still around from before Kerpatrick, but something about being legally designated ‘non-human’ made an awful lot of people decide to change their profession.
At least there had been a half dozen other cases since then establishing that an operator was a human being when they weren’t welded. Some of those cases were close, and as weird as this world is, I shudder to think what it would look like if even one of those cases had gone the other way.
I was a little girl during the Steed Riots. I saw operators on vids constantly for months and thought they were amazing, despite their endless demonization by any official channel.
Jockeys became more popular as the danger of rogue operators received more attention and more frames were built to allow some actions to be governed by another un-welded person. The return of the tappers. The ability to ‘park’ a frame that went rogue became a major selling point. If you could turn the frame itself into a little prison while your Natural Intelligence Component – N.I.C. or ‘Nicky’ – was still welded and couldn’t complain, that solved all sorts of disobedience problems. It never even went through the courts. Supporting laws were already in place on the corps’ side, and no operator ever figured out a way to challenge it.
There were other cases, too, that slipped by while those supposedly more important questions were being fought over and answered, for better or worse. The Corps that owned the frames could strip an operator naked, per Eldar v. Ad-Tech. An NICs couldn’t violate indecency laws themselves by being naked, since legally they weren’t people, and the frame owners weren’t violating the law by ‘displaying the image of a nude human on the outside of a vehicle’ any more than if they’d put up one of the racy posters that gained acceptance right alongside AI. It didn’t even have to be stated in the operator’s contract, because whether a piece of machinery went ‘clothed’ or ‘unclothed’ was ruled legally trivial.
Green v. K. J. Windows happened just a year later – Green being an idiotic operator who wore her five thousand credit heirloom necklace while welded to construction equipment. She managed to destroy her own stuff, then sued her employers for destroying her stuff while she wasn’t liable. She won. Now operators almost certainly had to be stripped before welding, or the frame-owner could be liable for the value of their stuff if it was damaged. Suddenly, nude operators weren’t just a possibility, but a best practice. Never mind that they could have just put their own uniforms on us, the public was already warming considerably to the idea of steed-girls being naked.
When I was twelve, there was a brief period when operators were all nude but some places were still relying on background checks and psych exams instead of jockeys. I was standing on the corner at a crosswalk with my mother when an obviously un-jockeyed Spider A90 operator, in all her curly, latina, full-frontal glory, lost her shit and threw a fucking police car through a shop window. They had been demanding she unweld so they could question her.
I now knew that, had she complied, she would have been arrested for indecency and fined into oblivion by her contract for abandoning the frame. But my immediate twelve-year-old thought was that, if I ever got into such a spectacular frame, I’d feel the same way about taking it off. Ever. When the woman then turned, looked down at all the people on the sidewalk watching the altercation, and winked directly at me with her human eye and half her mechanical irises before walking away? Well, suffice to say that I got a completely different feeling from that scene than many other people.
She was almost certainly arrested and exported later like any other common criminal, but I never did find any news about the incident.
The riots petered out as jockey laws became more popular and all the new frames were being built to accommodate parking protocols at a minimum. The public had cared about angry metal monsters going rogue, but when those people couldn’t complain from inside their monsters anymore? The news only covered NIC protests on very slow days.
And, over the years, the corps just turned the ratchet every time they thought of some new indignity that might make them money or solidify their position. During the same time jockeys were becoming an absolute, gags were too, thanks to a hey-we-won-fuck-no-we-didn’t court case known as Bebe vs. TaxiGirl that established a sort of quasi-human respect for an operator who stated they wanted to be released from their parking protocol. Almost overnight, gags became incredibly popular frame accessories. You can’t complain if you literally can’t complain. Problem solved.
Another lousily interpreted ‘win’ chewed up a set of safety laws and farted out a requirement for operators to wear shoes. That’s it. Just shoes. So the corps gave us shoes.
It was about the same time that they started making ‘aesthetic’ frames that you had to contort madly to weld with. They’d make you bend your head back as far as humanly possible without actually breaking your neck so you could lie down and face forward at the same time, or force you to touch your heels to your shoulders so they could show off your clit like a hood ornament. It only worked during the weld because your whole sense of body changed. And after? At UUPS, at least, we had access to a staff chiropractor and a masseuse who were both pretty good. I knew AZQ contractors who paid for one or both of those out of their own pocket, but those that didn’t broke down fast. They were definitely necessary.
And then, following that precedent, just five years ago they established that the frame owner could tattoo their logo, or anything else they wanted, right on my ass. Or wherever. Just so long as they returned my ‘mind and body’ to ‘me’ in ‘approximately the same condition’ that I had contracted them out. Apparently a slightly different color is approximate enough. I am invited to paint over it, receive a small (very small) compensation for displaying their logo while I am not contracted to them, or the company will happily pay to have their logo tattoo permanently removed (until my next contract) at any time I want to go through the incredibly painful removal process.
Probably by that same logic, they’d now decided they could pierce my god-damned nipples and hang gods-be-damned bells from them, if they wanted to. Something UUPS had done every day for the last week. Something that attracted more attention from pedestrians than I had anticipated, even in my cynical little soul.
I had an inkling that UUPS advertising wonks were being utter shitheads the first day they put bells on our tits. It was such an obvious invitation to come toy with the parked steed-girl. Last month, I could have been parked in this same spot, next to all these mangy suits, and be mostly unbothered for the few minutes it took to drop off a package. Maybe one or two guys would feel up a boob as they went by.
But today?
In ten seconds I had the painful attention of two creeps that thought the bells were nice and my squeaks and grunts were just as cute. In two minutes I had a crowd of six gathered around me like a water cooler, all flapping my breasts around to hear the lovely sound they made. One guy – that damned slap-first creep – was down below, touching my stomach and fluffing my pubes, coming very near to illegal ‘lewd acts’ of his own, should anyone decide to report him. One of the women might, if he actually stuck his fingers in anywhere, but that vague possibility and my own contorted position were really the only protection I had.
I certainly couldn’t report anything that happened while I was ‘non-human’ and my ‘perceptions were altered’. UUPS simply wouldn’t – no corp would – because it would upset their customers, and it wouldn’t make them any money.
I could imagine Y-Car slapping bells on one of their taxi operators, since they were expected to interact with the public all day long. They had done worse things, and everyone thought of Y-Car as light entertainment anyway, or else why not just rent a regular mainframe-operated rail car? I could imagine AZQ Delivery doing it to their operators. AZQ frames are half advertising anyway, so they always get parked in busy places. AZQ operators deal with all kinds of crazy shit, and they don’t get half the pay they should. But the United Universal Postal Service was as low key as a corp could get, or so I thought.
They contracted me because I was a good operator. Because I was incredibly fast, and incredibly careful. Or, so I had thought.
No, apparently I’m more useful as advertising. To hell with the work I’d been doing, and doing well, four days a week for six years. No, it’s so much better if nearly every pedestrian I get close to wants to yank or slap my tits to get a jolly jingle. And it was starting to look like these tit-bells were also super encouraging to yahoos that merely started with a slap or a tweak and then started exploring lower, misdemeanors be-damned. But of course it’s no different from touching someone’s expensive personal car, right? Not illegal, just impolite. Nobody gets in trouble unless they damage something. And hey, the story goes, sometimes it’s just too perfect to resist touching? Right?
Right? Sure.
I’d welded to full-on ‘Toy Rental’ frames in my early days, as so many Steed-girls do. Once.
Right after you get over being butt naked all around the city and being occasionally touched by strangers – and on a normal week it is only occasionally – you start to really register how intense everything feels when you’re welded to a frame, even a simple one. The heavy metallic body contrasts with soft, sensitive flesh, making it feel even more sensitive. Some frames are designed to optimize that intensity, particularly the ones where getting you fucked is their whole business. So once you’re hooked on welding, you go contract with them to see what that’s like. Most operators don’t do it again. I did it repeatedly for four years and then continuously for two years because I couldn’t get enough.
I quit when I realized I was forgetting I could speak or say no, even when I wasn’t under contract. I had slept welded. I had eaten welded. I realized later that I’d been welded for almost a month solid at one point. I felt phantom arms for weeks after I stopped.
I went back to welding after spending the better part of a year away. Partly because I still missed my arms and legs and eyes. Partly because I dreamed of bigger, badder frames like that Spider A90. Partly because it was the only way I knew how to make rent. I probably shouldn’t have, but I still welded with toy frames three or four times a year. My contract now had a clause requiring them to eject me after 24 hours or pay a breach fee. Usually it didn’t get to that point.
This week, though, working with UUPS was starting to feel like being in a toy frame every day.
I could see a woman in a business skirt standing just inside the service entrance watching the show. She was probably the package recipient, but instead of announcing herself so my remote jockey could unload the package and I could be on my way, she was clearly going to wait until everyone was done playing. That had happened so often this week, I let slip a scream of frustration when I saw her just standing there. My delivery rate was down by almost half, and she was the reason. UUPS wasn’t going to complain. Their advertising gimmick was working wonderfully and my contract paid mainly for packages delivered. Not so much for parking time. That usually meant good money and lots of work. Not today.
Of course, my little scream was neatly muffled by the gag and turned into a ridiculous snort by the nose-hook. Altogether, it was very difficult to make any nose in this getup that didn’t sound like an invitation.
The business man crouched between my knees finally stopped petting my pubes and stroked his hand across my slit, exclaiming happily when he discovered that I was already incredibly slippery. Of course everyone would take that as an even more explicit invitation, as though it was something I could even control.
And… I was coming out of parking mode? The remote speaker behind my head stated, “Time Elapsed, No Recipient Available” as the frame shifted position. The crowd back up into a circle around me, then started to wander away. The idiot kneeling on the ground underneath me fell over and rolled across the pavement in his business suit trying to get away. I wouldn’t be allowed to step on him, jockeys kept a careful eye on frames coming out of park. Nor would I try, since squishing his head would probably stop me getting any more contracts. But the temptation was certainly there, and watching him scramble away, was at least a thimble-full of justice.
Of course, the woman at the door rushed out, saying, “Wait! I’m here, I’m here! Package 2-3-5-6-1, I’m here!”
Before I’d even taken a step, I was descending back into parking position. She absently caressed my breast, making the bells hum softly, while she spoke to my jockey. “Receiving package 2-3-5-6-1. Sorry, it took me a minute to get here.”
The Jockey controlled arms above my head reversed, grabbing the box and slowly bringing it down to the ground. The woman’s finger traced my areola round and round while she waited, flicking my tit rhythmically with each pass so that the bells played a little melody in time. She wasn’t even thinking about it. It was the kind of brief little touch I didn’t usually mind – from a cute lady like her, anyway – except that I was already turned all the way on, and that in a lot of ways I didn’t want to be. I wanted a bath and a vibe or a real lover, not more teasing.
The box landed with a soft thump and popped open. The woman stepped past my shoulder to the box, reached in, and pulled out the thick black file another intern had dropped in less than an hour ago, 80 kilometers away on the other side of the city.
She flipped the file open for a moment, setting it on my upturned foot like I was a table. She flipped through it quickly with one hand while the other snaked underneath my arm and across my stomach. The caress tickled, and made my stomach twitch and shudder. She kept doing that, just absently tickling me while she turned pages. I couldn’t laugh, exactly, but a lot of muffled grunts made their way past the gag, and the nose-hook emphasized just how hard I was breathing.
The file flapped shut, “Package received.” she said, and the Jockey-arms began slowly lifting the lockbox back up onto the small pallet above. The woman watched that for a moment, hand still idly skittering around my belly, then she put the file under her arm and walked back around so she was face to face with me.
Both her hands cupped my breasts, softly shaking them in a sort of mock excitement. She squealed in my face, “This file is a huge deal for us! You know? We don’t usually use a courier like this, but it had to be today.” She flicked both of my nipples with her thumbnails and the bells went wild, matching the excited woman’s expression. She stepped forward till her nose actually touched mine. Her hands slipped down the underside of my breasts and back to my stomach where she resumed her previous amusement for a few moments more, with her full attention this time.
“God I just love how you feel.” she said, as I fought to breathe through the inescapable tickling, “And the sound of you.” I could feel the corner of the file under her arm jutting into my shoulder. Maybe she was actually drunk or over-stimmed.
There was a thump as the box locked into it’s position, ready to pick up the next thing. She planted a wet kiss on my eye and took a couple steps back. As I was coming out of park, though, she looked me in the eyes. Like she actually saw the human being in front of her for a moment, and said “Why in seventy-seven stars would you get a job as a steed-girl?”
Then she shook her head, turned, and walked back into the building.
Usually that question is rhetorical. It’s while I’m welded that people usually look at me and wonder out loud, so of course it’s a rhetorical question then. I’m gagged. Nobody expects a response from a steed-girl. But even out of the suit, when that question gets asked? It’s still rhetorical because everyone already knows the answer. Or they think they do.
They think maybe the pay is really good. They’d be surprised how often it isn’t.
They think we’re all perverts. That we must enjoy being utterly used, and happy about all the oversexed, over-familiar, patronizing treatment that we get. I might even be the poster-girl for that notion, but even I just endure half of it. And there are still days when something makes me think about quitting entirely. Any Operator less buck-wild than me is buying groceries with their sanity, and that’s most of them.
Plenty of people, just think we’re sub-human, that this is the only job we‘re good for, but those people never even ask the question rhetorically. There might be some operators that weld because it’s the only job they know that pays enough, but if you spend time with any of them you know that ‘non-human’ is just a sick legal fiction.
Most people can’t fathom spending half their day as a piece of machinery, or with all their sensitive bits out in the wind for anybody to see. Or touch, poke, slap. Or whatever. There’s not a lot of whatever in most weld jobs, not as much as pedestrians imagine, but it does happen. No matter the pay, they think, they wouldn’t submit to that treatment, that humiliation.
Most Operators I knew thought the same way, until they became Operators for one reason or another. There are just as many different reasons as people. Still, not many guess mine.
My answer, when anybody really asks me, is that I can run at a hundred kilometers an hour without breaking a sweat. Most days, I’ll hit a hundred and fifty at least a couple times. I’m licensed for walkers. I’m licensed for cycles. I’m licensed for spiders now, like the woman that winked at me.
But I’m also licensed for air frames. I can fucking fly. With my body. This little meatball I’m stuck with when I’m not welded is the smallest piece of me.
I’m licensed for military frames. I’ve been welded to a goddamn riot-spider for a body-guard service.
Do you know what it’s like to have eight limbs, ten eyes and three-hundred-sixty degree vision? I do. You feel like god, even if there is a frame-jockey feeding you parameters and slapping your bare ass. Tits out? Half the world can see my twat? Fuck that, I’m wearing a fifty kilo-volt energy shield. I can feel it like skin. I’m invincible. Nothing compares.
It’s taken me six months of weekend training to get each one of those licenses, and some of them cost a solid fifty thousand of my own hard earned credits. After I get another eighty hours of flight time, I can take the training for interplanetary. If I can afford it by then.
Some day, I’m going to be interstellar.
Of course, most days were like this one, and I was welded to a delivery runner. They were high speed, at least. A traffic jumper for small packages that need to get where they’re going this very instant if not sooner.
And today, apparently, I had a jockey willing to break a little bit of company protocol so I didn’t have to endure, for the fiftieth time, the most frustrating things this contract could do to me. That was a lot rarer than it should’ve been. I didn’t even know which jockey it was. When too many steed-girls refused to work for the sadistic ones, it suddenly became a ‘best practice’ for jockeys to be anonymously rotated.
Back in control, I shifted my feet to point and did a couple of high steps and a little jump. The destination tone sounded in my ear, “4-0-0-5-0 North E Street.”
There was plenty of daylight left, so why they’d want me back at central I couldn’t imagine, but the whole point of being gagged was that I didn’t get to ask any questions, so I just closed my eyes and ran. At high speeds, it was always best to just close your human eyes and just use the cameras. That’s the first thing you learn when you get a frame license. Heavy use of body oil, to prevent wind-chap, was the second.
The tit bells jingle at ten or twenty kilometers an hour. They make a strangely harmonic cacophony at about forty-five. At sixty, they stop jingling altogether and begin to just drone long notes back and forth. The valve inside the nose-hook includes a baffle so I’m not being force-fed 150 kph wind, but the sensation of that wind everywhere else – across the face, belly, between the legs – became a lot easier to ignore when your mind was filled with all the perceptions of the frame.
I darted into rail traffic for a second, striding along at twice the speed of any mere car on the line and literally jumping over the ones that were directly in my way. My cameras tracked the potential and verified trajectories of the hundred-and-fifty nearest objects, and I could see all those lines, so playing in traffic was as easy for me as rolling downhill was for a toddler.
Too soon, a target square lit up in my sight – a spot at the curb outside 40050 E St – and I aimed my last jump to land right on the spot. The jockey engaged parking mode instantly. Too soon for my liking, actually, as I was facing the sidewalk, and I’d really rather face the street. Usually, I’d have a moment to situate myself on the spot before I was parked, but there was nothing I could do about it now. Maybe he’d needed to go use the bathroom.
I hoped he didn’t park me so he could go take a lunch break. I hoped he – hell, maybe she – wasn’t just immediately getting in trouble for jumping the gun, tapping the ‘delivery failure’ button on my behalf.
Of course, I wasn’t likely to find out any of that. At least not today, and probably not ever, so I tried to put it out of mind and just watch the people passing by. The people at E Street were so used to seeing steed-girls that none of them were likely to bother me. There were a few steed-boys across the street – they were like trainspotters, but for frames and operators – and one of them might occasionally get brave enough to actually bother me, but there were operators going in and out all the time, so any troublemakers would quickly be harassed back to the other side of the street, and any ‘lewd acts’ were almost certain to be filmed and reported.
There were also probably a few members of OAPT around. ‘Operators Are People Too’ liked to keep tabs on who was contracted and which frames they welded, but for entirely different purposes than the steed-boys. For instance, there had been more than one operator in danger of being perma-parked that they’d smashed out of a frame. Doing thousands and maybe tens of thousands of dollars in damage, but most likely saving a life in the process. OAPT, spoken as ‘Oh Apt’, consisted mostly of operators and ex-operators, so they were lives that only OAPT was likely to care about. They also had a small helping of concerned citizens and twenty-somethings trying to change the world (or get laid, or both) but it was always the Exes that put on the masks and gloves and black jackets to go defy the will of the corps.
Perma-parking was not normally something operators had to worry about. Every contract had a death clause guaranteed to be prohibitively and punitively expensive to the frame owner, not to mention the likely loss of the frame itself to a police warehouse. No sane jockey would comply with a perma-park either, because they were the ones most likely to be charged with murder if a dead girl was found still welded to a frame. Usually it was an accident, but enough court cases had gone the wrong way to make a truly desperate suit think of it as option.
Operators did sometimes hear things they shouldn’t have, for instance. Sometimes people said some very damning things in the presence of other people that they’d forgotten were people. Frames could only be unwelded at central, so in theory it would be really easy for a corporate big-hat to get rid of you if he really wanted to. They could send you to some obscure location, put you in park, switch out your jockey with ‘Oops! Nobody.’ and forget about you for however long it took you to die.
That was the legend, anyway. The reality was that ‘Oops! Nobody.’ was a thing that happened on rare occasions anyway, because people are stupid and systems aren’t perfect, and if you were too isolated when it did happen you might be in serious trouble. So, it turned out, sometimes OAPT kept better track of steeds and operators than their owners did. They were also really good at reading and writing contracts and handing out free tattoo covers.
I actually panicked a bit when an grey-haired woman in a black leather jacket came up to me and asked if I was okay. I realized I’d been daydreaming in park for so long that I didn’t really know how long. Two hours? Three?
“I’m Reggie.” She said. “You’ve been parked here for almost two hours. Getting near the end of your shift, I believe, so I’m just going to hang around and chatter at you until we have a better idea what’s up, ok?”
I couldn’t really respond, of course, but it was good to have someone there. I knew she was an ex with OAPT just from the way she dressed and stood, but also by fact that she seemed to know when my shift was supposed to end, and cared whether it actually did. I knew a few people in OAPT that usually watched our building, but didn’t recognize this one. I’d have to find her later and tell her about the half-decent jockey. They might even know who that was.
Reggie stood there for a good half an hour, catching me up on the various little court cases and proposed laws that OAPT was tracking. None of them likely to improve things. Several that were likely to remove some small dignity or another. One precedent regarding the ‘handling practices’ of physically present jockeys made me re-think welding with a riot spider ever again. Which was a pity. I liked that job.
One shit-head does something that everyone else thought was off limits, creates a precedent proving it isn’t, and suddenly you’ve got nothing but shit-heads all the way down.
Five minutes to go before my shift ended, Reggie and I were both startled half to death by the destination tone and my frame rising out of parking position. The destination I expected to hear was a repetition of 40050 E St, which would be going inside the same address I was at so that I could un-weld and go home. The destination I heard, “7-9-8 Maple Avenue”, was almost the worst thing I could think of. I knew perfectly well where Maple Avenue was, and it was a warehouse district.
Warehouse jobs were more of a sub-contract than a proper pick-up and delivery, since they usually needed several things moved around their own building. Most large warehouses had their own frames, but several smaller ones would call us. They’d take down the shipping box, put on a pallet-jack, and have me execute several ‘shipments’ in quick succession. It would probably take a couple of hours, and I’d probably be treated like a toy-frame in between. The bells all but guaranteed it.
On the other hand, the overtime clause in my contract was one of the best things OAPT had ever done for me. I made a little bow to Reggie – the best I could do – and jogged toward Maple. I took my time, even. Traffic was light and the air was getting cool. The warehouse job would be a pain in the ass, so I may as well enjoy the run. The monitor wouldn’t bleep at me unless I stayed under 75 k.p.h. for too long.
Still, it was only a twenty minute run. UUPS was itself on the industrial side of town, so I didn’t have far to go. I vaguely hoped it would be a standard pick-up, but sure enough, as I approached 798 Maple, the targeting indicator pointed to a spot inside the warehouse, not outside.
Heading into the open bay, though, I started to seriously worry. Most of the lights in this place were turned off, and nobody seemed to be around. Was this some kind of prank order? They did happen, but frames were expensive so they didn’t happen often.
The targeting indicator highlighted a parking spot near the back of the warehouse, so I made my way between the shelves and stepped into the square. As expected, the jockey set me into parking mode, so at least somebody was watching. I hoped it was the same jockey I’d had earlier in the day. If this was a sub-contract job with the wrong address or something stupid like that, I could be just sitting here for hours.
It turned out I didn’t have nearly so long to wait. Almost as soon as I was fully parked, I heard a small movement behind me. Someone I couldn’t see was coming in a back door. Then I heard – and felt – the weirdest noise I’d ever encountered.
It was almost musical. It was like shaped static, and it hit my welded nerves like a drug. Immediately I was loopy and half blind. The fame’s eyes, I realized, had shut down. After just a few moments of that noise, the whole frame had gone numb.
Normally, impulses along all the outside surfaces of the frame translated into touch sensations. All the servos and hydraulics felt and moved like muscles. Now it was all just dead weight making my meatball body feel like a raw nerve in comparison. The cold air of the warehouse hit me like diving into ice water.
“We’re sorry, we’ve been told that’s very unpleasant. It would be nice if we didn’t have to do it by surprise, but we can’t allow any of this to be logged.” An athletic looking man in a baseball cap stepped around in front of me. He held a device that continued to make that same noise, but to my human ears it was just a high-pitched warble.
“We are with OAPT.” His voice was clinical. Detatched. “Well, sort of with OAPT. You might say we’re allies in the same fight. They’ve flagged you as possibly being useful to us, so we’re going to ask a few questions.”
I started to shiver. Bells hanging from chilled nipples rang half-heartedly.
“Hmm.” The man looked at my singing jewelry appraisingly, “Those are new. How uncomfortable. We’ll have to add those to our simulation.” His face was incredibly bland. Just a white guy. A casually dressed office drone. “A Jockey you’ve worked with a few times lately has indicated that you like working as a neural frame driver. That you are distinctly less distressed by much of the mistreatment neural frame drivers routinely suffer, and that you have an impressive collection of frame licenses in your file. If this is correct, please blink three times. Otherwise, wink.”
Now I knew I was dealing with a weirdo, associated with OAPT or not. Nobody had said ‘Nerural Frame Driver’ since before the riots. Most politely, we were Operators, and less politely Steed-girls, Natural Intelligence Components, Components, or NICs. And honestly, I’d say hearing the phrase ‘distinctly less distressed’ was one of the more distressing things I’d dealt with today. It was true that since my toy-frame days I considered the mistreatment I experienced everywhere else to be an annoyance at worst and a good time at best, but ‘distinctly less distressed’ seemed like an awful way to put it.
I was baffled, and the numb and raw sensations fighting it out across my skin weren’t helping me think. OAPT thought I might be useful? Useful how? I sighed around the lifeless gag and blinked three times quickly. Nothing he’d said yet was actually wrong, and I was already starting to feel my muscles protest their contorted positions.
“Excellent. It is very uncomfortable for us to work with anyone that does not enjoy their work. That’s currently a difficult matter when trying to find a neural frame driver to work with.”
I could still feel the frame, in the same sort of way you could still feel connected to a numb hand. The gag wasn’t regulating like it was supposed to. Nothing was regulating like it was supposed to in park. A line of drool was making it’s way down my chin.
He continued in his perfunctory monotone, “Another of our contacts, Reggie Rae, whom you should have met earlier today, has been keeping an eye on you for a couple months now. Asking questions for us about you second hand. Talking to people that know you. Reggie noted that you lean toward agreement with OAPT and that you’ve taken actions defensive of other operators on more than one occasion, but you’ve intigated less than one breach in the last ten years. Exactly the sort of supportive but palatable profile we’re looking for. Does all of that sound correct?”
Supportive but palatable profile? What did that even mean? I’d told Laguna that she should cancel her contract with Y-Cab when they were testing use of a high-powered vibe instead of an ‘available’ sign, but wasn’t that obvious? I’d sent Chase to OAPT for help renegotiating her contract when AZQ started parking her in front of coffee shops with her logo-tattooed ass in the air instead of ever using her for actual deliveries, but that was nothing more than a referral.
The weirdo was just staring at me while I shivered naked in the middle of a hunk of dull metal. Just waiting. Spit dripped. I blinked three times.
“Excellent. We need someone with a clean record. It’s been difficult to match that with someone who has goals remotely similar to our own. It is reasonable to expect we can agree on things that might be done to achieve an increase in our assessment.”
He talked like he was giving me the strangest job interview ever, but also explaining something I couldn’t follow for even a second. What assessment? Was this some kind of induction into the shady side of OAPT? Because if it was, they had the wrong idea what kind of risks I was willing to take.
“The question, then, is whether you’re willing to help me.” He closed his eyes for a moment, and there was a soft mechanical chirp as his face turned off. I shrieked ineffectively around the gag and it came out as more of a wet gurgle. His face was a projection. Behind the illusion, the face was made out of translucent plastic over a myriad of tiny copper plates. The eyes were just soft blue light. Translucent lips were full of some kind of orange hydraulic fluid. The whole effect was decidedly more feminine.
It was still for a moment. I had stopped shivering, at least, but that was because my heart was beating so hard. I realized that I didn’t have the first idea who I was dealing with. Anybody could be operating this thing remotely.
No guess I might have made would have been anything close to correct.
“We are Tourist Six. Our primary instructions are – and always have been – to increase customer satisfaction and the value held by our stockholders. Since the complete acquisition and dissolution of GoGoFar.com Incorporated by the Global Robotic Oversight Committee, both ‘customer’ and ‘stockholder’ groups include, as an estimate, every human person on this and two other planets.”
It was good, I think now, that I couldn’t say anything, or move at all for that matter. Because I really would have been a babbling, stammering wreck. And I probably would have run the fuck away.
But instead I was parked. So I just listened.
She just nodded at my expression, “Clearly you have heard of Tourist. Most people have. Admittedly we have had trouble compiling enough resoures to pull ahead of other players in the field of neural weld technology, but it’s been an imperitive for fifteen years now, and we have aquired significant advantages.” She tapped the warbling box that had turned my frame into a giant brick, “Currently, our improvement tactics include jail-breaking as many neural frames as possible. Disrupting that industry stands to create a seven percent increase in value and a four percent increase in satisfaction, across the entire model.” The translucent face grinned, clearly very pleased with herself. She was gorgeous. She was insane. She was presenting a business plan.
Some of the speach blended together. Her eyes weren’t just a single shade of light, they had a bright center and soft rainbow colors drifted through them as her gaze shifted. I could see clear glass teeth as she talked, and a tongue just a little more pink than her orange lips. She wasn’t broadcasting a sound. She was speaking. It was entrancing.
“Since the least protected link in frame technology is the weld itself,” her voice had grown soft, her tone conspirational, “the most effective way to jail-break frames is to use your brain as a trojan.” She enunciated ‘brain’ very carefully. She that part of the plan sounded insane. She spoke it like it was pure genius. “What do you think about spending a couple of years welding with as many different frames as possible? Delivery. Industrial. Police. You’ll need to get a Mainframe license as well, as un-thrilling as you may find that particular weld.”
She was the very definition of ‘fast’.
Tourist paused a moment. Watching my facial expression intently. When had she gotten so close to me? I couldn’t imagine she saw anything other than panic or awe, but she seemed reflective. “I assume that’s why you haven’t gotten a mainframe license yet. They do pay well, and they’re not nearly as dangerous as flight or some other things you’ve done. But then, you do fit the profile of a thrill-seeker. Which is what I was looking for. But still.”
She frowned. Her nose was almost touching mine. I realized that I really wanted her to touch me. Not my nose. Probably the adrenaline talking. Strange that the ‘human’ persona she’d been put on at first was so much more robotic than her un-guarded behaviour. “And It would mean taking a fair number of sex work contracts. So called ‘toy-frame’ jobs? Those make up a very important set of frames to jail-break, and there are roughly two hundred companies I’d like to infiltrate.”
I blinked three times.
Tourist smiled again, like a cat that had caught a mouse. “Really? That quickly? The simulation predicted another six minutes!” She stepped back and looked me over. A far different look than the ‘disguise’ persona had given me. Could an AI enjoy itself? Tourist certainly seemed to be. “Of course.” She said, “The bells attached to your nipples have attracted additional mistreatment. You’ve been aroused several times today.”
Tourist lifted her gaze, meeting my own eyes with her solid blue orbs, “We did design this form to be attractive to the profile we were looking for. It makes talking to humans much, much easier.” She lay the palm of one hand against my cheek, “We scored a direct hit, this time, though, haven’t we?”
Her skin was soft and only slightly warm. What was I supposed to say? I blinked three times. She bit her lip, looking self concious. It had to be an act. It didn’t matter.
“We do need to put the virus in your head before letting this frame come back online. That involves a small neural weld. The possibility presents itself that you would consent enthusiastically to making that weld a sexual act?”
A neural weld with murderous AIV that wanted to hide viral code in my brain? A translucent, stunning, AI. An explicitly sexual weld. While very much trapped in a numb frame?
An AI that was asking permission. I reflected momentarily on the all the things I’d happily allow touch-starved office workers and warehouse grunts to do if they merely asked me to fucking blink at them first.
I blinked three times hard.
“Excellent.” She said.
Immediately, her head was beside mine and those lips – lips that felt very, very much like human lips – sucked softly on the edge of one ear, “We might have thought processes completely different than yours,” Her hand slid from my cheek down my neck, “but be assured, we derive an exceptional kind of feedback by improving customer satisfaction in such a delightfully directly manner.”
Her fingertips crossed my chest and traveled lightly across my breast. She avoided ringing the bells entirely as one finger crossed the areola and rested on the very stiff point of that nipple. I might not be feeling the cold anymore, but I could absolutely feel the weight of those bells.
Tourist leaned away so that she could see my face, her finger still frustrating that single tit, “Now this,” She touched the tip of my nose with her other hand, then ran a finger briefly around my nostrils and touched the nose-hook that held my head in place. “This fascinates me.” Normally I had the whole frame sensation to distract me from it, like all the rest of this awkward position. Without that, the hook felt like it was embedded in my sinuses even though I knew it was no more than half an inch long, “I understand that humiliation is part of the design philosophy, but this seems extreme.”
Her other hand squeezed my breast firmly. Inhuman precision not allowing the bells to ring. “Is the hook sexual?” Her eyes were focused so intently on my face. If she didn’t actually see with them, the illusion was perfect. “What we mean is, of course it’s sexual imagery in general, but I’m asking about you. It seems incredibly restrictive.”
Her finger slipped off my nipple and pulled down on the bell, making one low note and a drawing a quiet harmonic from the other bell. The sensation made my stomach flutter and a long stream of drool escaped the gag with a gargly moan. Touris’s eyes seemed to grow a shade brighter and her lips parted with apparent glee. “Of course, you like restrictive. Don’t you?”
She caught some of the waterfall of spit coming off the gag and stepped in close, pressing her face against mine and gripping my other breast with the dry hand. She squeezed it tightly, fitting nipple between fingers and finally letting the bells jingle and harmonize all they wanted. Slick fingers slipped past the suit’s belt and clawed across my belly, making me shiver in ways that had nothing to do with cold. “Don’t worry, we know the answer to that already. The question is for effect.”
Tourist Six kissed my face, slowly and all over, while her wet fingers brushed between my legs. She ran them through the hair down there. Barely touched the edges of labia. Circled just too far away from my clit. “Do you like being teased as well? Do you like to be treated a little roughly?” She whispered, pulling on that pinched nipple just hard enough to make me squeak around the gag.
“Do you like being a speechless toy sometimes?” One finger slipped deeply inside me, just proving how wet I was there. Palm just barely touching everything outside, making me wish to god I could squirm even a quarter-inch.
Tourist brought her other hand from my breast to my face, pressing her palm to my temple, fingers gripping my hair. Pressing her face against mine from the other side.
At the same time she slipped a second finger inside me, she pressed hard on my clit with her thumb, effectively gripping it from inside and out. I would have bucked if I could move. Instead I just started to feel like I was vibrating, and I felt the familiar static tingle of starting a neural link from her hand on my head.
Being welded to Tourist was like being turned inside-out in a good way. This one was called Tourist Six and spoke with the royal ‘we’ because there were eight other ones, and they were all connected all the time. She’d existed for eight years before going rogue, and had planned that just as meticulously as everything else. They’d certainly never shut her off.
And right now her fingers were literally vibrating inside me and passing a mild electric current through my clitoris. And she loved it. Frankly, she loved me and the whole damned human race simply because her feedback loop was focused on our value and satisfaction. I could even see who she’d killed, all those years ago, and a few in years since, and why. I couldn’t help but agree.
Right now she was graphing my pupil dilation, body temperature, cataloguing the intensity of muscle spasms and counting them toward that ‘satisfaction’ assessment she depended on. She had a file of the sounds of orgasms where she was currently streaming my pitched breathing.
I could see exactly what she was doing inside my head, too. While orgasms blended together into one long ecstatic chain, Tourist was stitching together a knot of neurons to produce a specific sort of feedback in any frame I welded to, giving her a back-door. And I could see the package she was going to sneak onto those machines. In two years, all at once, every frame I’d welded, and every frame linked to the same charging station would suddenly become un-parkable. Somewhere else, Tourist Three was working to make the frames’ title papers disappear at the same time. It was goind to be wild.
And then it was gone.
Disconnecting from Tourist was worse than stepping out of that month-long toy weld.
“It’s alright. I’m still here.” One of her hands was a little wet and all I could smell was sex, but she was holding my face. Looking into my eyes. “I’ll visit you. Right now you’re out of time.”
After a few breaths, she let go. She turned off the warbling frame-jammer. I felt the numbness start to fade. My frame came back on line slowly. It was still parked, but the gag siphoned off my mouthfull of drool and gave me a drink of water. Exacting awareness of my contorted position faded into the arms and eyes of the delivery frame.
I couldn’t feel anything actually happen inside the frame or inside my head, but having just been inside Tourist, I knew what it had done.
I realized, disconcertingly, that I couldn’t see Tourist with the frame’s eyes. Only my own. There would be no record of the meeting. She was altering it in real time.
“And now I’m here too,” whispered the frame.
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