Overclock
“Hey. I got a new program for you to try.” Her breath is hot on my neck as she slips a thumb drive into my hand.
I look into her eyes and watch as they twinkle and change colors. Pink, red, blue… I have to pinch myself to keep from getting lost in them. I fidget with the drive, pressing its case into my fingers.
She’s been like this ever since we both got modded. When she visits, she’ll push me down on the bed and whisper to me about her day as she leers at my body. As soon as I meet her gaze, I get swallowed by those eyes, the products of mods I’m too squeamish to imitate. When I let my guard down, I can lose hours staring into them, drool caking the corners of my slack mouth.
Of course her touch is electric. We have our skins set to just the right frequencies, the signals passing from our brains to our bodies at just the right amplitude to make us both jolt when our fingers brush against each other. She traces the muscles of my abdomen and grins as I squirm, guts contracting, laughter pouring from us.
So I’m no stranger to her pushing herself onto me. The thumb drive is new.
“What is it?” I ask. “Is it that wireless communication thing you were telling me about?”
“Nope,” she says, voice slipping into an autotuned sing-song. “Something way more interesting.”
I press my forehead against hers and feel the sparks burrowing their way into my brain. “What could be more interesting than being in each other’s heads all day?”
“That’s not passé to you by now?” she laughs. “No, this is way more thrilling. I don’t wanna give it away, but…” she tilts my chin up towards her and presses us into a long kiss. “I think you’re gonna love it.”
When my head stops swimming, I draw in a breath and ask, “Should I install it right now?”
“No, no,” she says. “Have fun with it by yourself. But tell me how you like it once it’s over, got it?”
I nod and smile.
She kisses me again, and the electricity surges through me. She kills all metaphors when she touches me. I don’t have anything for you, just my skin’s memory of her lips and her fingers and the bits of her body she lets brush against mine.
“Good girl.”
I grin at her.
#
The glow of neon lights outside my window flickers softly as it bathes my bedroom in a dark purple light. My computer monitor emits a harsh glare in the darkness, but I won’t need it soon. I’ve finished copying the thumb drive’s contents onto my machine; all that’s left is to upload it to my mods and let it run.
I ignore all the messages warning me about malware and install. And when it’s complete, it’s time to execute whatever program was on the drive. As I do so, the visual data overlay my mods flash onto the world melts away, leaving plain space behind. Nothing else happens for a few seconds, and I wonder whether something went wrong. Did it just disable my ocular mods?
Then—suddenly—I lose all vision in my left eye. Panicking, I try to stand, but my left leg won’t move, so I collapse to the floor. What little I can still see starts to swim, the colors of my wall and ceiling melting and swirling into each other, the purple light from outside becoming intensely vivid in the chaos.
Her voice echoes in my ear. “Good girl. Good, good girl.” I try to ask what’s going on, but my mouth won’t move. “Good girls stay quiet,” I hear her giggle. Is she talking to me? Or am I just imagining her?
The colors struggling with each other in my eye move in a slow, deliberate pattern. I can’t do anything but focus on them, watch them as they spiral and deepen. “Focus,” she says. “Just focus and relax.”
I focus on their movements, my mind going blank as I do. Down, left, up, right… Down, left, up, right… By the time I realize that I can see with both eyes again, my body has warmed up, and my head is swimming. They’re so entrancing… And I can swear I can hear her breathing, not in my ear, but deep inside my head, somewhere she could only have gotten if I had emptied everything else for her. She’s smiling. I can feel it. And that smile sparks a fire in my skull, burns my brain, fills my head with smoke.
I still can’t move, but I don’t need to, not like this.
“Let me help you,” she says, so deep inside of me that I can’t even identify the source of her voice.
I try to ask her where she is, but my mouth won’t move. I could swear I can feel her press a finger to my lips. “Now, what did I say?” My arms are moving of their own volition, pushing me upright, propping me up against my bed strangely, as if they’ve never moved quite like this before. The strangeness of the thought pulses through my nerves and makes my body feel even hotter, even smokier.
Before I realize it, I’m tugging off my shirt, the mods animating the process almost exasperated that I’d have one on to begin with, as though the only purpose it served was to make them do extra work. Still watching the colors swirling in my right eye, I feel apologetic to them; I want to apologize for adding a step, for making it harder, for not being a good girl.
“That’s right,” she says. “Say you’re sorry.”
But good girls don’t talk. So I say nothing.
I feel her smile inside me again. My whole body quivers. My cock is throbbing against my pants; I’m thrusting it against my clothes, pressing hard, desperately searching for any way to let out the heat and smoke clouding my senses. Drool runs down my chin—I try to move my arms to take off my pants, but they won’t listen to me—the more I try to move the more my body seems to lock up, refuse; the more my room swims in patterns of enthrallment in my eye. “Please, please,” I whimper, straining against my arms, my crotch, my whole body, the air around me, the voice inside me, the fading control I have over any of it, hell, the decreasing willingness I have to even try to control it at all.
“Well… since you asked nicely.” Her voice shakes my insides and as much as I try to get them to move faster, my arms only slowly undo my pants and slide them off. It’s as though the only part of me I can move on my own is my hips, and it dawns on me how high in the air I’m thrusting them, how pathetic I am for it. My cock bounces stupidly up above me. Moans leak out of me like saliva.
My body drags itself onto the bed, flopping me onto my stomach in the process. Even the light touch of my bedsheets makes precum drip out of me. It seems like I’ll be rewarded nicely. My hands reach for one of my pillows, wrap it around my cock, press it tightly against my body, hugging it so hard I worry my muscles might burst.
But wait—I can move my hips. I can move them! Without asking for permission, I start humping, the soft pillowcase teasing every inch of me, the friction making the pangs of heat surge through me again, my mouth filling with my sheets as I try to choke down my moans, my bed creaking with lust. I can feel, but not hear, her laughter. It shakes my core.
I imagine that she’s the one wrapped around my dick, her legs around my hips, her tongue deep in my mouth. I get so dizzy I nearly lose my balance, then redouble my efforts, thrusting so deep I worry I’ll start splitting her apart, my body moving independently of me, shockwaves boiling me, jolts frying every millimeter of my brain—
I feel her brush her hand against my cheek. “Come inside me,” she says, vibrant eyes beaming brilliant light into me. So I do, whining pathetically as an orgasm surges through me, expelling all the stress and heat and color and smoke clogging my body through my hips and out my cock.
And as soon as I do, my vision returns to normal, the overlay is back. A warning pops up, telling me that it quarantined the program I got off the thumb drive, and to be careful downloading suspicious files.
I’ve collapsed on my bed, sticky with cum and sweat and drool, control regained. My head’s still swimming, though. I can swear I can feel her smile.
Biography
Gaast is a ghost currently haunting occupied Lenni Lenape land. It was declared the MVP of its 8th-grade Reading Olympics team. Its horror writing can be found in Bound in Flesh, Thank You For Joining the Algorithm, and forthcoming from Inky Bones Press.