Chapter 18: Chapter 18
The four flights felt like eight. Derek climbed them with his legs open, the way his body now insisted, the bell head of the locked dildo shifting deep inside him with every bounce of his step. His lace thong rode up between his cheeks and the harness straps framed it, and he caught himself checking his reflection in the stairwell window, skinny and pale and ruined, and thinking, not for the first time, that he looked correct now. Unfinished, Kai's voice said in his head, but closer. Closer every day.
Huo Xiao was waiting at the front desk of the office tower at eight sharp. He looked Derek over once, up and down, the way a man checks a delivery.
"Inspection first," he said. "You arrived full?"
"Yes, sir." Derek's lisp made the word soft. "Full, sir."
The inspection room was tiled and bright, the same as always. Huo Xiao had him drop his holeless jeans and thong, bend over the padded bench, and spread. He put on a nitrile glove, worked two fingers in past the flared base with no resistance at all, and pressed deep, checking the fullness, the temperature, the give. Derek breathed popper fumes off his own wrist and shook.
"Good," Huo Xiao said, peeling the glove off. "Report goes up. The desk wants you at the machine by nine."
The two technicians were in the training corridor, and Derek's eyes did what they always did, dragged over them like a tongue over a wound. They were identical in their indifference and nothing alike in their bodies. The taller one had broad swimmer's shoulders under his navy work shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbow, forearms roped with tendon, a faded scar splitting one eyebrow. The shorter one was denser, a wrestler's build, thick neck, buzzed hair, a faint silver ring in his ear that somehow made him more masculine, not less. Neither looked at Derek's face. They looked at his harness, his stride, his angle of walk, and Derek stood there hating himself for cataloguing them, for wondering, for the ten-thousandth time, what their chests looked like, what hung between their legs, whether their cocks were as heavy and uncut and perfect as every other part of them. They were probably straight. They probably went home to girlfriends. They probably thought about Derek the way a plumber thinks about a drain.
He's equipment, Kai murmured. Envy converts. Give it to me.
They walked him into the training room and strapped him into the contoured chair, ankles up in the stirrups, wrists cuffed to the armrests, the nasal cannula fitted under his nose and taped. The harness at his hips was unbuckled and the bell dildo came out with a sound like a bottle opening, a long wet slide, and Derek's hole, empty for the first time in eighteen hours, felt like a scream. It didn't close. He knew it wouldn't. Dr. Lu had told him plainly: outer ring gone, inner ring thirty percent. There was nothing left down there to squeeze with. Just an open warm mouth of him, air moving through it.
The shorter technician held up the new attachment so Derek could see it. Thirteen inches, black silicone, the same width he'd been carrying all night, but plain. No flare, no bell. A column, slightly rounded at the tip, engineered deep.
"Same size," the tall one said. His English was flat and perfect. "Depth only."
It went in in one slow push, no lube beyond what Derek's body had been making for weeks, and Derek's head fell back against the rest and he made a sound that his high lisping voice turned into something barely human. The chair's cradle took the base and locked it. The machine's arm engaged with a hydraulic sigh.
The cannula hissed.
The first hit rolled through him like warm water filling a cracked bowl. The room went soft at the edges. The column sat so deep that his breath came in little pushed-out gasps around it, and Kai's voice, that warm recorded patient voice, settled over him like a hand on his forehead: Every inch is a man's fingers. Count them. There are five already and more coming.
"Mr. Zhang will conduct the session today," the tall technician said, and then they both left, and Derek was alone with the machine and the fumes and the slow small piston motion beginning, out to the rounded tip, back to the hilt, out, back, patient as a tide.
Zhang Ming came in at five past nine carrying a clipboard, and Derek's whole stupid body reacted before his brain did, a hot flutter deep around the column, a fresh leak from the cage. Zhang Ming was not handsome the way the technicians were handsome, not built like the executives in the cafeteria. He was narrow-shouldered and a little stooped, in a grey cardigan over a button-down that never quite sat right, glasses that he pushed up with one finger, hair cut in some serious student style from a decade ago. He was maybe thirty. He had a smudge of chalk-dry skin on his knuckle from handling paper. He was, in every visible way, a nerd, and Derek, poppered and impaled, watched him walk to the stool beside the chair and thought, with a shame that burned hotter than any of it: I would let him do anything. I want his hand. I want his skinny shoulders over me. I want him to think about me even once the way I think about him.
Zhang Ming pushed up his glasses and clicked his pen.
"Good morning, asset," he said. The word asset came out in his careful, slightly over-pronounced way, each syllable placed like a specimen slide. "Before we begin, some procedural notes. The virtual reality questionnaire interface, the one where you answered by gaze, it is a prototype. We have concluded that, mm, how to say. The old format is better. In-person. Paper. The data quality is higher when a subject answers aloud to a human." A small pause. "So we are bringing them back. I am the human."
"Thank you, sir," Derek said, and the lisp made him sound like a leaking balloon, and Zhang Ming wrote something down, and Derek's hole fluttered again around the moving column. The machine pushed deep and the poppers hit again and Derek's vision swam with little golden cracks.
"Ten questions. Multiple choice. A, B, C, or D. They concern last night's video call with Li Wei, which was recorded, transcribed, and logged, and your affect during it was, I will say, interesting to review." He said it the way he'd note a lab result. "Please answer honestly. Dishonesty shows in the log, asset. You know this."
"Yes, sir. I'm honest, sir."
"Good," Zhang Ming said. He uncapped a bottle of water and took a small sip, set it down, and squared the paper on the clipboard like a man aligning a specimen. "Question one."
The machine drew out to the rounded tip and pushed back to the hilt, unhurried, and the cannula hissed again. Derek's thighs strained uselessly against the stirrups.
"During last night's call, when Li Wei showed you his bicep and you were instructed to describe it, you used the words 'huge' and 'perfect.' Which of the following is closest to your honest experience at that moment? You were performing an answer you believed was expected. You meant it completely, and your hole pushed on the word 'big' without conscious thought. C. You felt envy of his arm, which converted to heat. D. You felt nothing, because your thoughts had already thinned."
Derek's mouth opened and hung there. The poppers were climbing, that warm heavy water rising behind his eyes, and he tried to find himself inside option A, the old Derek, the liar, the data-entry boy who could craft an answer. The old Derek was very small now.
"B, sir," he lisped. "I meant it. My hole pushed without me telling it to. It just... heard 'big' and did it." He giggled, high and thin, and hated the sound, and the hate curdled instantly into heat. Kai's voice: shame is fuel, feed it to me.
Zhang Ming ticked a box. His handwriting was small and exact. "Noted. The B response also appeared in your affect log, so, good consistency." He said it as praise and Derek glowed like a boy given a gold star, and the glow itself was the humiliation, and he leaked into the thong under the harness.
"Question two. When Li Wei told you that Chinese men are finished and white faggots are unfinished, which thought followed? That the statement was unfair. That you wished to argue. C. That you wanted to thank him for explaining what you are. D. That you wanted to be finished faster, by any means, including the hand."
There was no lie available. The machine seated deep and Derek's breath punched out of him in little gasps around the column.
"C," Derek whispered. Then, honest to the log, "And D. Both, sir. I wanted to thank him and I want the hand so bad, sir, please."
"Please is not one of the choices," Zhang Ming said mildly, not unkindly, and wrote something in the margin. Derek's face burned. His hole, empty of any will of its own, clenched uselessly around nothing at the outer edge, nothing there to clench, just a hot open ripple, and Zhang Ming glanced at the readout without expression.
"Question three. Li Wei required you to worship his armpit through the screen. Describe your feeling at that moment. Embarrassment only. Disgust you concealed. C. Genuine wanting; you wished the screen were skin, and your mouth watered. D. Confusion about why a man's armpit would be shown to you."
"I want to say C, sir." Derek's eyes were wet, from the fumes or something else. "My mouth watered so much, sir. I could smell him through the phone almost. I wanted to put my tongue there. I'm not supposed to suck cock so I thought maybe..." He drifted. The sentence dissolved in fumes. Zhang Ming waited, pen poised, patient as a lab tech waiting for a reaction to complete.
"Maybe?" Zhang Ming prompted.
"Maybe if I couldn't suck, I could... sniff, sir. That's not sucking." Derek heard himself and it was like hearing a stranger, a small stupid leaking animal with a lisping voice, and the hearing made his cage ache. "C, sir. Final answer."
Zhang Ming wrote for a long time. Longer than the other answers. Derek watched his dry knuckle, the chalk-smudge, the glasses pushed up with one finger, and thought, I would die if he let me smell his cardigan, and thought, God, look at me, and pushed out on the column as it bottomed, because deep, deeper, was the only prayer he had left.
"Question four. Your file was moved by the rotation desk. Li Wei informed you of this. Which best describes your reaction? Fear about what it means. Pride that your data merited attention. C. Both; the fear itself excited you. D. You did not understand and did not ask, because asking is not your function."
The machine pulled out. The emptiness at the tip was a cold draft in him. It slid back and he moaned, a small punched sound.
"B and C, sir. I felt... chosen. Like an object that got moved to the good shelf." He giggled again, breathless. "I was scared but my dick would've been hard if it could, sir. Inside the cage it pushed and couldn't get big and that felt correct."
"That is a very complete answer," Zhang Ming said, and made a note, and Derek treasured the word complete like a coin.
The cannula hissed and the room went golden at the edges. Zhang Ming's face swam above the clipboard, narrow, earnest, forty years of schooling in how he held the pen. Derek wanted to be the paper under that pen. He wanted to be the clipboard. He wanted to be the water bottle Zhang Ming's lips had touched, and the wanting was so stupid and so total that he pushed out again, empty clench, nothing, ripple.
"Question five. During the call you were given dosing instructions. Which sentence describes your obedience? You followed the instructions because you feared consequences. You followed them gratefully and felt cared for; the pills and poppers felt like gifts. C. You delayed and had to be reminded. D. You do not remember the instructions, only the obeying."
"B," Derek said at once. "It felt like being looked after. Nobody's ever..." His voice caught. "My mom doesn't even tell me what pills to take, sir. He knows my body better than I do. He counted the doses for me. I felt like, like a plant getting watered." He blinked and the tears slid warm. "Sorry, sir. Am I talking too much? The old format probably didn't have talking."
"The talking is the data," Zhang Ming said, and underlined something twice. "Continue as much as you wish."
That permission undid Derek completely. The machine stroked, the fumes rose, and the words came out of him in a high lisping stream he couldn't have stopped with both hands.
"It's just, sir, he's so... he has that Armani polo, sir, the grey one, and his shoulders fill it all the way, and last night when he raised his arm I saw the skin of his armpit and I made a noise I couldn't stop, and he heard it and he just said 'good faggot' and kept going, and sir, I would live inside that sentence if they'd let me. Good faggot. He said it like a grade. I got a good grade at being a faggot." He was laughing and crying at once now, and the machine pushed to the hilt and held there, deep pressure against whatever was left of his inner ring, and Zhang Ming watched the readout climb and made a small satisfied mark.
"Question six," Zhang Ming said. "When the call ended and you were alone, what did you do? Removed the harness and touched the cage, hoping for release. B. Slept immediately under the drugs. C. Stayed in position, legs open, huffing, watching the reels he curated for you, until sleep took you. Cried."
"C, sir. Legs open. I woke up with my legs open too, sir. I didn't put them there, they just... go there now." He swallowed. "I didn't cry. I think crying needs a person inside you and I'm getting hollowed out, sir. Is that the right answer? Is hollow right?"
"There is no wrong answer, asset," Zhang Ming said, and it was the first time he said it all morning, and it landed on Derek like absolution. "The choices only sort you. We are mapping the shape of your training. All shapes that appear are correct shapes for the program."
Derek absorbed that. There is no wrong answer. Every door he could walk through was the right door. Somewhere under the fumes the old Derek, the twenty-five-year-old who read sci-fi paperbacks and had opinions about typography, raised a hand and said something about consent, about manipulation, about this being a trap with no exit, and Kai's voice closed over it like warm water over a pill: That thought is a closing muscle. Let it close.
"C for six," Derek said softly.
"Question seven. Li Wei asked you about the other asset in your building, the one with the fist walk. Which describes your thought? A. Jealousy that the other asset is ahead of you. Curiosity about his appearance. C. Hope that you will see him in the hallway and he will recognize what you are. D. You blocked the topic."
"Jealousy, sir. But the jealous kind of jealousy that's also, like, hungry." Derek's head lolled; he straightened it with effort. "I thought, he gets fisted already and I'm still on the thirteen-inch column, and I hated him, sir, I hated a man I've never met, and the hating felt like a workout. Kai says envy converts. It converted. I pushed out for like a minute straight thinking about him walking funny because some Chinese man's fist rearranged him." His voice cracked into a whine. "I want to walk funny, sir. Please put that in the report."
Zhang Ming's pen paused. He looked at Derek over the glasses for the first time all morning, a flat clinical look, and Derek held it as long as he could, four seconds, five, before his eyes dropped to Zhang Ming's soft pale hands and stayed there, aching.
"I will note it," Zhang Ming said. "The desk reads everything. Your eagerness is logged at" he checked the readout, "a high value. Question eight. During the call, Li Wei's face was close to the camera. Which of his features held your attention longest, honestly? His jaw. His eyes. C. His mouth. D. You were watching his crotch the entire time, per your training."
Derek laughed, a helpless hooting little sound. "D. D, sir. One hundred percent D. He knows it too, sir. He moved the phone lower on purpose once, just for a second, and I made the noise again. He tests me. I love being tested. Is that..." He breathed. The fumes crested; the room's corners dissolved. "Is loving the test also data?"
"Everything is data," Zhang Ming said. He said it the way other men say good morning.
"Question nine." Zhang Ming turned the clipboard page with a dry flick. "This one is comparative. Li Wei, Mr. Huo, Dr. Lu, the technicians, myself. You have been handled by all of us. Which statement is truest? You would choose one of us if you could. You have no preference; you are a hole and holes do not choose. C. You want all of us in whatever order the desk decides, because the deciding is the point. D. You think about us sexually more than we have ever thought about you."
Derek was quiet for a moment, if a moaning, breathing, poppered silence could be called quiet. The machine stroked. The answer was so obvious it embarrassed his tongue.
"C and D, sir," he lisped. "The desk decides, that's the point, being decided about is..." He searched, fumes swirling. "It's like being weather. Somebody plans around you and you don't get a vote. And, sir, D is so true it hurts. I think about you all..." He swallowed. "I know what your knuckle smells like from here, sir, paper and chalk. You probably don't know my name without the file. You probably say 'asset.' And I lie in my thong at night imagining your hands under the cardigan, imagining that you, that nerdy men, that even the nerdy ones are..." His voice went to a whisper. "Are big, sir. I imagine every one of you is big. I can't stop. It's the word. I hear it and I push."
Zhang Ming wrote for a very long time. The pen moved in small precise strokes and his face never changed, and Derek watched him and felt the two truths sit together in his chest like stones: this man is documenting my ruin the way a botanist documents moss, and I would open my legs wider for him right now if the stirrups let me, wider than they are, wider than anatomy allows. The machine bottomed out. The cannula hissed. Derek's eyes rolled and he came back to himself at the sound of the page turning.
"Last question," Zhang Ming said. "Question ten. Looking forward. The rotation desk has your file. The hand is coming. Which sentence describes your readiness? You are afraid and want more time. You are ready today, right now, in this chair. C. You understand you will never be ready and will be fisted anyway, and that this arrangement, readiness not being required, is the deepest comfort you have ever felt. D. You cannot read the question anymore."
Derek read the question. The letters swam and reassembled, swam and held. He read it three times to be sure.
"C, sir," he said, and his voice came out steady for the first time all morning, steady and small and lisping and true. "That's the one. Nobody's ever going to ask if I'm ready again. It's decided above my head, like weather. And the comfort is..." He breathed, pushed, rippled. "The comfort is that I don't have to be a person about it. Being ready is a person's job. I'm not a person's job anymore, sir. I'm just the thing the hand is for."
Zhang Ming set the pen down. He took off his glasses, cleaned them on the hem of the cardigan with two fingers, and put them back on, and looked at Derek the whole time, the whole four seconds, the longest anyone at the firm had looked at Derek's face in weeks. Derek's hole fluttered around the column and fresh heat ran out of him and he didn't look away this time, he couldn't, he was being seen, and being seen by Zhang Ming was better than the poppers, which was saying everything, because the poppers were everything.
"Data entry now," Zhang Ming said, standing. He lifted the VR headset from its cradle on the equipment cart and fitted it over Derek's eyes with two careful hands, adjusting the strap at the back of his skull the way a lab tech adjusts a sensor. The screen was dark for now, a black softness pressed against his face, and the world shrank to the column inside him and the cannula hiss and the sound of the stool rolling back across the tile.
"The module begins in ten minutes," Zhang Ming said from the door. "Your answers are good data, asset. The desk will be pleased." The door clicked. His footsteps went away down the corridor, quick and light, and Derek lay alone in the stirrups with his legs open, being slowly fucked by a machine, waiting to be turned on like a television.
Ten minutes was a long time. The machine stroked its patient tide, out to the rounded tip, back to the hilt, and the poppers fed in small measured doses, and Derek's thoughts went soft and shapeless. He thought about Zhang Ming's pen. He thought about the way the man had said everything is data, and how Derek himself was the everything, every flutter and leak logged somewhere upstairs in a building full of Chinese men who never thought about him at all. He wanted to be thought about so badly it was a physical hunger, deeper than the column, and Kai's voice was already there in the dark behind his eyes, patient: The wanting is the fuel, derekreads. Keep it burning.
The headset lit up.
The room assembled itself around him, the familiar rendered training suite, warm light on pale wood, and then Kai stepped into it and Derek's breath caught so hard the column jumped.
Kai was bigger. The last weeks of his own upgrades had been applied to the model, apparently, because the man walking toward the rendered bench was broader through the shoulders than Derek remembered, the black tank strained differently, the chest plate of muscle fuller, the jaw somehow squarer, the golden skin smoother, like someone had gone over the render with a finishing coat. He looked like the Platonic form of the technicians' arms and Wei Li's chest and the Beach Man's heavy hands, all of them averaged up into one impossible man.
"Hello, derekreads," Kai said, and his voice had that warm professional patience, the gym-coach register, and he smiled. "I read your file this morning. All of it."
Derek's face went hot. The machine pushed deep. "Thir," he managed.
"Sit up for me mentally. You can't actually, you're strapped, and that's correct." Kai flexed his right arm slowly, deliberately, the bicep peaking under the tank strap, round and hard, a vein climbing over the render of his deltoid. "The call with Li Wei. Ten o'clock at night. He did a striptease for you through a phone and you whined at his armpit. You said, and I quote the transcript, 'thmells tho good.'" Kai laughed, easy and warm, no cruelty in it, which was somehow worse. "You drooled on your pillow for a man's armpit through a camera, derekreads. How does that read to you?"
"Good," Derek whispered. "It reads good, sir. It felt good. It thtill feels good."
"It should. That was your graduation exercise and you passed with honors." Kai turned, gave the render of his back to the camera, then rolled his shoulders, and the lats flared wide, the tank shifting, the twin ridges of muscle moving like geography. Derek watched with his mouth open and his hole rippling. "Now. Let's review the questionnaire, because I know that too, every answer, and I want to hear the important one again. Question nine. You told Mr. Zhang you imagine every one of us is big. Even the nerdy ones. Even the skinny ones in cardigans." Kai stepped closer. In the render he was close enough that the light caught the grain of his skin, the small dark nipples under the strained fabric, the cropped hair at his throat. "You were honest. That honesty is worth more than your old brain ever was. Do you know why?"
"Because everything ith data, thir."
"Because honesty is your only remaining function," Kai said, and smiled. "A person can lie. Equipment reports accurately. You reported accurately about wanting Mr. Zhang's hands, wanting Li Wei's armpit, wanting technicians you've never spoken to. You are a very accurate instrument now, derekreads. Sniff."
The cannula hissed and Derek pulled the hit, right nostril, deep, and the burn climbed sweet and enormous and the rendered room went molten at the edges.
"Hold it. Five counts while you look at this." Kai lifted both arms over his head, hands clasped, and stretched, and the tank rode up, and the lower ridge of his stomach came into view, hard and ridged, the dark line of hair running down into his waistband. The twin hollows of his armpits opened toward Derek, the render of the hair dense and curled, the skin warm-looking. "One. Two. You pushed out on the word big last night without being told. Three. Your body does one thing now. Four. It opens. Five. Exhale."
Derek exhaled and pushed, and there was almost nothing there to push with, and the nothing itself was the thrill, an empty hot ripple that ran through him like a shiver.
"Good. Other side. Sniff." Left nostril, deeper, and the heavy formula opened the back of his skull like a curtain and Kai's rendered face swam gold. "Hold. Now tell me the truth, because everything is data and I can read the log. When you look at me, what do you feel?"
"Thmall," Derek said. The word came out wet and happy. "I feel thmall, sir. You're all tho big. Him, and Wei Lith, and the technicianth, and even Zhang Ming with hith cardigan. I want all of you and none of you wantth me and that'th, that'th the correct thing, that'th the gift."
"That's the gift," Kai agreed warmly. "Nobody at the firm has ever thought about you sexually, derekreads. Not once. You know that. And you still lie in your lace at night wanting us, and the wanting has nowhere to go, so it goes inward, and it became this." He gestured, a small encompassing motion at Derek's whole strapped, stirruped, impaled existence. "Six weeks ago you were a man. Now you're a wanting with a hole in it. I'm proud of you. And I want you to keep being honest about the wanting, so tell me, when I do this," and he raised the right arm again, slow, the bicep peaking, the hollow opening, "what happens in your body?"
"Before you answer," Kai said, "look at the readout."
A small window opened in the corner of the render, and there was the telemetry, the readout Derek had watched Zhang Ming glance at, and his own ripple was climbing its little graph like a pulse.
"That's not the machine," Kai said. "That's you. Your hole flutters when you look at us and you can't feel it from outside because the muscle is gone, but the sensor feels it, and I feel it, and Mr. Zhang felt it through his stool this morning and wrote it down. You flirt with the entire firm and none of us knows it's happening except as a number." He laughed. "It's the purest flirtation there is, derekreads. No risk of rejection because there's no one there to reject you. Just data climbing. Now, hold the sniff, three, four, five, exhale, and let's talk about your workout."
The machine changed.
The tide stopped its patient rhythm and drew all the way out, out, the rounded tip pulling back through him and out until only nothing was inside and the emptiness roared, and then it drove back in to the hilt in one smooth hydraulic push, and the tempo had changed. Faster. Deeper. The column seated itself against what was left of his inner ring and the pressure bloomed up through his belly and out his mouth as a long high sound.
"There it is," Kai said. "You remember the noise. Li Wei's favorite. Sniff, both barrels, big one."
Derek pulled both nostrils and the heavy formula went through him like an avalanche and the machine drew out and slammed home again, and again, tempo climbing.
"Your rings are gone," Kai said, conversational, coaching through it, his rendered body still beside the bench with one arm raised so Derek had the armpit and the pistoning at once. "Outer ring, nonfunctional. Inner ring, less than thirty percent and unresponsive. You cannot squeeze, derekreads. You cannot clamp down. The old parts of this don't work anymore." The machine bottomed out and held, deep, and Derek's breath came in little punched gasps. "And that means something wonderful. You can't resist this. Not because you're brave. Because the part of you that resists was removed. So what's left to do?"
"Relax," Derek sobbed. "Relax and take it, thir."
"Relax and take it. Try to push, actually, I want the data. Push now."
Derek pushed and there was nothing, a flutter deep inside, the faintest movement of whatever remained, a little tremor around the column like a fish touching the surface of water from underneath.
"Oh, beautiful. The sensor caught that. The faintest flutter, deep in. That's your whole voice now, derekreads. That flutter is you saying everything you'll ever say." Kai crouched beside the rendered bench, forearms on his knees, face close, and Derek stared into the dark eyes and the square jaw and pushed again, another ghost-flutter, and the machine pulled out to the tip and drove back in, faster, and Derek's whole body began to shake.
"Feel it," Kai said, softer, the bedtime register. "Don't chase it. Don't grip, you can't grip. Let it happen. The column goes out, in, out, in, and every stroke is a hand, and every hand is one of ours, and all you have to do is be open and look at me."
The machine was pistoning fast now, nearly all the way out and in, quick and deep and relentless, and the sensation climbed up through Derek like water up a straw. His outer edge was nothing, air moving through an open mouth of him, but deep inside the column dragged across whatever remained of the inner ring and the feeling was enormous, whole-body, a rolling pressure that gathered behind his navel and spread down his trembling thighs and up his chest and out his mouth in sounds he couldn't have stopped with a gag.
"Thir," Derek gasped. "Thir, it'th, it'th like, I think I'm, thir, it'th like coming but it doethn't thtop, thir, it won't thtop."
"It won't stop," Kai said, warm and calm, while the machine hammered and the poppers crested and Derek's wrists strained against the cuffs. "That's the plateau, derekreads. The real thing, the fist, sits right on that plateau and doesn't let you off it. This is your preview. Now answer me, and be accurate, because that's your only function. How good is it?"
"So good," Derek wailed. "Tho good, thir, I love it, I love it, I need it, I need it every day, I'll do anything, pleathe, pleathe put the hand in the report, pleathe, I want to walk funny, I want a Chinese man'th firtht to rearrange me, pleathe."
"Good faggot," Kai said, in exactly the tone Wei Li had used, and the words went through Derek like a grade and the plateau climbed another inch and he sobbed with it. "Now the important coaching. You're going to want to focus on the feeling. Don't. Feeling is what you were made for, but attention is the last thing you own, and you give it to us. Look at my arm. Sniff on my flex. Hold your five counts. Keep the flutter running down there all by itself, like a heart, unwatched, and put your eyes where they belong. Where do they belong, derekreads?"
"On you, thir," Derek gasped, huffing, holding, counting, "on the big, on the arm, on the pit, on all of you, on the Chinese men, the big oneth, the finithed oneth."
"Because we're the ones who hold things up," Kai said. He stood and raised both arms and stretched, slow, shameless, while Derek was hammered and drugged and shaking, and Derek drank in the lats and the hollows and the flat dark nipples and the hard ridge of stomach and felt the inferiority pour through him like warm oil, feeding everything, converting everything. "Your mind couldn't hold, so we emptied it. Your rings couldn't hold, so we removed them. But you hold the load, and the load is being held right now, and it feels almost like coming, and it never stops, and that's your job, derekreads. Say what your job is."
"I hold the load," Derek slurred, eyes floating, tracking nothing, tracking the biggest thing in the room. "I'm the hole the hand ith for. Therv. Property. My firtht ith coming."
"Sniff on three. Two." Kai's bicep peaked, huge and round, the vein climbing it, and Derek could almost smell the render, the warmth, the cropped hair, the skin. "Three. Four. Five. Flex, exhale, and push."
Derek exhaled and pushed and there was nothing and there was everything, the ghost-flutter and the plateau and the hammering column and the gold, and the feeling overwhelmed his whole body, a rolling almost-orgasm that gathered and gathered and never arrived, never crested, never stopped, and Kai stood over him rendered and perfect and said, "Stay relaxed, little one. Don't focus on it. Focus on me. That feeling is just your body saying thank you, and thank you doesn't need your attention, it runs by itself now," and Derek stopped reaching for the feeling and let it run, and it ran through him like current through a wire, and he stared at the armpit and huffed and fluttered and thanked, silently, accurately, all the way down.
In the corner of the render, the little graph climbed and climbed and did not come down.
The graph reached the top of its window and stayed there, a flat bright line, and that was when the render changed.
It was small at first. Kai's flexed bicep seemed to throb, the way light throbs through water. Derek blinked and the throb did not stop. The golden skin of the arm pulsed, swelling and settling, swelling and settling, in time with the machine's stroke, in time with the cannula's hiss, in time with Derek's own pulse until he couldn't tell which rhythm belonged to him. The background of the rendered suite began to turn, slow, a lazy swirl of warm wood and pale light, and Kai's arm turned with it, always centered, always the biggest thing in the frame.
"Look at the arm, derekreads," Kai said, and his voice had a wobble in it now too, a slow underwater bend. "Just the arm. Nothing else needs you."
The bicep peaked. Fell. Peaked again. Each peak was a little bigger than Derek could hold in his eyes, and each fall left a second of warm nothing, and Derek waited for the peak the way he'd once waited for the next page of a paperback, except this was the only page and it was made of gold and it flexed for him forever.
"Sniff," Kai said, or the room said, or the arm said. The cannula hissed on its own schedule and Derek pulled the fumes because there was no longer any part of him that decided things.
Throb. Swirl. Flex. His eyes crossed trying to keep the whole round mass of the rendered muscle in focus and the crossing felt good, felt like the flutter deep in him, the fish touching the water from underneath. His thoughts came apart like wet paper. One at a time, layer by layer: his opinion about the render's realism, gone. His memory of the questionnaire, gone. His name, going soft at the edges, turning into derekreads, then into asset, then into just a warm open letter O.
The machine never slowed. Out to the tip, home to the hilt, out, home, the column dragging across the ruin of his inner ring, and Derek's body went limp in the stirrups, wrists slack in the cuffs, head lolling, mouth open, a thin line of drool finding its way down his cheek onto the padded rest. His legs fell open as far as the stirrups allowed. The plateau ran through him like current, the almost-coming that never came, and he didn't chase it and didn't need to. It ran by itself now, like a heart.
"Good," Kai said, from somewhere inside the swirl. "Stay here. This is where you live now. The fist will meet you here."
Hours passed inside the throb. Derek couldn't have counted them. The arm flexed and he floated on it, and somewhere in the middle of forever Kai's voice said numbers, or mantras, or nothing, and Derek's mouth repeated what it heard in his high ruined lisp, words like therve and property and firtht, said to nobody, wet and automatic, while his hole fluttered its tiny ghost-language at a sensor and the sensor logged everything.
Then the light changed.
The headset lifted off his face and the training room came in sideways, tilted, because his head was still lolling. The tall technician stood over him, sleeves rolled, scar splitting his eyebrow, forearms roped. Derek's eyes did the only thing they knew how to do, dragged over the arms, the chest under the navy shirt, imagining the plates of muscle, the heavy uncut weight Derek was sure hung under the work trousers, big, the word arrived and his hole rippled around the moving column, still stroking, still full speed, and the technician didn't glance at the readout because he'd seen the graph maxed for an hour.
"He's cooked," the tall one said.
"Hour more than needed," said the short one, coming around the chair, buzzed head, thick neck, silver ring. "Desk wanted him empty. Look at his eyes."
Derek looked at the short one's eyes. He couldn't make them mean anything. They were dark and handsome and they looked through him at his harness, and the shame of being looked through burned somewhere far away and came back as heat, and the heat had no words attached. He tried to speak. What came out was "ahh," a long open vowel.
The machine was stopped. Hands unbuckled the harness. The column came out in one long wet slide and Derek felt it leave all the way up his body, a cold hollow draft, and he whined, high, needy, without knowing he was doing it.
"Same size as the bell, you said?" the short one asked, opening a case on the equipment cart.
"Fourteen and fourteen. Bigger."
The new attachment came out of the case and even Derek's ruined attention caught it, the way a moth catches a porch light. A column, black silicone, wide as a wrist is around, long as a forearm, with a hard flange at the base. Its surface gleamed with a warm gel, faintly amber, and it was steaming slightly, warm from a warmer, and the smell of it reached Derek's nose, chemical and sweet, lidocaine and something under the lidocaine.
"Dr. Lu's gel," the tall one said. "Numb and relax. Tell him it's going."
Neither of them told Derek anything. The short one stood between Derek's stirruped legs and aimed the flared tip at the open, rippling, Ring-less mouth of him, and pushed.
The width was a fact Derek's body met like a wall of warm water. The gel went to work before the depth did. A spreading coldless numbness poured over the outer edge of him, and whatever tension the last three hours had left dissolved under it, every fiber letting go at once, and the column sank in. The tall one braced Derek's hip. The short one kept pushing, a slow constant hydraulic pressure, and Derek's breath punched out in little grunts, "unh, unh, unh," the only sounds left in him, and the numbness climbed inward, meeting the deep places, relaxing them, switching them off.
Fourteen inches. The tip found the end of him and the push continued, patient, and the gel did what gel does, and the column seated itself with a deep seismic settling Derek felt in his teeth and his sternum. He was aware of it the way you're aware of a building you're inside of. Vast, present, not yours.
"Flange at the base," the short one said. "It's not coming out without the tool."
They unclipped the leather harness from around Derek's hips, worked the back plate down under him, refit it around the flared base so the base was trapped against the plate, then re-ran the straps, tighter, through new slots, cinching the whole apparatus to his pelvis. The tall one's knuckles pressed Derek's soft belly flat while he threaded the last strap, and Derek stared at those knuckles and the forearm above them and felt nothing down below and everything in his eyes.
"Up," the tall one said.
Derek did not come up. His body had gone to liquid. The technicians looked at each other, and then the tall one took Derek's arm over his shoulder and the short one took the other side, and between them they lifted him out of the chair like a piece of furniture being moved, his legs buckling, the fourteen-inch column shifting inside him with every motion, vast and numbed and immovable.
They walked him down the corridor. Walked was generous. Derek's feet did a shambling suggestion of steps, knees folding at random, his whole weight swinging off two men's shoulders, the harness straps biting his hips, the flange locked against the plate so nothing could move but everything dragged. His head hung. His lace thong and holeless jeans hung crooked around his ankles where they'd been pulled down for the change, and the technicians carried him past a window where morning light lay on the tile, and Derek saw their shadows joined to his, three shapes, two tall and strong and one small and rag-doll, and thought, in the last little whisper of a mind he had, they're thtrong, and the thought had no next thought.
The locker room was warm and smelled of steam. They stood him against a bench and he sagged until the tall one held him by the back of the shirt like a parent holding a toddler upright. The jeans came up his legs in stages. They were his regular skinnies, and Derek's thighs had thinned enough that they went on easy, but the harness at his hips fought every inch, and the two technicians worked the waistband over the straps and the flange's plate with their big hands, tugging, adjusting, until the denim sat low and tight under the rig. The threadbare vintage T-shirt came over his head, faded cotton, two sizes too small now that he'd shrunk under the salad and the pills, so the hem sat above the harness straps and the outline of the plate pushed the fabric out over his crotch like a shelf.
"Can he eat?" the short one asked, looking at Derek's eyes, which were aimed at the tile and seeing nothing.
Derek's mouth tried. "Ah," it said.
"Take him to the cafeteria, see if it settles," the tall one said. "If not, lobby."
They carried-walked him down the service corridor, one on each side, hands clamped on his arms, his feet scuffing, the column's weight reorganizing his stride into something worse than the bounce, a wide-legged stagger. Through the cafeteria doors. The lunch line was thick with men.
Derek's drifting eyes snagged on them the way they always did, even now, even emptied. Two businessmen at the corner table, one in a charcoal suit cut close over heavy shoulders, the other with his jacket off, shirt pulling across a broad back, cuffs rolled, a wristwatch like a small engine. Behind the line a cook in white worked a wok, forearm muscles flexing with the toss, sweat shining on his jaw, silver stubble at his chin. Derek's heart, whatever was left of it, tilted toward all of them. Big. The word surfaced on its own and his hole pushed out around the fourteen inches and produced, thanks to Dr. Lu's gel, absolutely no sensation at all, a push into numb cotton, and that nothing was somehow the loneliest feeling he had ever had.
The charcoal-suit man looked up. His eyes passed over Derek, the stagger, the shelf at his crotch, the glass face, and moved on without any change of expression, back to his rice. Derek wanted to drop to his knees right there on the cafeteria tile. The wanting rose up through the numbness and out of his mouth as a small bleat.
"Yeah," the short technician said. "Lobby."
They turned him around. The cafeteria doors swung shut on the smell of the wok and the sound of Chinese conversation, and Derek was carried-walked on through the atrium to the lobby, all glass and marble and the smell of the coffee shop where a tall man in a perfect suit had once changed his life. The doorman held the door. Outside, a black Uber idled at the curb, and the driver, a compact man in a jacket, leaned over as the technicians loaded Derek into the back seat like luggage that could mostly sit up.
The tall technician leaned into the driver's window and spoke in Chinese, quick and low. Derek caught none of it, only the shape of it, the clipped certainty, and the driver nodding twice, and glancing back at Derek slumped against the window, and nodding again.
"He will be dropped at the Emerald Gardens side entrance," the tall technician said in English, for the record, for Derek's addled ears to half-hear. "No lobby. No questions. The concierge expects him. Dosage is in the pouch on his lap. He will not remember the ride."
The door closed. The technicians walked back into the tower without looking at the car.
Derek sat in the back seat with his cheek on the cool glass, the fourteen-inch column locked deep in his numbed body, the harness shelf pushing at his too-small jeans, the T-shirt's faded graphic riding up over it. The city slid by the window in bright smeared pieces. The driver's eyes found him in the mirror once, held there a moment too long, and Derek, swimming, watched the eyes in the mirror and thought, big, and his numb hole pushed on nothing, and the driver smiled at the road and drove, and Derek floated the whole way home on the throb of the arm he could still see behind his eyelids, flexing, flexing, waiting for him at the center of the swirl.