Chapter 1: The Algorithm's Hungry Mouth
The concrete floor was cool against Thomas’s bare feet as he padded from the kitchen to the living area, a bowl of cereal in hand. The apartment was quiet, a sleek monument to orderly loneliness. He scrolled mindlessly, thumb flicking upward in a practiced, lazy rhythm.
A new post from Chloe Miraa loaded. She was on a beach somewhere, back arched, water glistening on the tanned curve of her hip, her smile aimed directly at the camera. Thomas let out a slow breath. He’d followed her for years. It was a harmless habit, a little pulse of heat at the end of a predictable day. He adjusted himself absently through the soft fabric of his sweatpants.
His thumb flicked again.
A yoga reel from Bethany Hayes auto-played next. She was in a sun-drenched studio, muscles coiling and releasing with focused power as she moved from one impossible pose to another. Strong, not just skinny. Captivating.
A jolt, sharp and electric, shot through his groin.
It wasn’t a thought. It was a physical fact. His cock stiffened violently, a full, aching erection surfacing in an instant. He grunted, startled, the cereal bowl tipping forgotten in his other hand. Milk splattered across the grey concrete.
Before he could process it, a sensation bloomed—wet, warm, impossibly real. The phantom pressure of lips, a perfect, swirling seal, clamping around him. He gasped, his hips jerking forward off the couch cushion involuntarily. A suction, deep and rhythmic, pulled at him, matching the beat of the music still playing from Bethany’s reel.
“What the hell?” The words scratched out of his throat.
He dropped his phone. It clattered on the floor, the screen glowing upward, Bethany frozen in a downward dog. The sensation didn’t stop. It intensified. His back arched, his fingers digging into the leather of the sofa. He could feel the ghost of a tongue, a flickering tease along the sensitive underside. It was maddening. It was exquisite. It was terrifying.
He wasn’t touching himself. He was completely clothed. But his body was reacting, buckling, riding a wave of pleasure generated by thin air and a phone screen. Heat flooded his face—shame, confusion, a dizzying thrill. His abs tightened, a coil spring ready to snap. He was hurtling toward a finish he didn’t choose.
“Stop,” he choked out, to no one, to the empty room.
With a ragged, strangled cry, his hips pistoned upward one last time, grinding against the relentless, invisible mouth. Pleasure detonated, white-hot and shocking, tearing through him. He shuddered, collapsing back into the couch, breath coming in ragged pants. There was no damp patch on his pants. His cum had been swallowed by the phantom mouth.
Silence. The hum of the refrigerator. The distant whine of a car alarm several streets over.
He lay there, utterly spent, staring at the exposed ductwork on the ceiling. His heart hammered against his ribs. The evidence was cooling against his skin. The sensations, vivid as memory, faded into a lingering, impossible echo.
He slowly sat up, his body feeling used and foreign. He looked at the spilled milk, the white puddle seeping across the floor. He looked at his phone, face-down. He didn’t want to see it. He didn’t want to touch it.
A laugh bubbled up in his chest, hollow and unhinged. Was he cracking up? Too much work stress? Some weird, latent psychic ability triggered by Instagram? That was the stuff of bad memes, not his life. His life was spreadsheets, gym sessions, and takeout on Sundays.
He walked to the bathroom on autopilot, turned the shower to scalding, and stepped under the spray. The water beat down on him, but he couldn’t wash off the feeling. It was etched into his nerves.
Later, dressed in clean jeans and a t-shirt, he cautiously picked up his phone. Wiped it clean. The screen lit up. Notifications. A text from his friend Sam about grabbing a beer Friday. A weather alert. And then, another Instagram notification.
Not from Chloe. Not from Bethany.
A direct message request. The username was a string of numbers and letters: K7THA_0. The profile picture was black. No followers, no posts.
The message preview showed just two words.
Did you like that?
Thomas’s blood went cold. He stared at the screen. His thumb hovered over the notification. The cool, minimalist calm of his apartment felt like a lie now, a shell around something he didn’t understand. The pulse in his throat was frantic. This wasn’t boredom. This wasn’t routine.
This was a door swinging open in a wall he never knew was there.
He took a deep, steadying breath. Then he tapped the screen.
Then he tapped the screen.
The message loaded.
K7THA_0: Did you like that?
Thomas stared. His thumb trembled just above the virtual keyboard. What was he supposed to say? Yes? No? What the fuck are you and what did you do to me? He typed a single question mark and hit send.
The reply was instantaneous.
K7THA_0: Don’t lie. Your body doesn’t.
A cold sweat broke out across the back of his neck. He threw the phone onto the couch like it had bitten him. He paced the length of the concrete floor, running both hands through his hair. It had to be a hallucination. A stress-induced, hyper-vivid daydream. Maybe he’d fallen asleep on the couch. That was it. He’d dozed off, had a weird dream, and spilled his cereal.
The logic was flimsy, but he clung to it. The alternative was unthinkable.
He needed to prove it to himself. To break the spell. He deliberately walked back to the couch, picked up the phone with the careful detachment of a bomb technician, and with a decisive press of the side button, turned the screen black. He placed it on the coffee table.
See. Nothing. Just a phone.
He breathed out, a shaky laugh of relief escaping him. It was over. A bizarre glitch in his own brain chemistry, now corrected. He went to the kitchen to get a towel for the spilled milk, his movements returning to something like normalcy.
As he bent to wipe the floor, his hip bumped the edge of the coffee table. His phone clattered to the concrete, face-up. The impact triggered the screen.
The Instagram app, never fully closed, sprang to life.
He froze, towel in hand, kneeling on the floor.
The algorithm, relentless and omniscient, served him a new video. It was Skyler Lo. She filled the screen, a knowing smile on her glossed lips. Her hair was in pigtails. The schoolgirl outfit was cartoonish, the neckline plunged to her sternum, barely containing the heavy, exaggerated swell of her breasts. She winked, licking her lip slowly.
Thomas’s breath hitched. Not in desire this time, but in pure, animal fear.
The sensation didn’t build. It attacked.
It was a brutal, claiming grip—no lips, no suction. Just a vicious, sudden tightness around his cock, a rough, twisting friction that felt like sandpaper and velvet all at once. It wasn’t pleasure. It was punishment. A violation of rhythm and nerve.
“Ah, Christ!” he yelled, doubling over on the floor, the towel falling from his grip. His free hand flew to his groin, clawing at his jeans, finding only denim and his own agonizingly hard flesh beneath. He writhed, his knees scraping against the cold concrete as an inexorable, mocking pressure worked him. It was fast and mechanical, a merciless parody of touch.
Tears of pain and shock blurred his vision. He could only endure it, hips jerking spastically against the empty air, utterly helpless. The climax, when it was ripped from him, was a brutal shockwave that left him gasping and hollowed out, forehead pressed against the floor.
His phone vibrated on the concrete beside his face.
With a trembling hand, smearing the last of the milk, he pulled it toward him.
K7THA_0: See? Not your imagination.
See? Not your imagination.
The words glowed on the screen, a clinical confirmation of his madness. Thomas let his head fall back against the cool concrete floor, his breath rattling in his chest. He felt scraped raw, hollowed out. The physical evidence was a chilling slickness inside his jeans. The psychological evidence was a screaming static in his skull.
He pushed himself up, muscles protesting. He ignored the phone. Just a hallucination, he said to the empty room, his voice flat and unconvinced. A stress-induced psychotic break. He needed sleep. He needed a doctor. He definitely needed to never, ever open Instagram again.
He stood on shaky legs, grabbed the soiled towel, and walked to the laundry closet. The mundane task of balling up the fabric, of shoving it into the washer, was a lifeline to normalcy. He methodically poured detergent. He set the cycle. The familiar whir of the machine starting up was a soothing white noise. He was in control. He was cleaning up a mess. That’s all this was.
He washed his hands at the kitchen sink, watching the water swirl down the drain. He avoided looking at his reflection in the dark window over the sink. He didn’t want to see whatever looked back.
His phone, left on the living room floor, buzzed. Once. Then again. A double text.
His body went rigid. Every instinct told him to leave it. To walk out of the apartment and never come back.
But his feet carried him back into the living room. The screen was face-up, casting a pale rectangle of light on the grey concrete.
The first message from K7THA_0 was still visible.
Below it, a new one had appeared.
Maybe you need to be pleasured more to be convinced.
Thomas’s mouth went dry. A cold, predatory intelligence was in those words. It wasn’t a glitch. It was a negotiation.
A third message popped up, cutting through the fear with a blade of pure, targeted desire.
Open Beca Oliveira’s page. The 20-year-old gorgeous slender brunette model you love to fantasize about. If you do, I’ll give you the two best blowjobs of your life. Back to back.
He stared. Beca Oliveira. The name alone sent a traitorous heat through his veins, a low thrum beneath the panic. Her page was a cathedral of his private worship. The thought of it now felt like walking into a trap with his eyes wide open.
The phone buzzed once more in his hand, a final, soft pulse.
He stood in the center of his minimalist sanctuary, the hum of the washing machine a distant drumroll. The air no longer smelled of ozone and crushed velvet. It smelled of his own sweat, of spilled milk, of fear.
And underneath it all, the metallic tang of a choice.
And underneath it all, the metallic tang of a choice.
He walked to the window, his movements slow and deliberate. He pulled the cord for the blinds. The slats snapped shut with a series of soft clicks, sealing him off from the city’s indifferent glow. The room was dark now, lit only by the faint, sickly light bleeding from the phone still clenched in his hand.
He didn’t think. If he thought, he’d stop. He peeled his t-shirt over his head, let it drop. Unbuttoned his jeans, pushed them and his boxer briefs down in one stiff motion, stepping out of the puddle of fabric. The air in the apartment was cool on his skin. He felt exposed, ridiculous, and terrifyingly complicit.
He sat naked on the edge of the leather couch. The material was unforgiving and cold against his thighs. He looked at the phone. The screen had gone dark. He woke it. The Instagram icon seemed to pulse.
His thumb found the search bar. He typed B-E-C-A. The name autofilled immediately. Beca Oliveira. A thumbnail of her face, all full lips and smoky eyes, appeared. His heart was a frantic animal in a cage. His cock, half-hard with nervous dread and illicit expectation, gave a thick, interested throb against his leg.
He hovered over her name. This was the threshold. On this side, maybe he was just a guy losing his mind. On the other, he was accepting a bargain with something he didn’t understand.
A spark of sensation, feather-light and electric, traced the very tip of his cock. He flinched. It was the teasing flick of a tongue, unmistakable. Then the soft, yielding part of lips, just a hint of suction around the head. A promise. A taunt.
A low groan escaped him. It was fear. It was want. The two had fused into a single, undeniable need.
“Fine,” he whispered to the empty, dark room. “Fine.”
He tapped the screen.
Beca’s profile loaded, a grid of curated perfection. The first post was a reel. She was laughing on a boat, sun-drenched, hair whipping in the salt air. The moment it began to play, the phantom mouth descended fully.
It was not like before. This was not an attack or a rough possession. This was art. This was devotion.
A deep, languid swallow took him whole, a warmth and wetness so perfectly simulated his hips arched off the couch to meet it. He cried out, a raw, shattered sound. The sensation was granular—he could feel the individual pressure points, the swirling pattern of a tongue along his shaft, the gentle scrape of teeth, the hollowing of cheeks. It was synchronized to Beca’s movements on screen, to the rise and fall of her laughter. It was slow, and deep, and agonizingly thorough.
His head fell back, eyes squeezed shut. He was a conduit. Pleasure, pure and escalating, hammered through him in waves. His fingers clawed at the smooth leather. Every muscle in his abdomen was taut wire. The entity, K7THA_0, was making good on its promise. This was no mechanical servicing. This was worship, designed to unravel him synapse by synapse.
The first climax built not as a spike, but as a rising tide. It overwhelmed him, wracking his body with silent, violent tremors as he spilled into that greedy, unseen void. The sensation didn’t pause. It gentled, became a soft, coaxing suckle, pulling him through the oversensitivity and keeping him achingly hard.
“Wait,” he gasped, “I can’t…”
But it could. The second began immediately. A different technique. Faster, more insistent, a relentless rhythm that stole the breath from his lungs. He was a prisoner on the couch, pinned by pleasure, his body no longer his own. Beca’s face smiled from the phone on the floor where it had slipped from his boneless hand. The disconnect was complete. Her sunny, public fantasy was the backdrop to his private damnation.
The second peak shattered him. This time, a broken shout did escape, echoing in the sterile apartment. His vision whited out. For a long moment, there was nothing. Just the static hum of his own nervous system collapsing.
Slowly, the world swam back. The phantom mouth withdrew with one last, tender kiss. He was empty. Devastated. Swimming in a chemical haze of endorphins and dread.
He didn’t move. He couldn’t. He stared at the ceiling, listening to the frantic gallop of his own heart.
On the floor, his phone buzzed, skittering a half-inch on the concrete.
With Herculean effort, he slid off the couch, onto his knees. He reached for it.
A new message from K7THA_0.
See? I keep my promises. Now you keep yours.
A cold that had nothing to do with the room seeped into his bones. He had never agreed to anything. He’d just taken the offered hit.
Another message appeared.
Tomorrow. 8 PM. The coffee shop on the corner of 5th and Grant. Sit at the window. Wear the grey hoodie.
Thomas stared. How did it know about the grey hoodie? The one crumpled on his bedroom chair?
If you’re not there, the final message came, I’ll get bored. And I won’t use my mouth.
The screen went dark. Thomas knelt naked on the cold floor, the afterglow gone, replaced by the profound chill of a contract he never meant to sign. The entity didn’t want just his body in the dark. It wanted him in the world.
It wanted a meeting.
Her latest reel began to play.