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Molly skidded to the dirt, panting and raising a hand out in desperation. Her cries were crackled with fear as tears swelled in her eyes, and the sword swung round to point to her throat.
“Stop it! Please, just – everyone, just stop it!” she screamed, tripping over her words and struggling to keep balance on her knees, “Ali! Listen, you don’t have to kill me –“
“Shut the f-fuck up!” cried the blade-wielding woman standing over Molly. She clearly had not held a sword before in her life, then again, none of them had. Clashing steel and wails of pain surrounded them as half a dozen others fought each other. Molly scoffed at the sight.
“You don’t know what you’re doing! Stop fighting! Stop and –“
“Don’t you understand?!” Ali bellowed, “We have to keep doing this! We have no choice!”

No sooner had she said this did a man nearby collapse to the ground, shouting “That’s it! I can’t do this anymore!” He was covered in bruises and scars, everyone was, and the chaos died down rather quickly after his yelling. Other agreed, throwing their weapons down, many collapsing out of exhaustion. Screams and metal swipes were replaced with heavy breathing and spluttering as the group took a rest. Ali remained standing, the sword poised at Molly’s jugular.
“Am I the only one who’s f-forgotten we’re being fucking watched?! We have to keep doing this!”
“No, we don’t,” Molly said, and all turned to her in shock and hope, “We can work together.”
“For what?!” Ali screeched, “We can’t do anything! We haven’t got a choice!”
“I’m not going to fight you, Ali. I’m not going to fight any of you.” There was a silence that kept everyone on edge. Ali kept the sword up for a bit longer, but between the weight of the iron and her heart, the weapon fell to the ground with a singing clang after no time. She fell like the others and sobbed.
“We don’t have to live like that in here!” Molly said, “Fuck the consequences! We’re not going to let them tear us apart! We have each other, and as long as we remember that, nothing else matters!” The men and women scattered across the battlefield cried out in agreement. In that moment, even Ali embraced those she’d been fighting just a second ago, and the dusty plain was filled with a roar of revolution against the two faces staring down at them from the sky.

“Fuck off, not again,” Cathy mumbled, picking the chip up and staring with furious eyes into the screen. As she fiddled with some setting, Ethan was chuckling. The two had been sitting on the floor watching Cathy’s repeated attempts for almost an hour, and the gizmos inside her newest creation were persistent as hell.
“Give ‘em a break, I think they’re cute,” he said.
“There’s nothing cute about them,” Cathy snapped as she started to hit the chip, “They’re meant to fight! It’s meant to be cool! That’s the fifth time they’ve pulled this shit! Ethan slid over to Cathy and placed his hands on her shoulders. She looked up with a pout but couldn’t keep it up for long, smiling and pecking him on the lips. “I think I’ll take a break from it.”
“Yes!” Ethan said, “You need a break from this thing. Just relax.”

Throwing the chip on the ground, Cathy wrapped her arms around Ethan’s waist and stared into his eyes. Most other guys she’d met were freaked out by the whole gizmo thing, but he didn’t seem to care. If anything, he had taken a huge liking to it, having a few of his own in fact.
“Oh yeah, what’re your little friends up to?” Cathy asked. She had given Ethan a few chips for Valentines Day, just to play with, but in all honesty, he’d forgotten about them.
“Oh shit, yeah,” he stammered, nervous and giving a glance down to his crotch. Cathy’s eyes wide and she laughed;
“Are you fucking serious?” Without a second of hesitation, she drew down his trouser zip and slipped her hand inside, throwing her fingers around inside his pants like rough feelers. Ethan just bit his lip and groaned to himself as her hand rummaged around, eventually finding what it was searching for. Cathy had clawed through humid air and dense forest before she felt a tiny, wet bead deep inside, trapped in a fold between his balls. Nudging a finger aside to move his cock out of the way, she caught the tiny thing just in time as it slipped down and almost out of reach. It was no bigger than half a marble, plastic and sticky after spending some ten hours or so in the pitch darkness, and Cathy made sure to ease it out between two fingers and roll it into her palm. It smelled good, at least to her it did, and she watched the little sphere trundle across the skin, following the path of one of the palm’s creases, and eventually jerking to a stop. She poked it for a look from all angles. This was the chip that contained about five Gizmos, maybe a few more, that she had kept in a constant state of falling. Tossed around by incredible winds and strikes of lightning, the tortured souls inside were never given a moment’s respite, and all around them was the sphere’s 360° projection of everything around the chip, their sky. They saw the skin, glistening and pressed against the bottom of the sky, the fingers and forms around the room stretching over them as though everything in the world was bigger than them, and they saw Cathy’s grinning face peering down too.

“How long have they been falling?” Ethan asked as he gathered himself back together.
“Well, I turned it on last Monday,” Cathy sneered, scrunching her nose up as her eyes pierced their vision to get a better look. Ethan pressed closer until his face was an inch away from hers and they felt each other’s breath. He watched the tiny chip as it was rolled around by one of Cathy’s fingers.
“What do you think it’s like in there?” he asked. Their faces moved closer still until their lips touched with a daintiness, and their eyes took up all each other’s sight. Cathy balled her fingers into a fist, trapping the chip while she moved it back to the zip opening. Her breath was thick and cracked as she spoke.
“Hell,” she whispered, pressing herself against him, and their lips met again. Ethan loved it when she spoke like that, he couldn’t control himself when she did. He held her hand as they kissed and brought it closer to his crotch, encouraging her to bend her fingers down and let the chip roll back in. The little sphere tumbled down into the crevice between two fingers and sped along the stretch of skin, straight through the open zip of his trousers. It clinked from the metal of the zipper far down into the dark, musty cavern, and all around them, the spinning sky disoriented the gizmos inside even more, making them feel a sickness in their stomachs that brought out horrendous cries of despair in them. If there restless situation wasn’t dire enough, Cathy had programmed them so they couldn’t close their eyes, not even blink. There was no escape not only from the winds but also the image of Ethan’s ballsack as it took up the entire sky projection and spun around.

Cathy sneaked her fingers in again to feel for it, finding the chip tossing about at the bottom of Ethan’s pants and being thrown hard against the underside of his skin. Hairs caught the chip for seconds at a time, and in the blustering disorder of it all, her fingers scratched and snatched at it to.
“Slippery little thing,” she laughed, finally recapturing it and laying it between her hand and his crotch as she cupped his groin and rubbed back and forth, vigorous and strong. In the terrible heaving, the chip reached the threshold of any damage it could take, and a great crack snapped in a millisecond across the face of the sphere. The sky projection inside stuttered for a moment, crackling with a fuzzy noise that broke through the raging storm that continued to toss the gizmos about. Some tried to grab each other, even if they had to endure this forever, they wanted to at least have someone by their side, but the gales were too incredible in brutal strength to let any two gizmos link hands. After a time, the screen around them cut out and went to black, making their ordeal that little bit more bearable. There might have even been a cheer. However, this wouldn’t last; the sky screen flickered back to broken life with a luminosity that was clearly unintended in its intensity, almost blinding everyone inside the chip. The screen returned to a brief snippet of the movement outside it had shown before, a crude mess of hair strands, fingers, and slick, glistening skin rubbing off each other a morphing and shifting around the sky, accompanied by this sickening sound of wet flesh slapping off itself, rumbling fabric, and the taunting giggles and moist kissing noises of two cruel pseudo-gods who, it seemed, would never have to pay for the pain they were inflicting on countless others. Then the screen and sounds glitches out, then cut back to the start again and played. The projection did this again, then again, looping the same noises and visuals, distorting them a little bit each time until, by the hundredth or so loop, it was sheer torture unlike what they had known before. Cathy’s rough treatment of it had clearly broken the chip, and now the gizmos were left in an increasing tempest that knocked around some sky that seemed infinite and inescapable, surrounded by a frightful, forever-looping clip.

“That felt great,” Ethan said, pulling his trousers back tight up against his waist and doing the zip, “These little things you make are awesome!”
“I’m glad you like them,” Cathy replied, “How’s she doing?” Ethan looked up in slight confusion.
“How’s she… she? Oh shit, yeah!” he stammered, embarrassed by how little he could think straight after getting so caught up in the fun they’d had. Cathy smirked back at him and he smiled without even thinking. “I’ll ask her…. Hey, Marie!” he sang, “You doin’ alright in there?” He opened his mouth wide and flattened his tongue down, letting Cathy peer in. She made sure to give a big smile and brighten her eyes up, just to torment the lone gizmo trapped inside a crumb-sized chip attached to Ethan’s tongue piercing. Ethan laughed just a little, panting hot breath out into Cathy’s face. This gizmo was unique in that it was the first successful replica of a real human being, a simulated version of a person Cathy had gone to painstaking lengths to retrieve information on, any information, mostly from internet databases. She poked a single finger in at the piercing, nudging it about on the sloppy surface, just to make sure she had gotten the attention of his ex-girlfriend.

The girl hadn’t exactly done anything wrong, Ethan had just fell out of interest with her. The last conversation he had ever had with Marie was just after she’d found out he had been sleeping with Cathy. Needless to say, Marie was left distraught. She had always been very clingy, Ethan thought, and so focussed on making sure he was happy all the time that it kind of freaked him out. The copy of her inside the chip had been there for just over a month now, inside a dark, small room with only a screen on one wall that showed the view from inside Ethan’s mouth permanently, an audio feed flooding the room with every sound around the chip, mostly his breathing. Marie spent most of her time crying in a corner, banging at the concrete walls and screaming in the hopes of being heard, or just trying to smash in the screen and audio system if it meant she didn’t have to endure anymore humiliation. Right now, she was lying on the ground, her back facing the view outside, as she attempted for the millionth time to go to sleep even though that behaviour wasn’t programmed into her. One thing she refused to do at this point was to even acknowledge what Cathy said or did, or at least try.
“You in there, lil’ Marie? You going to say ‘hi’?” Cathy laughed, pulling her finger back out. Ethan laughed too, unable to keep a secret how much he enjoyed it when they did this.
“Hey, Cathy. I love you so much,” he said, grabbing her by the waist and pulling her in. Marie couldn’t help it, and her head tossed back to the screen. It showed Ethan’s gaping mouth and rows of teeth curled into a gigantic smile, and through the gap was Cathy’s face moving closer in and with a teasing look of bliss on it.

“I love you too, baby,” Cathy said, enveloping Marie’s whole view of the outside world as her lips met his again. Ethan and Cathy shifted their tongues in and out of each other’s mouth, wrapping around their lips with smacking, slick sounds that deafened Marie who huddled back into a ball in the middle of the shaking room and screamed. Cathy’s tongue slapped and wiggled the chip in his piercing every chance she had, violent shaking causing the tiny room to tumble around and send Marie falling into the left wall, then the right, then the ceiling. Cathy’s lips shook the room too as she sucked on Ethan’s tongue, knowing how incredible the agony would be for Marie at this moment, as she had made sure to amplify the pain receptors of the gizmo in the chip as it was being made. Caught up in the excitement, Ethan reached for the chip on the ground they’d been playing with earlier, suddenly shocking the gizmos inside who panicked and rushed about the battlefield as though there was some exit to escape through and they only need find it. Some even lost it altogether again and started slashing at each other with swords, but the battle wouldn’t remain for long as their entire world shook and wheeled about. Ethan threw the chip into his mouth and Cathy immediately started playing around with it as they made out. The two chips clanked against each other numerous times, scaring both the battling gizmos and Marie as they thought they might die there and then. Ethan moaned just to let the ex-girlfriend trapped in the piercing on his tongue know that he enjoyed this, far more than any kiss she had given him. Cathy seemed so cruel and mean-streaked, obnoxious and foul, but Ethan loved it more than any sweetness or warm words, and this fact alone was enough to slowly drive Marie insane over days and weeks, to know that being kind hadn’t earned her respect at all. She tried to rip the screen off the wall as she had many times before, screeching uncharacteristic profanities that damned both him and Cathy to hell. Marie didn’t care what happened to herself anymore, she was just desperate to see the two monsters burn for what they were doing. It was hopeless, until there was another sound above all the others that froze everyone; Marie stopped weeping, the crazed warring ceased, and Cathy and Ethan’s mouths parted as they turned to the window.

“What was that?” Ethan quivered. Cathy couldn’t reply, she was too fixated on catching earshot of what was happening outside. It sounded like a conversation of some sort, but it was off – the voices were Ethan’s and Cathy’s.
“Another one?” the Ethan-voice said, echoing and low. The Cathy-voice replied:
“Yeah, but this one’s different. Look!” The room shook a little, and the loose chip fell out of Ethan’s open mouth onto the ground, he didn’t know what to say or do. Marie climbed to her feet and watched the screen, staring out of Ethan’s mouth at the closed curtains at the window. Cathy began to manoeuvre slow and cautious to the sounds, stretching to pull the curtains across.
“Oh crap! This is the one you were talking about!” the Ethan-voice cheered, shaking the room and sending books flying off shelves and posters tearing from the walls. Cathy couldn’t suspend it for any longer. She ripped away at the curtains to send them both firing to opposite ends of the railing, and the light that flooded in revealed two colossal figures. One resembled Cathy herself, holding the room between two fingers, the other was Ethan. The giants were staring in at the room, and Cathy and Ethan stared back out before sharing a glance of horror and disbelief with each other.
“Is it for me?” the Ethan outside asked, reaching for the room.
“Of course! Just a fun little thing, not much,” the Cathy outside boomed back. She handed the gigantic Ethan the whole room and the place shook about again. Cathy couldn’t take this, she refused to believe it, and she ran to the bedroom door to escape. Swinging it open, it just revealed more wall.
“F-fuck, what?!” she cried, and Ethan rushed up behind her.
“What’s happening? Cathy, what’s happening?!”
“I don’t… I – I think… fuck! No no, no no no!!” Cathy clawed at the wall and beat at it, starting to break down and scream. Ethan tripped backwards onto the floor, his backside crashing into the chip on the ground and smashing it apart. Shards shot into his skin and he whined, looking back out at the version of him looking in.
“What can I do with it?” the Ethan outside asked.
“Anything, dude!”

Cathy leapt up from the floor and rushed to the window, banging against it with tears streaming down her cheeks.
“Ethan!” she yelled out, “Please, look! It’s me!!” The giant Ethan smiled and glared at her, cocking his head in bemusement. “Please!” Cathy continued, “Baby, it’s me, Cathy!”
“She thinks she’s real,” the Ethan outside chuckled. The giant Cathy looked in too and laughed.
“Honey,” she patronised, “This guy’s mine, your one is in there.” Cathy turned to look at Ethan who was lying on the ground in pain, struggling to articulate a single word. She turned back to the window and battered at it.
“Hey! Hey, I’m Cathy too! You can’t do this to yourself!! I’m you, you fucking bitch!” The Ethan outside interrupted with another laugh, much louder this time.
“I know exactly what to do with it.” He reached down to his trousers and began to unzip, sending Cathy rushing away from the window and into another spastic panic of shrill screams. He moved the room closer in towards his pants and tilted his hand so the thing started rolling inside.
“NO! ETHAN NO! DON’T!!” she squealed as her cries became less and less discernible. The room tossed around and cartwheeled on top of itself, mixing the furniture up together as though Cathy and Ethan had been shoved into a cacophonous blender set to maximum power. Everything went dark and the laughing voices became muffled, the room’s temperature already soaring with a thick moisture in the air. Cathy heaved about with Ethan on the floor, hitting him and pulling at his clothes.
“Let us out! Ethan, you fucking bastard! Let us out! Why would you do that?!” she wailed at him.
“Wh-what?! I didn’t!”
“Yes, you FUCKUNG DID!!” she screamed, ripping away at his trousers and searching for the room inside his pants as they both began to fight. “Let us OUT!! LET ME O-OUT!!”

Outside, the giant Ethan and Cathy could no longer hear what was happening inside the chip. He snapped his trousers shut and zipped them up, looking back up at her.
“It’s an awesome present, thanks!”
“Don’t thank me,” she said winking, “You can pay me back later, when we’re playing with them.” Cathy and Ethan held one another and pressed their lips together, smiling between pecks.
“Cathy,” Ethan muttered, “None of these things are alive, not really, are they?”
“Huh?”
“I mean, were just messing ‘round with toys, right?”
“Yeah, yeah,” Cathy said, “Just toys.”
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