Deus ex Machina
By VivettaVenray
(WARNING: Contains mind-control/modifying,
sexual horror [including non-consensual], body-horror,
existential horror, vore [soft and hard], sadism/cruelty, torture, saliva, sweat, mucus/snot, absorption, reality-warping/omni-stuff, transformation [including object and food, sort of],
demi-monster-forms, burping, digestion, messy-stomachs and gore among other things.
This story also contains futa [woman with a penis] for two chapters. These chapters have notices at their starts.
As another type of warning, please don't run any of the pseudo-code you read in this story as it was all never intended to function.)
(NOTE: For this story, I tried the "Snowflake Method" of story-planning. In particular, I had a 4000+ word synopsis as well as a spreadsheet scene list before the first chapter was even written. This was useful, but I also think it might’ve been a bit more planning than the story needed. It was fun to try though!
The characters of the story are fictional and their views don't necessarily reflect mine. Similarly, the story isn't intended to reflect poorly on programmers and other tech-people.
Please enjoy the story, and feel free to share your thoughts on it if you’d like!)
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Chapter 1: Gray Skies
‘He’s taking forever. Fucker.’ thought Delta. She didn’t dare say it aloud.
The man just in front of her in the queue wavered between the agonizing decision of whether to get the 0-Calorie chocolates or licorice. He held one package in each hand, as though their *weight* would help him decide.
She loathed how stores put candy at the front. It enticed customers, decision weary from shopping, to give into knee-jerk indulgence. She remembered the user interface term for it: a “Dark Pattern”. He got caught in it.
‘Idiot.’
The young tan 20-year-old noted the features she could make out from behind.
‘Bald. White skin. Age range mid-high 50s, early 60s if good genes. Average build.’
She sounded the words in her head just once. That was enough for her to remember. She did the same for his clothes. Her brown eyes studied those next.
‘Blue jeans. White T-shirt.’
The man dressed very casual this Monday afternoon, but Delta had him beat. She wore her usual ‘I have to go out today’ outfit of a yellow, logo-less T-shirt with dark green sweatpants. Her hoodie was unzipped and hood down to let her shoulder-stopped raven-hair breath in the convenience store’s sterile air. Some purple flip-flops completed the lazy attire that was far from fashionable.
The sweatshirt was a size to big on her thin frame. The muted hues were far from appealing, and the hoodie’s shade of green matched the sweatpants almost perfectly to give a sort of loose-jumpsuit vibe from behind. However, it was comfy, and she didn’t stand out much in it. Two things she liked.
‘Height 5’10”, maybe just into the eleventh inch.’
That put him at just about the average height for a man. She quietly cursed to herself, as outliers made things easier. Her estimate put him at three or four inches above herself. She was shorter than the moron: another slight from the universe towards her. Delta herself stood at 5’7”: an inch above the female average. Of course, she saw it as ‘just’ an inch.
The middle-aged store clerk nodded, smiled, and remained courteous to the customer while Delta quietly seethed. How did he tolerate this? Why did he. Why did the clerk man the store himself? Delta figured he didn’t want to lease a drone from the Ministry of Labor.
‘Cheap bastard.’
She gripped a chip bag in one hand; short unpainted nails dug into the crinkly plastic of it. The fingers of another curled around the handle of a Nutri-drink case whose weight began to strain at her shoulder.
The seconds felt like minutes which felt like hours stuck in this line. How could the indecisive man in front be so inconsiderate to her?
Delta imagined having some power here: some control. She imagined the man at her feet in some realm of her own design. He’d be small enough to fit right underneath her foot there. She set her ped down on him and twist, side to side as he flattened.
Delta shut her eyes and twisted her right foot side to side in its flip-flop. The sound of cheap foam-like sole rubbing on the smooth tiled floor hit her ears. It served as an anchor as she slipped deeper into the daydream. The hum of cooler-shelves and the mutterings of the indecisive man faded away as her mind substituted his screams, the cracks of bones. Begs, pleadings. In her reality, she was a giant to that pest of a man. He shouted for mercy and she had none.
Her light-brown foot kept shifting on the tile with a gentle whine. Back and forth. Back and forth. Back and-
“Ma’am, do you mind?”
Delta’s lids flung open in an instant. Her smile turned to a grimace. She swung around the face the source of that burly voice that took. By then, she wore the mask of embarrassment.
“I’m so sorry!” said Delta, lying.
The man didn’t speak again. A curt nod of his head conveyed acceptance of the apology. Bastard couldn’t even spare the reflexive “no problem” or “it’s fine”.
Delta smiled. She of course noted his features as well.
‘Tall, at least 6’2”. Fit build. 30-40 age range. Buzzed black hair. Brown skin brown eyes. Orange shirt, black coat, blue jeans.’
“I’ll go with this one!” said the man to her front.
‘Finally’, thought Delta.
The clerk moved a handheld device over the man’s items, then his face.
“Thanks! Next please.”
Delta took one step and called out to the bald man before he got out of view.
“Wait, sir, you dropped something!”
He turned around and she noted his eyes were blue.
“Hmm?”, said the man.
“Oh, sorry. I must of imagined it.”, she said.
“No trouble!” he said, before leaving.
Delta stepped up to the counter and forced a smile. The clerk scanned her items before pointing the gun-like tool at her forehead. Even though her headclip hid behind dark bangs, the piece of technology had no problems interfacing with that gray square of silicon embedded in her skull. The young woman heard a voice, just for her, from the scanner. The voice was robotic and one she heard before. It asked her to confirm the purchases. Delta thought clearly and firmly the command: “yes”.
Her back account was deducted; his payment was received. The clerk got his own notification from the scanner intermediary, and on each of their headclips, a near-flat led flashed green as a transaction confirmation. He smiled and bagged her things.
Delta stepped outside and zipped up her hoodie once the light chill air hit her. She walked along the streets towards her apartment, bags in hand. The chrome surface of the sidewalk didn’t shine too much. Its sheen was dulled from countless steps like hers.
She heard a roar from above as far up in the gray sky a silver-seeder soared. Those specialized jets were what gave the sky its colors as they distributed silver-based aerosol into the atmosphere. The compound reflected enough of the sun’s rays to keep the planet from boiling.
One shouldn’t confuse them with the autonomous cloud-seeders. Those were the boats that sailed the waters nearby, and the oceans at large, to pump steamed water into the air and make clouds. The United State government had to keep the rain on schedule, after all. Thankfully, today was to be a “dry” day.
Even on a Monday afternoon Delta ran into a few people on the city streets. Some woman sat at a bench, empty Nutri-drink at her side as she chomped at some crisps. Delta tried not to show her disgust. The repulsive smacking of that woman’s lips, the noisy chewing, the guttural gulpings: it all seemed so obnoxious and vile. She didn’t think the same when she herself ate, of course.
A man almost bumped into her on the sidewalk. He was clearly focused texting on a private-holodisplay to his front: that is, a semi-transparent graphical user-interface only he could see. Delta could tell, though, by his mannerisms and the direction of his eyes.
A bus came to the traffic circle right when she was about to cross. A couple on their day off chattered incessantly behind her. It seems everywhere she went had a person or two to inconvenience her with their presence.
The young woman walked hurriedly. She ignored the advertising screens on every corner with their annoying chimes and whistles, but stopped to stare at a special rectangular display on the other side of the street. The screen showed people dancing in a city square. Concrete walks surrounded the area even more crowded than the chrome ones Delta dealt with out here.
Still, she smiled. She hated that fucking square of course, and the city it was in: Nexus. However, she longed to go to where it was in the world of Paradise. “The Future of Entertainment”, was one motto for the world. “The Future of Imagination” was another.
A bus paused in the street and occluded her view of the display. She frowned and got back to her walk.
Newer York City was a busy place and Delta hated it. The name was tongue-in-cheek and came from way back when the government announced the rebuilding project. Amusingly, it stuck and became official. All this was hundreds of years before Delta’s time. She lived in the “Queens” borough, which apparently suffered the most in that 2150 flood.
Now, state of the art buildings lined every block. The city was rife with hyper-speed railways whizzing by. The air was pierced by the occasional hum of a bus’s electric motor, or the gentle buzz of a delivery drone zipping overhead. All the sights and sounds were the trappings of a modern luxurious lifestyle. Delta thought it’d all be better crushed under her heel. Whenever she gazed at a towering structure of shiny titanium and chrome, she couldn’t help but imagine her toes bending over its roof before pressing down to stomp it flat. Her imagination was vivid enough to feel it.
Delta walked into her apartment building. The drone doorman scanned the chip on her forehead in a fraction of a second and beeped happily. The robot, “Bob”, recognized her as a resident of the building: the only resident, in fact. She patted him on the head then walked to her first floor apartment.
She brought the entire building at quite the steal. Delta valued privacy, and the quiet to enjoy herself. When she first moved in, she worked day and night to find a vulnerability in the utility companies. It took her a bit, but she found the electricity provider left in a “test mode” function she could switch on at a room-by-room basis. That caused power to cycle on and off every 30 seconds. Waterworks she could just turn off outright.
Naturally tenants were pissed and started to break leases with threats of lawsuits. All the technicians the property owner hired to investigate kept getting mysteriously rescheduled. The schedule database had a bug which let her tweak the entries, of course. Most service companies used that software.
The landlord was in dire financial straits with just Delta as the tenant, but she kindly took the building off their hands for just a few tens of thousands of dollars. It was the best they could get with their property listings getting constantly canceled. Funny thing that was...
Delta still only used the one room, and hardly any of it. She kicked off her flip-flops and with a thought the lights turned on via a signal from her headclip. Her studio apartment had a twin mattress in one corner with a desk and wheeled chair in the other. Her clothes laid in two piles on the hardwood floor: one for dirty and one for clean. Delta kicked her door close, locked it, and made her way to the chair.
The chair turned to face her with just a signal from her headclip, preceded by a thought on her part. She tore open her 0-Calorie chip bag and swiveled to face a rectangular screen with a glass-like transparency to it on a black stand. Another thought and the circuits in the stand’s base came alive. The screen lit up with a computer desktop, empty and neat unlike her room.
Delta disliked a lot of things, but she loved headclips. She figured if there’s anything her fellow humans did right throughout history, it was inventing those things. Every living person had one embedded in their skull right above their left eye. Just a bit of the gray thing stuck outside the skin, with the rest lingering underneath flush with some skull bone. The name was misleading in that sense, as they didn’t really clip on and off. They were essentially irremovable, save for the LED at the surface if it ever died out.
They quickly became essential to life. Not a single transaction doesn’t go through at least two headclips before finalizing. People used to physically handle money or money-cards, Delta learned. They used to *print* currency and carry it around like some adventurer with gold in their satchel. All those lines at the convenience store she put up with would’ve been far worse if “bring payment” was a perquisite idiot customers could forget.
Of course, not everything about them was good. Delta wasn’t sitting in front of a computer so much as a screen: the thing in her head was the PC: among other functionalities. However, government regulations made it so it could only provide “personal computer” functionalities when seated in front of a compatible screen. This was to stop idiots from trying to work while they walked the streets, bumping into stuff as they eyes focused on a holographic display to their front. Delta didn’t like that limitation. She could certainly handle multitasking.
They also didn’t make you super smart or anything. Delta already considered herself a genius of sorts, but she wouldn’t mind an even better memory, or some sort of higher thinking. The Government, and most of society, was very against any sort of direct intelligence augmentation like that. No one knew how to do something like that anyway, and they probably never would with research on that form of transhumanism banned.
Still, Delta wondered why anyone wouldn’t want one. They let you do everything. A super computer right at one’s immediate disposal. What a chore it must’ve been to have to type text into a web browser with one’s hands. She heard stories of having a special tool just for a cursor too. The young woman could only imagine the wrist pain.
Of all the features they had, the best of all was serving as the key into Paradise.
Delta had to finish some ‘business’ first before any fun. She still felt aggrieved from her time at the store. She opened two web pages for the same site. The headers said “Newer York City Transportation Services” right underneath emblems of its managing Ministry of Transport.
Thanks to Delta’s backdoor in the city’s transit servers, she had access to data only employees should. She filled in search fields to try and find info on the people who inconvenienced her while shopping.
“Eyes: Blue. Skin: White. Hair: Bald. Hair Color: NA.
Age: >= 50 AND <= 60. Height >= (5,9)”
That got her candidates for the guy who took forever. For the man with the audacity to interrupt her fantasy, she searched.
“Eyes: Brown. Skin: Brown. Hair: Buzzed. Hair Color: Black.
Age: >= 30 AND <= 40. Height >= (6,1)”
For both searches, she set the day’s date: June 28th, 2404. That got her a couple hundred results each. Newer York City was a big city, after all. Delta figured she could’ve narrowed it down more by capping heights, but she was lazy there. Nevertheless she quickly scrolled through all the photos till she saw the faces she recognized that day.
The Council of Representatives took privacy very seriously. All this came from the cameras at the stations, not the headclips--except for one detail: the headclip IDs which she’d need. She memorized the strings of digits then checked their transit data. With the departure locations of the hyper-rails, then the buses they took after, she had what she needed to run searches for major places of employment in the area. The bald guy, named Jerold, had to work at a sanitation facility as that was the only building on the street, and the only non residential block between the bus’s next stop. Tiago, the other man, had to work at Rain Forest since there was a distribution center right outside his stop. She searched for the names of the chief managers at those locations, and memorized them as well.
Delta munched her chips. What a coincidence, as Rain Forest was the next website she opened. They were the premier online store. Well, the only one really. You could order something from them and drones would have it delivered by the end of the day. Highly convenient. Sadly, she didn’t have a backdoor to the company. That would’ve been quite the powerful tool. She didn’t need it though: a simple exploit would suffice.
Delta filled two digital shopping carts with the lewdest, crudest sex toy she could find. She sent each as wrapped gifts to their bosses with a personalized note expressing their identity as well as exactly where the recipient could shove the present.
Normally this would be traceable, but that’s where Delta’s exploit came in. The URL of the confirmation page had a long series of digits which represented a headclip id. This was terrible design, even if the id was encrypted as it was. Fixing it would take a day of maintenance though, and Delta knew the consumers of the nation wouldn’t tolerate that.
She had cracked the algorithm. Rain Forest’s encryption method used the date and two very large numbers as a seed for the final cryptic string. She opened a terminal and plugged in Jerold’s headclip id to a program, then got an encrypted string right out. All she had to do was copy the confirmation URL, substitute her encrypted id for that one, and Rain Forest would ship it thinking he sent it. The money came from her own account, but that was a small price to pay for vengeance.
She repeated for Tiago and finished the last of her chips, chuckling to herself after. One again she had the last laugh.
Delta ditched her hoodie and draped it over the back of her chair. She then opened a news feed to kill time while she drank her Nutri-drink. You couldn’t go into Paradise on an empty stomach. The headclip had bio-data access and knew when she was full based on nutrients in blood and signals from her gut.
Delta chugged fast, eager to wind down with some time to herself. She saw a headline that made her groan. “Great Misstep Memorial Shutdown in two days.”, it read. That was her least favorite day of the year: an entire 24 hours without Paradise access.
Thankfully, a few articles below was a headline to cheer her up. “Time Dilation Feature announcement tomorrow at the Nexus.” She smiled, till she remembered she’d probably have to stand in Central Square with all the rubes to hear it as it went out.
Delta gulped down the last of her beverage and chucked the empty bottle into a waste-bin nearby. She buckled herself into her chair with a strap around her waist and over her shoulder. She was seated, secured, hydrated and in a fed state. Delta closed her eyes and entered Paradise. Her headclip LED lit up blue and stayed that way. Her body went limp as her consciousness became alert in another reality.
The simulated reality of Paradise.