Floret in the Mirror Chapter Six Draft Preview - "Halting Problem"

HOO BOY. 

You know how life finds a way? Yeah. Sometimes life finds a way to really mess up your schedule. Hence why this post is coming in two days late. Sorry, y'all. You're getting a hot-off-the-presses draft this week, which means it's probably gonna be draftier than normal, so mind the rough edges. 

The good news is, you get a sneak preview at five thousand of the smuttiest words I've ever written. Mind those content warnings, though, they're not foolin'. 

And what are those Content Warnings? Power exchange, disassembly kink, limb disarticulation, explicit oral sex. Also, like, maybe surprise parties? I don't know, those would scare the hell out of me! 

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Halting Problem

2.8.1-rc3

It was not Jess’s first time exploring the digital side of the Tillandsia, of course. She had ventured there many times using her extended haustoric implant’s ability to interface with networked systems and a fulldive VR rig that allowed her mammalian senses to ride simulated bodies. That was how she’d spent time with digitized friends, not to mention her connivents Dipt and Thrüeetak, neither of whom particularly cared to inhabit the physical side of the Tillandsia. Dipt might be convinced to inhabit a drone or something similar from time to time, and would sometimes manifest digitally as a cloudhopper just to stretch its wings for nostalgia’s sake, but Thrüeetak in particular barely even adopted digital embodiment anymore.

Jess could sympathize — she’d wanted something similar for most of her life, and while the urge to abandon her body had lessened once her body hadn’t been so viscerally wrong, she still felt quite comfortable moving through the network as a being of pure thought. It was so different from the fulldive experience, where, even with the haustoric implant’s technopathy, everything had to be filtered down into something appreciable by a mammal. Now, she could natively interface directly with systems, bypassing even the need to format data visually. Everything felt buttery smooth in a way that even the finest of Affini user interfaces, immaculately perfected over thousands of years, could never have achieved. Without being natively digital, she could never have appreciated the scale of Tillandsia’s network topology in its full glory, could never have held so many network addresses in her perception at a single time.

And yet, for all that, the first place she chose to visit was one she’d been many times before, and the avatar she wore here, which she’d worn in her days as an aspiring synth-sophont, was similar enough to her own body that if one discounted the panel lines, warning labels, and the legs that tapered down to obviously artificial stilt-like feet, it was functionally identical. As she manifested herself in the lobby of the Möbius Loop, she ran through a self-check, testing each servo in her simulated body and luxuriating in the smooth, precise movements of perfectly machined parts. It was absolute bliss, even better than the experience had been in fulldive, and far, far better than her original bio-body. Stars, she thought, if I’d been born in a body like this I might never have given a single fuck about uploading.

The relentlessly-realistic simulation of her body was about the only realistic thing in sight — the Möbius Loop was a simulated cafe-slash-hangout-space in the form of a strip that wrapped impossibly around to become its own reverse, hanging in space in the middle of a realtime simulation of Tillandsia. Vertigo-inducing? Sometimes, yes, but that was part of the fun, along with being able to say “Hey, I can see my hab from here!”

The Loop was always busy with one crowd or another — without the sunline (which the simulation did without), one had to judge the time of day by the relative brightness of the Tillandsia’s interior. She could have just checked her system clock, but where was the fun in that? It was clear enough that she was well into the nocturnal shift, even without the dim false-color surface below or the warm glow of the lamps lining the Loop’s edge. And then, of course, there was the digital Affini smiling at her from the front counter, a spray of blocky polygonal flowers in a dozen vibrant RBG hues framing their similarly low-poly face. “I was wondering when you’d show up here,” they said, polishing an glass clean with an incongruously-realistic microfiber cloth purely for the aesthetic value of doing so.

“Hey, Echina,” Jess said, stepping down off the entrance pad and walking over to the counter, every step a euphoric little click of advanced alloy against the simulated marble of the floor. “Quiet night?” There were a few pockets of sophonts here and there, sitting at tables in little sconces around the Strip, but the entryway was surprisingly empty.

“Well, for a bit,” Echina said. “But I think it’ll pick up in short order. How are you enjoying the digital side of things?”

[I’m having the time of my life], Jess sent, along with an ATP packet loaded with a sample of the contented feeling she got when her actuators cycled. Echina laughed and reached out with a vine to give Jess a pat on the head.

“Absolutely adorable,” they replied. “Well, allow me to be the first to officially welcome you. You know me, I like to beat the rush.”

“What r–” But Jess had scarcely begun to speak when there was a sudden shudder in the local data traffic, a glut of bandwidth she felt like something enormous passing beneath her in the ocean, and when she turned to look the entry plaza was no longer empty.

“Surprise!” came the chorus from dozens of digital sophonts, some of whom Jess knew, some whom Jess knew intimately, and some she’d never seen before — though that could have just been a case of New Avatar Syndrome. She was too busy being swamped by the crowd, passed around for hug after hug, laughing and hugging back, to bother querying the network ID of everyone who glommed onto her. Somewhere in the middle of it all, the music started, a deep and pulsing cascade of synthesizer tones overlaying a heavily distorted Yreeüt mating call. It was instantly familiar, and even amidst the delight of the surprise party, there was an extra mote of happiness. Of course, she thought, of course they got Thrüeetak to DJ this.

As the crowd began to break up a little, sophonts finding their ways into little knots of conversation, Jess wound up in the arms of a heavily-armored three-meter girlmech, her chrome skin catching the lights of the Loop and her eyes shining a brilliant gold. “Hey, Momo,” Jess said, reaching up to tweak one of her radiator fins as the girlmech cuddled her up into her paraodoxically soft robo-boobs. She rested her head right next to the flashy, stylized “01” on her shoulder and added “And hey, Flowerangers.”

“Hii!” came the voice of Perianth White over Momo’s loudspeakers, and through the little window into Momo’s bridge Jess could see the tiny figure of a Affini covered in broad white petals waving excitedly.

“Looking lovely as usual, Jess!” the appropriately-foliaged Perianth Red added from beside her.

Jess couldn’t help but laugh. “You know you didn’t need to get so small for this, right?”

“Oh nonsense, it’s the polite thing to do,” Perianth White replied, working one of the controls in front of her to make Momo stroke Jess’s hair with perfect, gentle precision.

“And it gives Momo a bit of peer socialization!” Perianth Yellow added.

“Apart from the usual peer socialization she gets,” Perianth Red added with a snicker. “Speaking of, it has been an age since you’ve played kaiju for Momo! Now that you’re fully digital, we can get you into some of the really wild designs we’ve been cooking up.”

“Mmmm.” Jess bit her lip and let her eyes slip shut with a deeply satisfying click. There wasn’t much point in hiding how the idea of loading herself into a weird alien monster for the Flowerangers and Momo to “domesticate” made her feel, considering that at their present size even her microexpressions were macroexpressions to the Flowerangers. Every “episode” of Domestication Sentai Flowerangers was an erotically charged battle amidst a lovingly-detailed miniature city ripe for smashing by giant alien creatures and a heroic girlmech, and they all ended the same way. Jess was a not-infrequent participant, but now she could play with the really interesting kaiju bodies by upgrading her motor cortex — not just tentacles or extra limbs, which her haustoric implant could handle, but radically different body plans were on the table now. “We definitely need to do that sometime, yeah. Raincheck? I’m still getting used to being digital.”

“Of course, petal, of course!” Periath White said. “You know where to find us!” Before she could work the controls to lower Jess, Jess pulled herself upright and planted a kiss on Momo’s silvery lips — then, she was touching down on the marble floor and getting a gentle swat on the rear from an outsized super-robot palm. She made it about three steps before something flew down and gently alighted on her shoulder, little claws digging into her jacket.

“Dipt!”

“Helloooo~, hello!” The little cloudhopper fidgeted and began grooming one of its wings with its rough little tongue. “Ooof. Always forget how much skin itches, iiiiitches. Should turn that off. Hi!” It gave her cheek a sandpapery lick and nuzzled into her with its little snoot.

“Hey,” Jess said, reaching up to scritch it in a spot on its shoulder that she knew it loved. “Good to see you! Why the retro body, though? I thought you’d have turned up in, I dunno, the disco-drone.” That was her pet name for the glittery, spangly saucer Dipt often rode to special occasions, both in simulation and physical reality.

“Thrüeetak wanted that one,” Dipt said, fluttering its wings in a cloudhopper gesture of agreement, “but! But! I need to get used to biomechanics again, yes? You don’t know how to fly. I’m going to teach you. Gotta code a cloudhopper body for you first. But then? Flying lessons, little fledgeling! No time to be gaudy!”

Jess couldn’t help but giggle, even if she knew Dipt was taking this very seriously. It was a silly little goofball the vast majority of the time, which made it easy to forget that it was over a thousand years old and looked on both its younger connivents with a kind of grandparent-ish fondness. “Well, I’m sure I’ve got the necessary mods somewhere in the list of add-ons Admin gave me.”

“Mm. Mm. Hope so. She hasn’t flown for Blooms, not physically, no, no,” it said. “Can’t let her teach you, nope. She was good, yes yes, but too many bodies ago.”

“Well, I very much look forward to it,” Jess said, winking. “I think my social calendar is going to fill up pretty rapidly at this rate. Everyone seems to want to personally welcome me.”

“Because you’re great and they know it,” Dipt replied, no small measure of pride in its voice. “Best Admin, best elder connivent.” It puffed up its fluff, practically doubling in size on her shoulder. “And human-pretty too. I asked, asked, I did. I don’t get human-pretty, nope, but everyone who does says you’re human-pretty.”

“Aren’t you a charmer?” She gave it a little kiss on the snoot, and it shook itself out in response.

“It always has been.” The voice was deep, rumbling, with a choral quality, but when Jess turned, there wasn’t a sophont there so much as a brilliant line, like a scratch in the simulation, that quivered and vibrated in time with the warbling and the beat coming from the sound system.

“Hey, aren’t you supposed to be in the DJ booth?” Jess said, raising an eyebrow and quietly luxuriating in the way the servos beneath her skin twisted and moved to make it happen.

“I’ve checked over a dozen cultures where the concept of DJing exists, and you know what? None of them have a rule stating the DJ can’t also be on the dance floor at the same time they’re DJing.” Every word Thrüeetak spoke introduced new vibrations into the scratch, little peaks and valleys running along its length.

“Well, dirt, you’ve got me there,” Jess said, grinning. “I’d hug you, but, well–” She was cut off as a surge of warmth and a sensation of gentle pressure coiling around her, complete with the slightly dusty scent of a Vreeüt’s plumage, enfolded her via ATP. “Oh come on,” she said, giggling and hugging herself. “At least let me finish before you do that!” She sent a wave of affection right back at them.

“Nah. You’re cute when you get flustered.”

“Jess is always cute, always,” Dipt protested. “I asked!”

“Yes, Eggwatcher–” Thrüeetak replied, with all the sullen energy of a teenager that they hadn’t been for centuries. “Speaking of which, that sophont over there has been giving you The Look since they loaded in,” they added, introducing a vibrato into the music that manifested as a particularly large peak pointing in one direction. When Jess followed with a glance, she made eye contact with — well, they were bipedal, at least, and thoroughly chromed out, much like her, but their head was more like a cyberpunk reimagining of a Spectrum Jelly’s dome than anything, complete with wire-like tentacles draping down either side and trailing down their body.

“…okay, yeah, they’re pretty hot,” Jess admitted, rolling her lip between her teeth.

“Which sounds like our cue to make ourselves scarce,” Thrüeetak said. “We’ll loop you in on the Connivent Cuddle Network later, yeah?”

“And flying lessons!” Dipt chimed in.

“Absolutely!” She reached up and gave Dipt another scritch, mirroring the affection to Thrüeetak via ATP. “Later, you two!” She felt Dipt launch herself from her shoulders (after one more raspy little lick on the cheek) as she set out toward the other sophont.

Query her ID? Nah, let’s do the old fashioned way, Jess thought. Closer in, she could pick up on detail she’d missed from afar: the brilliant LEDs running in strips down their body, cycling through muted colors; the toolbelt, heavy on their hips and loaded with all manner of spanners, screwdrivers, and the like; the tightly coiled artificial musculature of their cybernetic arms. Overall, they cut a fairly butch figure, but it was always best to ask first.

But the other spoke before Jess could: “So, pretty hot, am I?” Their voice, though notably flanged to denote artificiality, nevertheless had an amused edge to it. The LEDs on their body cycled rapidly through a series of chromatic shifts as they spoke.

“I– what?” Jess felt the synthetic skin of her cheeks involuntarily cycle to a warmer shade. “How did you–?”

“I’m deaf, sweet thing, and my eyes can magnify detail, so yeah, I might have been reading your lips just a little. But also, I have a subtitler running.” Half the little white LEDs on their faceplate blinked out for a split second, a synthetic wink. “I know who you are, of course, you’re the guest of honor; I’m Cinnamon Soja, Ninth Floret Ramet, she/her.”

“Oh! I think we’ve met, actually. I fulldived to come to Hespera’s collaring. New avatar?”

Cinnamon nodded. “I remember. And not new, but new since the last time you’ve been around. The last one was a lot more biological, but, well, you hang around the digital long enough and chrome starts looking real good. You’re ahead of the curve there — love the bod. What sim level?”

“Uhh, three,” Jess said, cheekplates warming further, “but I want to sit down and improve it sometime, get it to four, maybe even five if I’m feeling ambitious.”

“Oooh, fives are nice,” Cinnamon purred, her LEDs flickering through a series of pinkish-red shades. “There are fun things you can do with battery chemistry once you hit five. Makes disassembly even more fun.”

Jess’s servos all froze for a millisecond. “You’re into disassembly?” she finally managed to say, the heat inside her having nothing to do with thermal regulation.

Cinnamon chuckled. “My owner gave me an entire workshop-world full of nothing but complicated machines to take apart. I like taking things apart — but I love taking cute girl-machines apart even more.” She took a step closer, and Jess suddenly realized that Cinnamon had nearly a full head of height on her.

Oh fuck. “We should, uhm… we should definitely make plans so you can show me sometime,” Jess whispered, trying to calm the wild rush of arousal running through her circuits.

“Plans?” Cinnamon laughed again. “Who needs plans?” She produced a card as if she were doing a magic trick and offered it to Jess. “My workshop-world’s network address. I’ve got a whole garage set up for entertaining girls like you.”

“I mean, stars that sounds hot, but… everyone put this whole party together, and–”

“Check the sim layer,” Cinnamon said. Jess reached out and took the card, following the embedded network address down beneath the Sim Canopy and into the Understory.

“… It’s native 20x?” That was deep, almost down to the Bureaucratic Trunk layer where Admin had been running her tutorial simulation.

“Mmmhmm. I like to take my time,” she replied. “You could step out for five minutes and we’d have a whole hour to play. Of course, if you don’t mind being gone for a little longer, I could really blow your fuses…”

Jess only took a moment to think it over. It was not a difficult choice. “Sure, what the heck?” she said, licking her lips and conjuring a programmatic mote to leave behind in case anyone wanted to ping her while she was otherwise occupied.

“I was hoping you’d say that,” Cinnamon said, offering Jess a chrome hand. “I’ve been dying to know what the inside of your chassis looks like since I got here.”

“I said yes, didn’t I?” Jess replied, taking Cinnamon’s hand and

<hr>

shivering as the transfer raked across her thought process. Something about clocking up to a higher time standard still left Jess feeling a little wrung out, but the sensation quickly passed, and she took in her new surroundings, beginning with the sheer amount of noise. Banging, hissing, thudding, grinding, clunking, screeching, stamping — the air was thick with the sounds of machines, of assembly lines, and though they’d materialized in a relatively small space, outfitted like a more plush version of a garage with tools neatly placed along the walls, Jess could see through the broad picture window an entire landscape of machines in motion. “Holy shit…”

“Oh, sorry, is it too loud for you?” Jess could scarcely hear her, but then Cinnamon made a gesture, and the sound died back to a much lower level. “Sorry, spaced out on that. Better?”

“Much, thanks,” Jess said, leaning into Cinnamon, feeling the warmth of whatever internal processes her synthetic avatar was simulating. “What is all that?”

“Oh, just a little project of mine I add to every now and again,” Cinnamon said. “It makes puzzleboxes.”

“All that for puzzleboxes?”

“Well, they’re five meters across and randomized. A lot of that is just mechanical computing for the latter, actually.”

“Oooooh.” Jess bit her lip — that was neat. “Well, I definitely want a tour sometime. Some other time. Because you have a puzzlebox right here to solve.”

“You seem pretty easy, though,” Cinnamon said, giving Jess another LED wink. “I bet I could solve you in five minutes flat.”

Stars, she’s hot. “You say things like that, you’ve got to ba–” Jess found her retort cut off by Cinnamon’s fingers slipping into her open mouth, pressing down on her tongue with gentle but irresistible force. “Aaah?!”

“Hush, now,” Cinnamon purred. “No more words from you, little puzzlebox.” She began to work one of her fingers back and forth on Jess’s tongue, a teasing gesture that, combined with her sheer confidence, was doing precisely what it was intended to — Jess found herself powerless to draw back to pull Cinnamon’s hand from her mouth, to resist in any meaningful way. It was simply too hot, and Jess didn’t want it to stop. “Now then,” she said, her other hand falling to her toolbelt, from which she produced a pair of heavy shears. “Got your clothing pattern backed up?” Jess nodded, and Cinnamon’s LEDs flooded with a warm reddish-pink. “Good.”

She began to cleave through Jess’s clothes — snip went the shears, and fabric effortlessly parted. Within twenty seconds, her jacket and top had fallen away, and the cool air of the garage rushed in to run its fingers across her chassis. She hugged herself, the organic reflex still strong enough to command her limbs. “See? I told you,” Cinnamon said. Another snip — her belt this time — and then the shears were back in their pocket, and Cinnamon’s strong hand was jerking down her short-shorts and panties as one. With a bit of gentle pressure from the hand in Jess’s mouth, Cinnamon pushed her back, and she stepped clear of them as they fell to the floor. “I’m already through the first layer.”

She kept pushing, and Jess shivered in a way that had nothing to do with the cool air as her narrow feet click-click-clicked against the cement as she acquiesced, taking step after step backwards until she passed through a doorway into another, smaller room. Here, power tools hung from a massive ceiling-mounted rack, connected via thick cables that all ran together in a massive trunk line somewhere in the high-shadowy ceiling. Before she could make out anything specific, though, she stumbled and all but fell back into something like a dentist’s chair, padded and soft, a light on an articulated arm above blotting out the details beyond. Cinnamon’s strong fingers were still in her mouth, firm, unyielding, still teasing her tongue maddeningly. When had Jess started to suck at them? She wasn’t sure.

“I’m going to take you apart,” Cinnamon said, straddling Jess on the chair and leaning in close. With her free hand, she stroked Jess’s cheek, then traced down her neck to her collarbone panel. “I think I’ll start here. I’m going to keep you active and conscious the whole time. Do you want to struggle?” Jess shook her head as best as she could. “What a good little girlmachine you are.” Her LEDs rippled as she pulled a flathead screwdriver from her toolbelt and began using it as a shim, working her way around her collarbone panel until she found the manual release.

“Mmmm. I think the Terran term is ‘bingo?’” She laughed and pushed, popping the panel out of place and levering it free to expose Jess’s inner workings. Jess squirmed beneath Cinnamon as her avatar’s systems lit up with warning lights, which multiplied as Cinnamon gently disconnected the plate’s leads and discarded it on the tray to her left. Jess glanced down, watching the little servos in her chest actuate as she gasped for breath around Cinnamon’s fingers. “Perfect. From here…” She leaned in, sliding the screwdriver inside Jess — she felt it against her servos as they moved, not directly but in system alarms warning her that a foreign object was impeding normal operations. She heard a click, and then another — another panel, her shoulder this time, came free. “Too easy, too easy!” Cinnamon said with a cackle, setting aside the screwdriver and reaching up to grab one of the power tools — a pneumatic power drill with a configurable smart head. With almost no hesitation, in it went, another cascade of alerts before the sudden, whirring buzz of the drill redoubled them.

ERROR! FOREIGN OBJECT INTRUSION!

Again, her servos struggled as something interfered with their normal movement, and Jess let out a helpless whimper.

ERROR! LEFT ARM INTERNAL DATA BUS DISCONNECTED!

A yelp snuck free as Jess’s arm went numb.

ERROR! CHASSIS STRUCTURAL COMPROMISE!

With another pneumatic buzz, something came very loose inside Jess. She felt the slide of metal on metal, and watched in the corner of her vision as her arm simply came away from her body. Cinnamon set aside the power drill and held it up in front of Jess. “That’s one,” she purred, then set it aside.

Jess let out a moan, suckling helplessly at Cinnamon’s fingers as she went back to work disarticulating her other arm. Though she couldn’t see it, she could feel one of the heavy tools in Cinnamon’s toolbelt pressing against her synth-girlcock, already hard and wet with lubricant. She ground against it, but no sooner had Cinnamon disconnected her other arm that she leaned back, looked down, and let out a theatrical sigh. “No, no, no,” she said. “I’m going to have to do something about this, aren’t I?” Jess whimpered and nodded, her glassy eyes pleading — but it wasn’t relief that Cinnamon had in mind.

Screwdriver in hand again, she shimmed and pried open Jess’s abdominal maintenance plate, then dug around and disconnected Jess’s primary ventral motor drive train. Her data feeds were all still connected — she could feel absolutely everything — but she couldn’t move her legs at all, and without arms the only motive servos she had left were those in her core, not nearly enough to hump Cinnamon with. She whined and tried to complain around Cinnamon’s fingers, but soon Cinnamon was back with the screwdriver, podding and prying behind Jess’s jaw until that, too, went slack.

“Aaaah?!” Cinnamon withdrew her fingers, and though her face wasn’t built for it, Jess couldn’t help but feel the smug smile.

“Sorry, puzzlebox. I need both hands for this part. But don’t worry, you’ll have something back in there soon enough.” With one last stroke of Jess’s cheek with her wet, faux-saliva-drenched fingers, Cinnamon went back to work around Jess’s collarbone. “My, but you have such a lovely interior,” she added as more and more error messages popped up in Jess’s vision. “I can’t wait to see what I can do to you when you’ve got a sim level four or five version of this. So many fun little things to disconnect.”

And with that word, Jess felt something in her neck click and release, and her head lolled to one side, resting against Cinnamon’s warm palm. “Aaah!?” More and more clicks, more and more alarm signals warning of dire chassis compromise, and then–

And then her head actually came free of her shoulders, trailing data cables behind it. “Ohhh, look at that,” Cinnamon purred. “Now, I just need to run a bypass–” Something electric tingled at the base of Jess’s skull. ”–and disconnect this… and cut this–“ More buzzing, more tingling. “And there we are.” She heard the metal-on-metal snip of the shears again, and now her head really did come free, her point of view dizzyingly drifting to the side as Cinnamon cradled her head under her arm, her face pressing into the mesh of her tank top, the synthetic musculature beneath it smelling of chemical reactions and long-chain polymers. Her tongue, still hanging free from her slack jaw, pressed against it, and she drooled helplessly. She could see her body now, half its panels missing, arms gone, and a long trail of wires leading from the stump of her neck all the way, presumably, to her head. She could still feel everything happening as Cinnamon continued to poke and prod, could still actuate the servos in her core.

Stars, Jess thought, drifting through a helpless haze of arousal, this is so fucking hot.

“You ready down there?” Cinnamon laughed and held Jess’s head up to hers, nuzzling her nose a bit with the face of her dome. [Everything okay?] she added, sending directly to Jess rather than her avatar.

[More, please!!!!] Jess replied, using ATP to broadcast exactly how turned on she was to Cinnamon.

“Ohh, you’re very ready,” Cinnamon said, LEDs flickering excitedly. “Well, good news, pretty puzzlebox: I’m giving you your legs back for now.” A pneumatic whine, and something clunked back into place in her torso. Jess tried to move her legs, but of course, Cinnamon was still straddling them — all she could do was wriggle helplessly. Cinnamon held her out so she could watch, laughing as Jess fruitlessly tried to pull her legs free, but Cinnamon just massed too much for her to shift. “Now, let’s put this,” she added, slipping a finger back between Jess’s lips momentarily, “to good use, shall we?”

And without further ceremony, she lowered Jess’s head and ran her loose tongue across one of her own nipples. The electric arc of simulated arousal that coursed between it and her nethers made every servo in her disconnected body actuate at once, and Jess could watch it all happen from a front-row seat. Every long, slow drag of her tongue across sensitive synthflesh lit it all up once more, quivering, shivering, helpless to resist. Jess moaned around her breasts, eyes rolling in her head, her synthetic girlcock as stiff as its design specs allowed for. Slowly, Cinnamon painted her way across Jess’s chest from one nipple to another, then down her body to her open abdominal panel. She was careful to avoid anything that might pinch, but let Jess taste the metal and lubricant of her own interior, and combined with the sudden absence of stimulation it only drove her need higher.

“Open wide, now,” Cinnamon purred, and with deft hands lowered Jess’s mouth onto her own girlcock. Wet mouth met wet synth-skin, and the flavor of her artificial lubricant — the kind meant to be tasted — painted her tongue bittersweet and salty. Cinnamon began to work her up and down almost immediately, setting a tortuously slow rhythm that, her jaw still lack and her tongue still limp and drooling, Jess was powerless to alter. All she could do was whimper, moan, beg wordlessly for more, and try desperately to pump in time with Cinnamon’s gentle up-and-down motion with what little control of her body she still had. It was torture. It was ecstasy. It was perfect.

Finally, blessedly, she felt a click behind her jaw, realized that Cinnamon had reconnected her motor pathways for her jaw, and began to properly work herself, lips and tongue working in tandem with Cinnamon and with her own body to bring herself back to the edge, and then to push herself over the top. Synthetic girlcum spurted, dribbling from her lips and from her disconnected cervical access shaft. “Aaah… ohhh fuck,” she moaned, “that was…”

“Good, I hope?” Cinnamon said, lifting Jess’s head and turning it around to stare right into her eyes.

“… a lot more than five minutes flat,” Jess said, grinning dopily.

“What can I say? With such a pretty puzzlebox, I had to take my time and really enjoy myself,” Cinnamon replied with an LED wink. Slowly, she went about reassembling Jess, taking the time to mend or replace any wires she’d cut or circuits she’d unplugged. Once everything was back in place (minus a few panels here or there, which Cinnamon left off purely to tease Jess), she threw a heavy blanket over her and offered her a warm cup of cocoa. “So, it was good for you?” she asked, pulling a stool over and taking a seat beside her.

“Oh, very good,” Jess said, giggling — she was still a bit loopy — and carefully taking a sip of the cocoa. “You’re a bit rougher with your disassembly than my Admin, but that’s not a bad thing. It felt nice.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

Cinnamon’s LEDs all went pink for a moment before other colors began to creep back in. “Well, you’re welcome in my garage anytime. You’re a delight to take apart even at sim level three. You get yourself up to a four? Come back and I’ll knoll you.”

Holy fuck. Jess couldn’t help but squirm at the idea of every single one of her components laid out like that. “Yes, ma’am,” she said, biting her lip and fluttering her eyelashes at Cinnamon.

They moved into an attached lounge to cuddle for a little while shortly thereafter, Cinnamon’s strong hand stroking Jess’s hair as she leaned into the chromed-out Spectrum Jelly’s shoulder. “I wish we’d met sooner,” Jess murmured. “Like, properly, I mean.”

“Well, I’ve only been on Tillandsia for a few years,” Cinnamon said. “Before that, my owner and I were all over Rinan-Terran space. I wanted to see it all, you know? It was so exciting finally getting to do what I was engineered for.” She laughed. “So excited I decided one of me wasn’t enough. Two can see twice as much, you know? My ortet is still back in Rinan-Terran space. I came out here to see what else was out there. We send each other mail all the time.”

“Aww, that’s nice,” Jess said, letting her eyes slip shut. Cinnamon was unreasonably comfortable, her artificial musculature warm and and just soft enough to give under Jess’s weight, but firm enough to support her (and to feel lovely as Jess ran her fingers across them). Somewhere deep inside, she felt a kernel of sadness begin to a form, a sense of loss — she’d never get to have a conversation with her ortet, exchange mail with her, or anything like that. Her digital haustorium swiftly engaged its countermeasures, damping out the sorrow with gentle reminders of good things and a sense of belonging and continuity. Slowly but surely, the sorrow faded. Despite the loss, Jess knew she’d be okay, and that, just by existing, she was giving her ortet a second chance, carrying her with her in her memories wherever she went. Even heartache could be a source of comfort, as long as one looked at it in the right way.

“We should probably think about getting back to the party,” Cinnamon said quietly, nodding at the chronometer on the wall that displayed time across various simulation strata.

“Six minutes, fifty-eight seconds?” Jess couldn’t help but giggle. “Seven minutes in heaven,” she added.

“Oh, I know that,” Cinnamon said. “That’s a Terran game, right? Where you– oh.” She laughed. “Yeah, I guess we did, didn’t we? Come on, let’s get you dressed.”

With Cinnamon’s help, and with the afterglow of amazing sex fading, it didn’t take long to reinstance Jess’s clothes and put them on — it felt better, gave the intimacy a sense of closure, to put them on properly instead of just summoning them directly onto her body. Then, taking Cinnamon’s proffered hand, she took a deep

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breath and shivered as her consciousness was dragged back down to realtime simulation, at once a relief and a bizarre sensation to feel her thoughts growing slow and treacly. She shook her head, blushed as Cinnamon gently pressed Jess’s hand to the front of her dome in emulation of a kiss, and made her way back into the party.

Something was different, though. She’d only been gone seven minutes, but the energy of the party had shifted significantly. There was still music, still chatter, but now she felt a definite sense of distance between her and the others present. They weren’t avoiding her per se, but there were far more short, furtive glances thrown her way. No one was throwing themselves at her, either, they way they had been earlier.

Puzzled, she gathered her mote from the air and checked it. It held dozens of messages, mostly well-wishes, teases, jokes — and then suddenly those ground to a halt, only about two minutes ago. One final message followed that point, and it was from Admin.

Come home, Petal. We need to talk.