Chapter Text
The pod hummed beneath me, a low, constant vibration that had long since become background noise, like the fridge in my old apartment, in the before days. The armbinder made of advanced synthetic material held my forearms snug against each other behind my back – forearms exactly 90 degrees to upper arms – and I hated that this alone turned me on.
I hated bondage in the before times. I considered it the stupidest kink. My hands gave myself and my partner pleasure, so why would you lock them away? But they conditioned me to get wet in this position, and right now I was soaking.
I shifted my weight from one hip to the other, a completely useless movement, really. The harness across my chest, the wide belt at my waist, the thigh cuffs, the ankle locks: they all did their job with polite, unnegotiable firmness. I wasn’t going anywhere until the pod’s computers said so.
The gag filled my mouth completely, a smooth, slightly yielding silicone bulb that pressed my tongue flat and sealed my lips around its base. No drool escape routes; the engineering was annoyingly perfect. A thin tube ran from the center of it to a reservoir somewhere behind my headrest for nutrient gel and a little water. But mostly I didn’t need it. They had me tuned in before they put me in this thing.
The face mask clung like a second skin, matte black, featureless except for the narrow slits that let me breathe. No one would recognize me on the outside, not even on a highest-resolution security cams. The goggles sealed over my eyes, feeding me nothing but darkness until the system decided otherwise. Headphones cupped my ears, noise-canceling so perfect I could hear my own pulse louder than the pod’s tires on the highway.
I rolled my head to the side, testing the collar that kept my neck aligned with the headrest. My horniness had subsided for the moment. A tiny, petulant sigh escaped through my nose.
The algorithm noticed.
The darkness in the goggles dissolved into soft golden light. My favorite show loaded without fanfare: The Long Tide, season seven, episode four, the one where Mara finally breaks protocol and lets the station AI seduce her in zero-g. I felt the corners of my mouth twitch around the gag despite myself. Bastard algorithm knew me too well.
The screen bloomed across my vision, crisp, immersive, the colors richer than reality. Mara’s slow exhale as the AI’s haptic field ghosted down her spine. I let my shoulders drop a fraction. Better.
A small translucent overlay appeared in the bottom-right corner of my vision.
Arrival ETA: 3 hours 2 minutes
I glanced at it, then back to the screen. Mara was naked now, floating, wrists crossed behind her back in magnetic cuffs that looked suspiciously like the ones I’d worn last month in Chicago. Coincidence, my ass.
The pod adjusted the seat angle by maybe five degrees, tilting my pelvis up.
I watched Mara arch as the AI’s field tightened around her thighs, spreading her slowly. My own thighs flexed uselessly against the padded restraints. Heat pooled low in my belly, familiar and patient. Three hours. Plenty of time.
On screen, Mara whispered something filthy to the AI. I couldn’t hear the words over my own breathing, but I knew them by heart. My nipples tightened against the thin, breathable fabric of the transport bodysuit. The material was engineered to feel like nothing at all, until it decided to feel like everything. Right now it was gently, maddeningly stroking in time with my pulse.
I closed my eyes behind the goggles. I pictured the couple waiting at the other end.
I shifted again, deliberately this time, grinding my hips down into the seat as much as the harness allowed. The pod registered the movement. The seat warmed another degree. A faint, rhythmic pulse began against my clit, slow, barely there, just enough to keep me simmering.
The algorithm was showing off now.
Mara came on screen, trembling, weightless, every muscle straining against invisible bonds. My chest rose and fell faster. The countdown blinked.
I settled back, let the show wash over me, let the pod tease me in its polite, relentless way. Three hours was nothing. This transport was as routine as it gets.
Annoyed? Sure.
But mostly… ready.
Still, how do you ever get used to this? How did I get here again?
I drew a long, deliberate breath through my nose, pulling air past the mask’s filters in a slow, measured pull. The pod registered the subtle uptick in respiration rate, the faint flare of my nostrils against the silicone seal.
The golden glow of The Long Tide vanished. Mara’s suspended body, the AI’s shimmering touch, the slow curl of her toes, all of it dissolved into perfect black. Only one thing remained: the countdown timer, crisp white numerals floating in the center of my vision.
2 hours 47 minutes
Nothing else. No teasing pulse between my legs. No ambient warmth from the seat. Just darkness and the timer and the soft mechanical hush of the pod gliding along its invisible track.
I let the breath out slowly, feeling the gag press firmer against my tongue as my jaw relaxed. My mind, denied distraction, turned inward the way it always did when the pod gave me silence.
It started with the numbers. They always started with the numbers.
Seven billion down to four hundred million in three generations. Fertility collapse off a cliff. They blamed a tangle of causes, but it was undeniable that the deepest wound was to the womb itself: its delicate lining eroded by decades of pervasive microplastics and endocrine disruptors, turning every gestation into a fragile, failing battle against rejection and collapse.
The labs called it “catastrophic genomic drift.” The rest of us just called it the end.
Then came the Sect.
The Utilitarians didn’t seize power with guns. They did it with spreadsheets, algorithms, code, presentations. They modeled every variable and arrived at the same conclusion every time: humanity could survive, but only if the next ten years produced one hundred thousand viable births from a single, tightly controlled cohort.
Ten thousand fertile women.
One child every twenty months.
Ten cycles each.
One hundred thousand new lives.
They said we would be called "Vessels." Capital V.
They said it would be our highest calling.
We just had to agree.
But less than two hundred of the ten thousand did. The number rose to 1,200 when they bribed us with a million dollar per year salary. It rose to just shy of 2,000 when they said we'd each be billionaires. The rest of us said, "hell no!" We weren't going to be farmed out to be bred, no matter how much money they threw at us!
The Sect didn’t debate morality in public anymore. They’d already done the math. The models demanded ten thousand, give or take a few hundred. The good of the many outweighed the autonomy of the few.
So they took us.
Efficiently. Humanely. With the same dispassionate care they applied to every other optimization problem. Restraints padded to the millimeter, transport routes calculated to minimize cortisol spikes. They even optimized pleasure. They wanted us happy, because low stress meant higher reproductive probability.
“You’re one of the lucky ten thousand,” they told me the first time they tied me up.
Lucky.
My pulse climbed at the word. I felt it in my throat, in the collar that kept my neck perfectly aligned. My heart thumped against my chest. The pod’s sensors picked it up within seconds.
They didn’t let it build.
A sudden cool bloom spread across my tongue: sharp, clean peppermint. Not just flavor; the gel reservoir had released a calibrated mist through the gag’s central port. At the same instant, the same scent flooded the mask’s intake filters, crisp and icy, cutting through the faint metallic taste of recycled air. My nostrils flared involuntarily. The chill raced down my throat, into my lungs, spreading outward like frost on glass.
Then the music.
Beethoven. Piano Concerto No. 5, the “Emperor.” The second movement, Adagio un poco mosso. That slow, aching melody the pianist coaxes out of the keys. The headphones delivered it in perfect spatial audio, strings low and warm behind me, piano crystalline in front.
The peppermint lingered, bright and numbing at the edges. My heartbeat slowed, first one beat, then another, dragged down by the music’s patient gravity.
I didn’t want to calm down.
I wanted to stay angry.
I wanted to hold the injustice like a blade, sharp enough to cut through the complacency of everyone who’d decided this was necessary.
But the algorithm was good. Too good.
The coolness in my mouth faded to a gentle aftertaste. The mint scent softened to a whisper. Beethoven played on, the piano tracing its quiet, inevitable arc. My eyelids grew heavy behind the goggles even though I fought to keep them open.
The timer floated in the dark.
1 hour 41 minutes
I exhaled through my nose, long and defeated.
Calm settled over me like a blanket I hadn’t asked for.
The darkness lingered a moment longer, Beethoven’s slow movement fading to a single, lingering chord that hung in the air like smoke. Then silence again, except for my breathing, steady now, almost meditative despite the anger still smoldering somewhere beneath my ribs.
The algorithm didn’t ask permission. It never did.
A faint warmth returned to the seat beneath me, not the broad comforting heat from before, but something more focused: a gentle bloom right at the cleft of my thighs, where the padded insert of the harness cupped my mound. The first vibration was so subtle I might have imagined it, a single slow ripple, like a finger tracing the seam of my bodysuit from clit to perineum and back again. Once. Then nothing.
My hips twitched before I could stop them.
The goggles stayed dark, but sound arrived first. A woman’s voice, low and velvet, reading from an old novel.
“…Her own hands, which were beneath her back, were grazed by the sex of the man who was caressing himself in the furrow of her buttocks before rising to strike hard into the depths of her belly…”
The words slipped into my ears like warm oil. I knew the book, Story of O. The reader’s cadence was deliberate and sensual. The vibration came again. Two ripples this time, firmer, lingering a half-second longer against my clit before retreating.
The darkness in the goggles softened to twilight blue. Shapes resolved slowly: not a full scene yet, just suggestion. A woman’s bare back, shoulders straining, wrists crossed high behind her in black cuffs. Candle flames reflected in the gloss of oiled skin. No face. Just the elegant line of her spine, the subtle quiver of muscle as she waited.
Another ripple, three now, a slow wave that pressed and held, then eased. My labia swelled against the thin fabric, suddenly hyperaware of every thread. The bodysuit wasn’t just passive anymore; microscopic actuators in the weave began to contract in tiny, synchronized patterns, stroking the outer lips in a lazy figure-eight while the seat pulsed beneath.
The voice continued, softer now, almost confiding.
“…she was bound with her hands behind her back, exposed and trembling in the dim light, her body yielding as the unknown touch explored her most intimate depths, a gasp escaping her lips, not from pain, not pleasure yet, just surrender, pure and overwhelming…”
The goggles shifted perspective. Now I was looking down at myself,or a version of myself. Same matte-black bodysuit, same harness, same armbinder binding my arms. My projected breasts rose and fell faster. Between my spread thighs, a faint shimmer outlined the contours of my sex, the fabric growing darker where I was already wet. The image wasn’t pornographic; it was clinical in its intimacy, every twitch and flush rendered in perfect detail.
Vibration stepped up, a steady, low-frequency hum now, not fast enough to chase orgasm but insistent enough to make my inner walls flutter uselessly. The seat tilted my pelvis another five degrees. A second set of actuators activated along the inner thighs, tiny stroking points that mimicked fingertips trailing upward, pausing just short of where I wanted them, then retreating.
My nostrils flared. I sucked air through the mask in short, hungry pulls. The peppermint aftertaste was gone; now the nutrient and aroma lines delivered something warmer, faintly sweet: vanilla and musk, engineered to mimic arousal pheromones. It curled in my lungs, sank into my bloodstream.
The reader’s voice dropped to a whisper.
“…he circled her clit with the lightest pressure, never quite giving her what she begged for. She writhed, hips bucking against nothing, every nerve screaming for more. And still he waited…”
The goggles matched the rhythm. The projected version of me arched, back bowing against invisible restraints, thighs trembling. A slow zoom: the wet patch on the bodysuit spreading, the outer lips visibly parting under the pulsing fabric. My clit, swollen, outlined, throbbed in perfect sync with the real one. Every time the seat pressed, the image shuddered.
I moaned behind the gag, a muffled, animal sound that vibrated through the silicone bulb. My hips rolled in tiny, helpless circles, chasing the vibration that never quite arrived at full strength. Sweat prickled under the armbinder and was immediately blown dry by bursts of pneumatic air. My nipples were painfully hard.
The countdown appeared again, small and merciless in the corner.
7 minutes
The vibration deepened, stronger pulses now, rolling from clit to entrance in long, languid waves. The bodysuit tightened fractionally around my labia, holding them open while the seat rocked me in micro-thrusts. The projected me mirrored every movement: head thrown back, hips grinding down onto nothing.
I was dripping. I could feel it. My clit throbbed in time with my heartbeat, huge and desperate. Every muscle in my core clenched and released, clenched and released, building pressure that had nowhere to go.
The voice read the final line of the passage, slow and reverent.
“…and when he finally pressed inside her, she shattered—not from the penetration, but from the relief of being allowed to feel it all…”
4 minutes
The stimulation leveled off, just enough to keep me teetering, not enough to push me over. The goggles froze on a single frame: my projected body arched at the peak of a thrust, every tendon standing out, mouth open around a scream I couldn’t voice.
I whimpered through my nose.
The pod hummed beneath me, patient, merciless, perfect.
Three minutes.
Two.
I was shaking now, fine, helpless tremors running through my thighs, my belly, the bound arms that could do nothing but strain against the perfectly designed armbinder.
One minute.
The vibration held steady, a cruel, loving promise.
And then the countdown blinked.
00:59
I closed my eyes behind the goggles, surrendered to the slow, inevitable climb.
They would find me like this: wet, trembling, ready.
Exactly as protocol demanded.
The pod slowed to a whisper, then stopped. A soft chime vibrated through the seat beneath me.
Arrival.
The harness released with a series of quiet clicks, not all at once but in deliberate sequence: ankles first, then thighs, waist belt last. My arms remained locked in the armbinder, forearms fused parallel behind my back. The face mask, goggles, and headphones stayed sealed. Protocol.
The pod door hissed open. Cool air brushed my skin, scented with cedar and something faintly floral. I blinked against the sudden light filtering through the tinted lenses of the goggles; they’d switched to transparent mode, letting me see without letting anyone see me.
“Oh my God, she is so hot!” said an attractive blond woman wearing a red dress.
“I told you I’d find a way, my darling,” said a well-groomed man in his early thirties, putting his arm around her and kissing her on the cheek. “I can’t believe I just spent ten million dollars for four hours!”
“You did it for me, my love,” the woman continued, kissing him sensually on the lips. “You got us a Boundmaid. We’re going to have a family.”