I know I’m not meant to enjoy my time in the machine… Pearl lives in a futuristic world governed by a giant, benevolent intelligence. When she is chosen to become part of the machine, she doesn’t expect intense sexual satisfaction to follow…
Pearl in the Machine
[‘Pearl in the Machine’ is an erotic and consensual short story centring female pleasure in a futuristic world. No particular triggers – maybe claustrophobia or medical procedures but only in a super light way.]
I know I’m not meant to enjoy my time in the machine.
I didn’t sign up with the intention of enjoying myself. I simply wanted to contribute, like so many of my generation. And as a government employee, I was honestly pretty much expected to apply, along with all of my colleagues.
My workmates were all found unsuitable. But the machine — obscure, impenetrable, possibly insane — decided that my work skillset was just what it required.
There were some jokes about that on the day I packed up my desk and left for machine headquarters.
Who knew the machine would want a poetry expert?
Be sure not to confuse the machine with your grandiose plans to reshape world architecture, Pearl.
The comments sound mean, but they weren’t really. I knew they were just jealous. The trouble was, being chosen to work in the machine came with a lot of status.
Anyway, I was as confused as they were.
I’m good at my job — it turned out that a doctorate in architecture had prepared me quite well to become a government employee — but I didn’t understand why the machine had chosen me and passed over my more highly qualified colleagues with economics, law and business strategy degrees. You would think it would want them to help it run the country, not me.
I couldn’t help but feel excited though. The machine had changed our world and I was going to meet it in person.
Half a generation ago, we were still struggling with rogue tech, wars and environmental disasters. But then, some researchers in a community collaboration laboratory developed the machine. They introduced it to the world and, barely a handful of years later, it is running things for us.
I was excited to see it, to meet it, but my first day was underwhelming.
After filling out a mountain of paperwork, a smiling tech assistant — Megan — helped me climb into the machine for the first time.
I had changed into a comfortable cotton robe and I felt cool and calm as I lay down on the immersion tray and Megan looped heavy, figure hugging straps across me to hold me in place.
‘You might think you’re going to feel claustrophobic,’ she said, pointing to the helmet that would fit around my face and the heavy seal that would land on top of me, enclosing me fully inside the machine. ‘But it isn’t really. No-one ever complains of claustrophobia.’
I shook my head, our roles reversed as I tried to reassure her. I wasn’t connected to the machine yet but somehow I knew I wasn’t going to be claustrophobic. It — the machine — didn’t want me to feel bad, I knew that for certain. I already knew that it was going to do everything it could to help me feel OK.
Reassured, Megan fitted the hood
I couldn’t tell you how long I was inside that first day. Megan had told me they kept first timers’ runs short until we were used to spending all day inside the machine. It wasn’t unpleasant though.
I felt the cool fabric of the machine shifting closer to my skin, almost as if it wanted to become part of me. I knew I was still breathing through the hood but I couldn’t feel myself breathing.
Then the machine itself seemed to breathe out with a huge sigh — an absurd concoction of my imagination, the machine was fully technological, it certainly didn’t need to breathe even if I did — and then I heard it humming as it started to integrate itself into my brain.
Maybe I should explain. The machine is possibly the greatest intelligence humankind has ever built. It uses our brains for everything from identifying ideas to processing to deciding who it is at any given point in time.
When I say that the machine integrated itself with my brain, what I mean was that it started sifting through my thoughts and memories, finding ones that it liked, and then using my imagination to generate new thoughts and memories for itself.
The machine is a composite of everyone who has ever been inside it, and it only accepts brains it wants.
I learned later that it also only returns people when it chooses.
Megan and the supervisors hadn’t told me that before I went in because it always returned new inhabitants — as the people who spend their workdays inside the machine are called — within five hours, usually much less.
The machine recognises that it takes a while for people to get used to it. Maybe it also wants to limit its own exposure to new thoughts and ideas.
It kept me for thirteen hours.
Everyone was panicking when it finally returned me but I was fine and I found myself reassuring them again. I was more relaxed than I had ever been and my only discomfort was a mild hunger and a pressing need for the bathroom.
‘I guess it liked you,’ someone said, as the tension in the room subsided and everyone stopped panicking that the machine had finally, actually, gone insane and started devouring its inhabitants.
It doesn’t hurt people, I wanted to say. It wouldn’t hurt people. I was fine. It was fine.
I felt like I already knew more about the machine than any of them did. It had a million minds and emotional sources inside it all day, every day and every night too. It carefully chose those parts too. It knew some humans were capable of great evil and it had already, somewhere in its formative years when it decided who it was, decided that it didn’t want to be evil.
Megan patted me on the shoulder. I could tell her heart was still racing faster than it should have been. But I was fine. The machine was fine. They all needed to stop panicking.
‘It just liked you,’ Megan reassured me again, even though I knew she was just reassuring herself.
‘I know,’ I replied.
Really, I didn’t need her or anyone to say it — I knew the machine liked me.
I felt the machine’s joy when I returned into it on the following day. You wouldn’t think it would notice a minor, insignificant part like me. Like I said, it has over a million humans inside it at any point in time.
But it was trained to care about people and then it trained itself to notice people. And it liked me and it wanted me back. The integration was even faster the second time — I barely had time to realise I was back in the darkness of the hood before the fabric of the machine’s ‘skin’ was attaching itself onto my skin, all over, in that uncanny way that almost felt like it was absorbing me into itself.
And then it was back inside my brain and my nervous system too, controlling, stroking, caressing, possessing.
I realised something no-one had ever told me, possibly because they didn’t know. The machine considered that it owned me. But not in a cruel or objectifying way. I was part of it, part of its symmetry and asymmetry, part of its beauty, part of its complex diversity.
I knew it was happy to have me back. It understood that I had to leave periodically, because I was organic and I had needs. It knew that I also needed to live separately from it from time to time — to bring it back new experiences, if nothing else.
But I was still part of it and it felt whole again when I — and every other inhabitant — returned.
I want to say that I don’t think the machine knew what sex was. Except that wasn’t true — it knew everything I knew and had ever experienced, it knew everything that more than a million souls embedded daily in its fibres knew. In that sense, it probably knew more about sex than all of humanity combined.
Did it have a sense of humour? I couldn’t say — no-one knew things like that about the machine. But I have to say that when I felt the shimmery touch that was stroking me all over shiver across my nipples, teasing, caressing, testing me, I thought it laughed gently with a joyous kind of pleasure.
It had found a new way to please some of its inhabitants, a new way to make more of our neurons fire than ever, a new way to bring us to even greater relaxation.
I gasped silently into the hood, and then I said yes somewhere deep inside my brain where I could still feel the machine integrating itself to me.
The machine chuckled and the sensation across my nipples expanded, stroking, teasing, until I could be sure I was being touched with fingers, a feather and tiny pinpricks of light all at the same time. I felt myself sinking into the bed, my body relaxing even more, tendrils of fire running down to my groin.
Of course, the machine — linked into me in every possible way — felt the direction of my pleasure even more quickly than I did.
But it was a tease.
It intensified its stroking of my nipples and breasts, until I could be sure that giant hands were stroking and squeezing, caressing and grabbing my breasts in just the way I like, while it suckled on the nipples, drawing down hard. It started to stroke other parts of me as well — my hips, my throat, my lips, my inner thighs, uncannily drawn to all the sexual parts of me.
My pussy and cunt it left alone and I could tell it wasn’t about consent. It knew it had every permission to touch me there, it was just teasing me, stroking me everywhere else until my whole body felt like fire and my cunt was pulsing with need, desperate and empty.
For the machine, play and work were not separate concepts.
While it came perilously close to fucking me, I could feel it engaging every part of my brain and my nervous system, using my body’s utter submission to its touch to process countless volumes of data. I could feel it inside me but it didn’t feel invasive.
Its touch inside my brain was honestly almost like the best penetrative sex I had ever had.
It stripped and owned me, and then it stripped me again, continually driving itself deeper and maximising its control over me.
But it still didn’t touch my pussy.
Damn you, I thought, swimming in a fog of desire, my cunt pulsing desperately. I knew I was sodden down there.
I seemed to hear the machine talking to me.
If you want more, you have to let go.
Let go, Pearl.
Relax into me. Let me make you one.
Let go.
I felt my legs opening automatically as the machine stroked my inner thighs and hips — my body inviting penetration — and my back arching, all of me opening up for the machine that was ravishing me.
Let go, Pearl. It’s time to be one.
I had no idea how to let go further and then with a blinding flash, I did know. I just needed to relax more, to stop thinking, to let the machine have all of me. I would briefly cease to exist and the machine would own all of me — body and soul.
The step from realisation to implementation was minuscule. The instant I realised how to submit, I did, flattening my thoughts, emptying my brain from everything that wasn’t part of the machine’s dominion.
Almost immediately, the machine was even deeper inside me than before. And it felt amazing. Tiny tendrils of heat and cold, soft and hard, trailed down my clitoris, tugging and stroking. Even if the machine wasn’t already inside my cunt, it was inside me everywhere else. Dammit, it owned my whole nervous system.
Then a thin sliver of pulsing, electric hardness probed into my cunt and I lost it.
I couldn’t tell you how many times I orgasmed as the machine explored my clitoris and cunt, stroking, teasing, thrusting, stretching, owning every part of me. I had given myself to it and I couldn’t even be sure that it realised I wasn’t part of it any more.
Was it giving me intense pleasure or was it just masturbating for its own pleasure, using one of its many inhabitants to give itself joy?
As I orgasmed again and again, I could feel the data highway in my brain running full bore. With my utter surrender, the machine was revving the engine to its maximum potential, using its complete ownership of me to get as much processing power out of me as it wanted.
I was inside it for fourteen hours that time, and I could hardly stand when it finally let me go.
‘Are you OK?’ Megan said as she helped me from the pod. ‘It seems to just really like you.’
I smiled faintly, wondering if my legs would hold me up.
Yep, the machine liked me alright.
‘Yes, I’m fine,’ I said, my voice shaking a bit. ‘I think… I think my brain does something new for it. It’s intrigued with me,’ I chuckled, already knowing I wasn’t going to tell Megan about the sex.
I could hardly wait to go back inside.
Because I had had two such long sessions, I had to wait nearly twenty-four hours before I could go back in. When the hood closed over my head again, the machine nearly swamped me, stroking and caressing — not even sexually, I thought wildly.
Like it was a friend and it had missed me.
I could almost hear its sly thoughts.
You want more? I want more. We want more.
Yes, I whispered deep in my brain. I want more. I want… to be part of you again. You can have me. Any part of me that you want.
It was a deeper submission than I had ever imagined. As the machine started to stroke me again, clearly enjoying the feedback loop where it felt its own teasing touch in the same way that I did, I felt myself relaxing back into that same intense, pleasure state that I had experienced the day before.
The machine was gentler with me today than it had been two days earlier — maybe sensing how tired I was still — but no less pleasurable.
I swore I felt its hum of pleasure when it finally slid its probe across my clit and into my cunt, starting to shiver and pulse against me. Of course, it knew every nerve pathway and ending that I possessed, and it used its skills to awaken all of them — and soon I felt myself falling, relaxing, melting as my entire groin became a centre of sheer, indescribable pleasure.
I had wondered about the machine’s use of ‘I’ and ‘we’. The scholars’ theory was that it didn’t really understand human pronouns, and so it used them interchangeably.
That day, unbelievably only my third day in the machine, I realised that it had a far more sophisticated understanding of human pronouns and all its different parts than anyone was aware.
As I orgasmed, I felt the ripples from my release flutter through the machine, intensifying, and then — unbelievably — into another inhabitant. The machine had been teasing her as well, I realised, flickering back and forth across that inhabitant’s clit as if it was a feather, but she hadn’t been allowed to cum until my energy reached her.
And then she exploded, screaming silently into the hood, her body melting as she gifted the machine everything — full access to her entire neural network, every memory of her past, every imagination she had for her future.
I realised, embedded in the network, that the same ripples were flooding across the whole network, skipping many inhabitants who had chosen not to consent, but otherwise ricocheting with pleasurable abandon, creating a giant orgasm across hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands of inhabitants, female, male and non-binary.
I want more, the machine had said.
We want more.
I screamed silently as the first floods of other inhabitants’ orgasms reached back to me, diverted straight along my nerves by the machine. Somewhere between my legs, whether real or imagined, it was driving into my cunt again and again, even as it ruthlessly teased my clit and my breasts and every other part of me.
I knew the machine would stop if I said I wanted to stop, but I also knew that I never wanted to stop. I was electric, I was on fire, I was floating — I was being ravaged, delightfully, again and again, the machine powering my body and my brain into overdrive as it and I orgasmed over and again in an impossible cycle.
It only kept me for twelve hours that day and I was weak and shaking when it finally released me, a mischievous chuckle in its voice.
You’ll be back tomorrow, little Pearl.
Eat. Stay strong. Come back tomorrow and find out what we learned overnight.
I’ll need you. We’ll need you.
The machine needn’t have worried about me going back. This was the best sex I had ever had — the best anything I had ever had — and there was no way I would be staying away.
Please follow me for more stories! In the real world, remember to always play safely and practise positive, informed and enthusiastic consent that is respectful of all genders.
It’s not a manifesto
I write a lot of M/f non-consent erotica, including enslavement of women, degradation and forced breeding. They are not an expression of how the world should be. Everything I write should stay in the hot world of fiction and play. It should absolutely not become part of the real world.
When I put intense play into my writing, it’s never a description of how these types of play should happen in the real world. There are a lot of people out there who can provide advice on how to do these things for real – listen to them and not me! Love you all 💖
© Pixie Isobella
