Chapter Text
The pod hums beneath me, a low, constant vibration that has long since become background noise, like the fridge in my old apartment, in the before days. The armbinder made of advanced synthetic material holds my forearms snug against each other behind my back – forearms exactly 90 degrees to upper arms – and I hate that this alone turns me on.
I hated bondage in the before days. I considered it the stupidest kink. My hands gave myself and my partner pleasure, so why lock them away? But they conditioned me to get wet from this position, and right now I am soaking.
I shift 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 press against me, doing their job with polite, non-negotiable firmness. I’m not going anywhere until the pod’s computers say so.
The gag fills my mouth completely, a smooth, slightly yielding silicone bulb that presses my tongue flat and seals my lips around its base. No drool escape routes; the engineering is annoyingly perfect. A thin tube runs from the center of it to a reservoir somewhere behind my headrest. Nutrient gel and a little water. But mostly I didn’t need it. They had me tuned before they put me in this thing.
The face mask clings 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 cameras. The goggles seal over my eyes, feeding me nothing but darkness until the system decides otherwise. Headphones cup my ears with noise-canceling so perfect I can hear my own pulse better than the pod’s tires on the highway.
I roll my head to the side, testing the collar that keeps my neck aligned with the headrest. My horniness subsides. I sigh a tiny, petulant sigh through my nose.
The algorithm notices.
The darkness in the goggles dissolves into soft golden light. My favorite show loads 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 feel the corners of my mouth twitch around the gag despite myself. Bastard algorithm knows me too well.
The screen blooms across my vision, crisp, immersive, the colors richer than reality. Mara’s slow exhale as the AI’s haptic field ghosts down her spine. I let my shoulders drop a fraction. Better.
A small translucent overlay appears in the bottom-right corner of my vision.
Arrival ETA: 3 hours 2 minutes
I glance at it, then back to the screen. Mara is naked now, floating, wrists crossed behind her back in magnetic cuffs. She’s helpless now. She can’t stop what’s about to happen.
The pod adjusts the seat angle by maybe five degrees, tilting my pelvis up.
I watch Mara arch deliciously as the AI’s field tightens around her thighs, spreading her slowly. My own thighs flex uselessly against the padded restraints. Heat pools low in my belly, familiar and patient. Three hours. Plenty of time.
On screen, Mara whispers something. I can’t hear the words over my own breathing, but I know them by heart. My nipples tighten against the thin, breathable fabric of the transport bodysuit, a material engineered to feel like nothing at all, until it decides to feel like everything all at once. Right now it is gently, maddeningly stroking me in time with my pulse.
I close my eyes behind the goggles. I picture the couple waiting at the other end.
I shift again, deliberately this time. I grind my hips down into the seat as much as the harness allows. The pod registers my movement. The seat warms another degree. A faint, rhythmic pulse begins against my clit, slow, barely there, just enough to keep me simmering.
The algorithm is showing off now.
Mara comes back on screen, trembling, weightless, every muscle straining against her inescapable bonds. My chest rises and falls faster. The countdown blinks.
I settle back, let the show wash over me, let the pod tease me in its polite, relentless way. Three hours is nothing. This transport was as routine as it gets.
Am I annoyed? Sure.
Am I angry? No.
I want to be angry. I need to be angry!
I draw a long, deliberate breath through my nose, pulling air past the mask’s filters in a slow, measured pull. The pod registers the subtle uptick in respiration rate, the faint flare of my nostrils against the silicone seal.
The golden glow of The Long Tide vanishes. Mara’s suspended body, the AI’s shimmering touch, the slow curl of her toes, all of it dissolves into perfect black. Only one thing remains: 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, turns inward the way it always does when the pod gives me silence.
It started with the numbers. They always started with the numbers.
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 “ubiquitous gestational inviability.” 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. Shoulder flexibility protocols. Muscular hypertrophy protocols. Nutritional perfection. Orgasms.
Yes, orgasms. How can you be mad when you’re orgasming?
Pleasure reduces stress, and low stress means higher reproductive probability.
But that’s mostly just convenient for them.
Net pleasure is their God.
“You’re one of the lucky ten thousand with the rr genotype,” they told me during the mandatory screening.
Lucky.
My pulse climbs at the word. I feel it in my throat, in the collar that keeps my neck perfectly aligned. My heart thumps against my chest. The pod’s sensors pick it up.
They don’t let it build.
A sudden cool bloom spreads across my tongue: sharp, clean peppermint. The gel reservoir releases a calibrated mist through the gag’s central port and the scent floods my mask’s intake filters. Crisp and icy, it cuts through the faint metallic taste of recycled air. My nostrils flare involuntarily. The chill races down my throat, into my lungs, spreading outward like frost on glass.
Music. I hear music fading in.
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 deliver it in perfect spatial audio, strings low and warm behind me, piano crystalline in front.
The peppermint lingers, bright and numbing at the edges. My heartbeat slows, first one beat, then another, dragged down by the music’s patient gravity.
I don’t want to calm down.
I want to stay angry.
I want 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 fades to a gentle aftertaste. The mint scent softens to a whisper. Beethoven plays on, the piano tracing its quiet, inevitable arc. My eyelids grow heavy behind the goggles.
The timer floats in the dark.
1 hour 41 minutes
I exhale through my nose, long and defeated.
Calm settles over me like a blanket I hadn’t asked for.
The darkness lingers a moment longer. Beethoven’s slow movement fades to a single, lingering chord that hangs in the air like smoke.
Silence. I am bound, gagged, blindfolded, and there is only silence.
I hear my breathing again, steady now, almost meditative despite the anger still smoldering somewhere beneath my ribs.
The algorithm doesn’t ask permission. It never has.
A faint warmth returns 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 cups my mound. The vibration is 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.
Nothing. I am bound, gagged, blindfolded, and there is only silence.
My hips twitch involuntarily.
In the darkness, I hear the sound of a woman’s voice. It is low and velvet.
…Her own hands, strictly bound behind her back, were grazed by the sex of the man who was caressing himself in the furrow of her buttocks…
The words slip into my ears like warm oil. I know the work. It’s a Sect-authored retelling of Story of O with a happy ending. The reader’s cadence is deliberate and sensual.
I feel the vibration again. Two ripples this time, firmer, lingering a half-second longer against my clit before retreating.
The darkness in the goggles softens to twilight blue. Shapes resolved slowly: not a full scene yet, just suggestion. A woman’s bare back, shoulders straining, wrists crossed behind her, bound with hemp rope. Candle flames reflect themselves in the gloss of her oiled skin. No face. Just the elegant line of her spine, the subtle quiver of muscle as she waits.
I feel another ripple, a slow wave that presses and holds.
It eases.
My labia swells against the thin fabric, suddenly hyperaware of every thread. This isn’t your Lululemon bodysuit. Microscopic actuators in the weave contract in tiny, synchronized patterns, stroking my outer lips in figure-eights while the seat pulses beneath.
The voice continues, softer now, almost confiding.
…she was 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 shift perspective. I am looking down at myself. Same matte-black bodysuit, same harness, same armbinder binding my arms at a 90-degree angle behind my back. My breasts rise and fall. Between my spread thighs, a faint shimmer outlines the contours of my sex, the fabric growing darker where I am already wet.
I feel the vibration stepping up in intensity. It’s a steady, low-frequency hum now. Not fast enough to chase orgasm but insistent enough to make my inner walls flutter uselessly. The seat tilts my pelvis another five degrees. A second set of actuators begins along my inner thighs, tiny stroking points that mimic fingertips trailing upward, pausing just short of where I wanted them, then retreating.
I suck in air through the mask in short, hungry pulls. The peppermint aftertaste is gone. The nutrient and aroma lines deliver something faintly sweet: vanilla and musk, engineered to mimic arousal pheromones.
The reader’s voice drops 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 match the rhythm. The projected version of me arches, arms fight against restraints, thighs tremble. A slow zoom: the wet patch on the bodysuit spreads, the outer lips visibly part under the pulsing fabric. My clit, swollen, outlined, throbs in perfect sync with the real one.
I moan into my gag, a muffled, animal sound that is absorbed into the silicone bulb. My hips roll in tiny, helpless circles, chasing the vibration that never arrives at the strength I need. Bursts of pneumatic air dry the sweat as it forms. My nipples are painfully hard.
The countdown appears again, small and merciless in the corner.
7 minutes
The vibration deepens. I feel stronger pulses now, rolling from clit to entrance in long, languid waves. The bodysuit tightens around my labia, holding them open while the seat rocks me in micro-thrusts. The projected me mirrors every movement: head thrown back, hips grinding down onto nothing.
I am dripping. My clit throbs in time with my heartbeat, huge and desperate. Every muscle in my core clenches and releases, clenches and releases. I am building pressure that has nowhere to go.
The voice reads the final line of the passage, slow and reverent.
…and when he finally pressed inside her, she shattered…
4 minutes
The stimulation levels off. I am teetering but I will not be pushed over. The goggles freeze on a single frame: my projected body arched at the peak of a thrust.
I moan into my gag again and the sound merges with the pod’s hum; patient, merciless, perfect.
Three minutes.
Two.
I am shaking now. Tremors run through my thighs. My bound arms strain against the perfectly designed armbinder. They are strong, but it is stronger.
One minute.
The vibration holds steady.
The countdown blinks.
00:59
I close my eyes behind the goggles, surrendering to the slow, inevitable climb.
They will find me like this: wet, trembling, ready.
Exactly as protocol demands.
The pod slows, climbs a series of ramps, then stops. A soft chime vibrates through the seat beneath me.
Arrival.
The harness releases with a series of quiet clicks in a deliberate sequence: ankles first, then thighs, waist belt last. My arms remain locked in the armbinder. The face mask, goggles, and headphones stay sealed. Protocol.
The pod door hisses open. Cool air brushes the uncovered parts of my skin. It is scented with cedar and something faintly floral. I blink against the sudden light filtering through the tinted lenses of the goggles.
“Oh my God, she is so hot!” I hear a bubbly female voice say. An attractive blonde woman is wearing a revealing red dress. Her breasts are a weaker version of mine, but she’s doing all she can to show them off.
“I told you I’d find a way, my darling,” the well-groomed man in his early thirties says. He puts his arm around her and kisses her tenderly on the cheek.
“I can’t believe I just spent ten million dollars for four hours!”
“You did it for me, my love.”
She kisses him slowly and sensually on the lips. I feel jealousy, of all feelings. Why do they get to have happiness and freedom?
She steps back, excitedly, and they both look at me.
“You got us a Boundmaid. We’re going to have a family!”