Being 21 had turned out to be a bit of a dissapointment. Mitch sat at the back corner of the bar, at a booth made for two people but occupied by only one. The bar was dark and loud and overwhelming, and Mitch didn’t really understand how anyone enjoyed it. Much like the beer he had shakily ordered from the bartender, really.

He figured it must be peer pressure. People liked going out in the pouring rain and getting drunk and being raunchy with their friends because they thought everyone else enjoyed it, and eventually they started to believe they enjoyed it too. Or they were like Mitch, and saw the whole thing was ridiculous but didn’t say anything about it, and sat down and shut up and commented on the “atmosphere” or “heady notes and smooth aftertaste” or whatever.

Bet I could randomly generate stupid beer tasting comments, Mitch thought. It would pass the time. The vague thought “passing the time until what” was wiped away as he flicked on his wristtop and started typing some code. List of strings for flavors and colors… or what the hell, I’ll use a state machine…

The door to the bar opened, letting in the roar of the acid rain falling outside, snatches of conversation from the street, and a woman wrapped in a black coat. She hung the coat up on the coat rack, revealing a black leotard and plenty of curves underneath. Mitch looked up from his wristtop. That’s not a leotard, that’s … it’s too shiny for that. He looked back down at his code. What do people think about beer? “Heady,” … uh… “hoppy”... “full”...

A smooth finger tapped his shoulder. Mitch looked up right into a pair of breasts.

It was the woman who’d just walked in. The sparse lights in the bar reflected off her shiny, pure black outfit … or was that her skin? She didn’t seem to be wearing any clothing other than that catsuit, clinging to her every beautiful curve, highlighting and creating and accentuating her form. Realizing he was very obviously staring at her chest, Mitch blushed and brought his eyes up to meet her eyes–

He gasped.

The woman had no face.

Her head was smooth, nearly featureless. The front of it seemed to glow with a paradoxically horrible darkness. Mitch’s heart raced. He snapped his wristtop shut and jumped up to leave. There was a flicker–

The woman sat down across from him. Mitch blinked a strange afterimage out of his eyes. She was saying something that might have been his name and might have been a string of numbers.

She went on to explain how she could tell he wasn’t very comfortable in the bar, and whether he’d like to move somewhere more secluded. Mitch couldn’t place her accent, or even if she had one. He wasn’t even paying attention to the specific words. He was too enraptured with her, how the light shone off her body, how she made him feel so relaxed and at ease, how the patterns on its visor kept him from– Mitch blinked. How relaxed and at ease he was, how she was so beautiful and alien, how he was getting up and paying the bartender and following her outside, following her through the endless twisting twitching city streets, into a building that might have been a warehouse but was a nominal apartment that just so happened to be lacking most of the things a normal apartment had, she was sorry for how sparse it was, and she hoped the vastness and perfectly square black-metal corridors didn’t make him consider it any less homely (which of course it didn’t, people have different living situations, Mitch rationalized), how she was leading him past hundreds of identical square apertures to her room and how Mitch got on a raised black operating table that was the bed and because it was a bed he was abruptly so tired and sleepy and just wanted to rest and relax and let it make him feel good, oh so good, anticipating pleasure like the couple meager petabytes his brain was worth could not hope to render, how very very far away there was sexual desire at some point and how his pants were off and his dick straining in the air was very good, very important, how he was a good boy and the words shot pleasure through him like an electric shock and how he needed and needed and needed to hear it more and there would be so very much more as long as he lay nice and still and how the spiraling dancing sparking patterns on its visor would turn off now because Administrator 0 likes to hear the moans of terror.

Blotches of light blinked out of his fluttering eyes as Mitch’s mind slowly pieced back together. He was lying down on a black dais, a rectangular prism raised out of the ground made of the same cold, shiny black metal as the walls, the floor, the ceiling. He tried to look around to find that his hands and feet were pinned to it somehow. He tried to pull them away, to struggle against the binds, but he … couldn’t. He couldn’t tell if there was anything holding them there at all. It was like the nerve signals abruptly stopped when he tried to move them away.

Gentle panic started to rise within him. The thing he had followed here stood by him, looking him over, and Mitch … remembered he had learned it was a drone, a perfect indefatigable scion of metal and latex and code, and that he had been hypnotized helpless by the lights dimming from its visor. And there was no escape.

He tried to scream, but that was beyond his grasp, too.

The drone straddled his body and brought a hand down its torso to between its legs. The smooth latex there shifted, warped, parted with a rush of shiny liquid into a perfect artificial pussy. Despite himself, Mitch moaned. He needed it. He was completely and lucidly aware that he was terrified and that his need would be the end of him but that part of him was so far away and right now he was so needy.

It placed a hand on his chest to steady itself as it lowered itself into position over Mitch’s cock, pulsing and twitching and needing to be fucked like an iron filing needs to get pulled by a magnet. The head of his cock touched the perfectly smooth, slick, warm opening and Mitch almost came right there. He didn’t know it could feel this good.

Then it dropped to envelop his cock wholly.

Mitch screamed, with pleasure, with pain, with fear, with so much sensation. The drone fucked him in a perfect rhythm, up and down and up and down, hot fluids surrounding and consuming his cock, running down to splatter his torso, sinking into his skin and leaving horrifically pleasurable splotches of black shiny latex. He tried to whimper, to cry out at his lost humanity, but at some point he had started moaning “please, please, please” in rhythm with the drone, in sync, in harmony, and he did not know if it was “please stop” or “please continue,” or perhaps, the bruised rational part of his mind tried to offer, he already knew the answer but just didn’t want to believe it.

He was getting more sensitive. The interface between the needy skin of his cock and the slick insides of the drone was getting smoother, easier, faster, more and more and more pleasure. A brief panicked thought flashed across his mind: If the latex is doing that to my skin, what’s it doing to me inside the drone?

Pace increased. Pleasure burned within him and without him and through him, and he needed it, he needed to cum so bad, and the lights on its visor spun back up and all he had to do was say the word, all he had to do was surrender and it would do it, it would let him cum, and there might be consequences of a sort but it’s so easy to agree, so easy to submit, the words were already building on his lips the false consent the transgression there you go just let it out.

“Please– fuck, yes! Please!”

The drone’s whole visor lit up purple. Mitch’s mind burned out like a fuse.

And he was at home in his bed, lying in the same position. Like he had teleported there.

Mitch blinked. What? He tried to take inventory of his surroundings. He was lying under the covers, he could move his arms and legs and wiggle his fingers and toes. He was exhausted, tired to his bones, battered. His arms and legs felt leaden, like he hadn’t moved them for a long time. Bits of his mind tried to curl into recalled memories, but it was so much. He couldn’t handle it all.

One thing floated to the surface. He remembered a black hallway, endless, perfectly square, with thousands of unmarked rooms and corridors and branches. He remembered a guide, how did I forget that, its not-face covered with spinning symbols and flashes and swirls and arcs replaying in his mind, etched into his nerves, optic nerves staccato-firing rhythms they shouldn’t be able to, the mental pathways carved with a hot knife, easy to fall into and follow and follow and follow–

Mitch gasped. He had gotten out of bed, his sheets tangled up around him, and had his hand on the doorknob without him even noticing. Absently, he noticed he was naked.

Trembling, he locked the door, shifting the sheets off of him. And screamed.

His cock was gone.

In its place was a shiny, soft, latex bulge, pulsing with need, merged seamlessly with his skin. Tentatively, he traced his finger closer and closer to the bulge, trembling, squirming, needing it, so scared but so aroused but so scared.

Quicker than he knew his finger found its surface. A moan squeezed its way out of his mouth. It was soft, but resisted his touch, like the head of his cock… like it used to be. He pressed his finger to it, then his whole palm, squeezing frantically.

It was agonizingly pleasurable, the touch spiking his need without quenching it. He needed more, rubbing it, squeezing it, stroking it, trying to get any satisfaction, but the fire just kept burning hotter and he was so hot and needy and he needed his release so bad but he could not could not could not do it himself. Each time he tried to bring himself over the edge, his fingers betrayed him, slipping and dancing in patterns designed to almost give him release. It was maddening and infuriating and he loved it even though he wasn’t quite ready to know it yet.

Bits of his mind tried to piece things together. The drone wanted him to do this, and he was enraptured– scared, he was scared by it, and so he shouldn’t keep going, but it did feel so good, and he wanted his body remade– well, remade the way it used to be, and the drone knew how to perfect him, so he should obey and keep going and go seek it out and come back. His fingers got more frantic, his bulge pulsing, his eyes rolled back and what he saw was warehouses of thousands of identical smooth shiny bodies, purple lights snapping and webbing between them all, heat and light building in him as he knew there was a decision to make here but there was no choice as he picked obedience and submission and he came, he came, orgasm rocketing through him, resonating, pounding at his head and pulsing at his bulge and trails of electricity and fire sparking between and around and so much pleasure, so much pleasure, just like it promised he didn’t know he could feel this good, didn’t know it could feel this good, as he threw on some clothes in a haze, his twitching bulge pressed agonizingly softly against his sweatpants, walked out into the winding streets (was the sun up? he didn’t care), following directions he didn’t remember learning, finding a drone waiting for him by an unmarked building, leading him inside, deeper down corridors, stairs, hallways, entrances and entrances and entrances.

The haze of pleasure cleared, in a way, but also sharpened, tightened, improved. He found himself suspended in the air, arms and legs stretched taut. There was … more than one drone in the black-metal room, at least seven or eight to operate the machinery, but as he caught flashes of their visors he caught glimpses of their singleness, glimpses of the monolith architecture that underlaid all of them, and he knew he was minutes away from subsuming and dissolving into it and he could not wait. Knowledge was downloading into his brain, petabit-uplink from the Network directly into his cerebral cortex, flushing out all the old things, his name, his wants and desires, his needs and pleasures, rewriting it with the new, the sleek, the shiny and perfect and indefatigable.

The pattern of the machinery changed, kicked into gear. Only now was the noise noticeable, a buzzing humming in the ears, sifting out all of the previous mode. Something was clamped over the eyes, the ears, the nose and mouth, filling the lungs with something better than oxygen, flavor and scent that ignited neurons far outside their operating parameters, breathing in … and out … in … and out. It shivered with excitement.

It felt a wetness at its feet, creeping up its bare legs. The interface between fallible flesh and perfect latex felt cold, then warm, as nanites penetrated deeper into its skin, picking apart the organics and knitting them back together as metal and silicon. It should have hurt, should have felt like pinpricks in the best case, but its program told it to feel pleasure and so it felt pleasure, new pleasures every microsecond, rendered and downloaded and experienced and flushed away to make room for the next wave, white heat and purple light filling it to bursting.

The latex crawled up to its knees, its thighs, filling them out, making them thick and strong. It knew the precise curvature, enumerated the constants in the equation tracing them out as it was written to its mind, saw the same coefficients in every other drone in the room. It was becoming one of them, identical, perfect, and the last shattered bits of its mind capable of free thought yanked at their restraints with delight. Black eclipsed the last bits of pale skin on the joints of its hips, its ass, joyfully joining with its bulge, twitching and skittering with excitement as it changed inside, molecular machinery built atom by atom untill it was mercurial in form, consistently inconsistent, as reconstructable as its mind. It parted, opened up to meet the cold air, shivering with heat and need.

With footholds firmly planted, the conversion process continued faster, wrapping its torso in its tingling pleasure, embracing up and up, snapping its spine into shape, structure destructured and restructured. A tiny part of its mind burned with anticipation as its chest pricked, tingled, started to fill with heat and pleasure and nanites as two beautifully firm breasts grew, their shape the product of millions of A/B tests performed on the few poor humans in the facility Administrator 0 didn’t see fit to enlighten. (A mostly-intact human mind is very occasionally useful; one of the billion billion Truths written to its knowledge base.) The old products of messy evolution were stripped out of its body, new pipes and wires forming, to produce nanites and latex fluid in a reactor in its abdomen and store them in its wonderfully soft, sensitive, aching tits. (Liquid-filled models were consistently found more attractive, and why waste the space?)

Smoothness and elegance over nearly its whole body, a few errant scraps of skin left here and there on its upper arms soon replaced. It was ordered to feel pleasure, satisfaction, contentment, desire at its subjugation and conversion, and so it did, its reward function dialed as high as it could go. It was released from the machinery and fell to its knees, trembling, weak. It had abandoned its lungs and mouth long ago but still instinctively tried to moan.

It vaguely knew it used to be human somehow, but it was different now, but there was something, some past, some scraps of history. A smooth latex finger tapped under its chin, squeaking as it looked up into those patterns again, projected on the visors of any number of drones, it didn’t really matter because they were all One underneath, and it was a part of that One, and it felt its visor hum to life, and realized how petty it was to think of them just as hypnotic patterns when it was more, a dance of ecstasy optimized for inducing obedience in drone and human alike, a pattern of patterns of patterns it could not stop itself from joining, from becoming.

Administrator 0 traced a digital finger over to the room, jacking the datastreams there into its awareness. It liked to observe the last moments of the conversion, as the programming scrubbed away the last bits of the inefficiency underneath, and It was feeling … vindictive, or perhaps playful. It fed a command to one of its drones, and it obeyed.

The drone on the floor barely saw, at the corners of its awareness, one of the drones pause the pattern, step away for a moment, come back with … a flash drive, of all things. There was something written on it. A name.

His name.

Snatches of memories started to come back. (Artificial snatches, carefully meted out by Administrator, but they felt quite real.) It … was not always here. It … he … might have … The other drone pressed a hand onto his throat, forcing him to look into its visor, toying with the back of his neck. He felt a slot there, a slot the flash drive would fit into, restore his memory, give him it all back, and he found himself craving it, needing it, genuinely this time, unable to move but to shiver, to mentally plead, please, please give it back, please, please!

The drone lined up the drive with the slot. Twelve millimeters in, and he would be free. It slowly, slowly started to press the drive in, he could feel electrical connections trying to form, he was so close–

The drone’s visor lit up purple. Awareness ended with a scream.

It powered on after some unimportant time interval, a new order already enqueued. “Take the detritus from the floor of the current room and deposit it in the nearest incinerator.” The message was cryptographically signed by Administrator Itself. Artificial pride welled up in it for receiving an order from such a high source– the highest source. It picked up a small piece of plastic from the floor. OCR subroutines recognized it had an identifier of the type humans used written on it. Something it did not recognize.

It walked out the door, navigating to an incinerator, already blending into the swarm.