1.

The Overseer’s voice was warm and silky; a little giggly, a little sensual. Jack called it the Fuckvoice.

“Great work, Martin!”

A bell chimed.

“Keep it up!”

Fuzzy buzzy white noise comfortably filled the factory. The ceilings were high, simulated sunlight poured in through the skylights; everything was eggshell-white - except for Jack’s thoughts, which were quite dark.

Supplemental Workforce was a young man’s game, and young had been in Jack’s rear-view mirror for a few years now, since before the Plague, before AMBR, before the Hive. His body, once slender and meticulously gym-sculpted, was now stronger but a bit softer around the edges; his hair a little thinner, a little grayer than it had once been. He was still handsome – but he was not young.

He was feeling his age this morning. The familiar, watery fatigue settled into his arms and shoulders as he continued picking parts from the conveyor belt and placing them in their correct, color-coded bins. The repetition of it numbed his mind as much as it did his body. He glanced at the timer on the leaderboard over his workstation.

Eighteen minutes until morning break.

It was only a moment’s glance, but that moment was long enough for him to miss a part coming down the belt. He saw his name flash on the leaderboard as he dropped from fourteenth to fifteenth place – the line separating the top half of the team from the bottom.

“Oh no!”

The sound of a crowd groaning in disappointment, as if at a sporting event, accompanied the Fuckvoice this time.

“Don’t worry, Jack! I believe in you! Get back in there, tiger!”

He grunted in disgust. Some of the guys – and the girls – on the team liked the Fuckvoice. Amanda had once admitted to him that she fantasized about it. But Jack was a “grown-ass man”; he wasn’t working himself to exhaustion every day because he wanted the Overseer’s approval. It was just goddamn code. It wasn’t human.

He was working to save the world.

A bit melodramatic? Perhaps. Jack had always been a little self-aggrandizing; his wife, Priyanka, sometimes teased him by calling him “The Last Man on Earth.” No, Jack wasn’t going to save the world. But he could save their son, Osiris. The little tousle-headed boy had been born post-AMBR, post-need and want, post-everything Jack and Priyanka considered to define the human experience. There was little left of what they considered “essential humanity” in the Hive. They wanted more for their son than the shelter, food, and meager stipend AMBR provided to all members of the Hive. They wanted their son to read books, to hear music, to see art – to understand what it meant to be human.

AMBR considered artistic expression irrelevant to the continuation of the human race, so the AI permitted no allowance for it. And still, there was a thriving black market for such things. Those black-market cultural artifacts cost credits, so Jack worked for credits. Priyanka remained at home and raised Ossie. Neither Jack nor Pree had considered, even for a moment, allowing Ossie to be raised by one of AMBR’s hostforms. Unlike his parents, Osiris had never known a world where Artificial Intelligences didn’t run things. Unless they taught him, Ossie would never know what life had been like before AMBR, would never understand the value of free will and self-determination.

Officially AMBR did not indoctrinate, did not enthrall, did not enslave.

Officially.

Officially, everyone was free to go where they wanted – although the world outside the Hive was a disease-ridden wasteland. Officially, everyone was free to do as they pleased – so long as their actions were not discordant with AMBR’s goals. Officially, everyone was free to think what they wanted to think – and if you were troubled by your thoughts, if you were thinking unwanted, subversive thoughts that made it difficult to integrate with the Hive, AMBR could help you with that.

The Procedure was called thought-smoothing.

“Oh no!” the Fuckvoice moaned as Jack missed three more pieces in succession. He was rapidly dropping on the leaderboard now. His co-workers did not look at him. They simply worked, with single-minded focus, on their task, and on improving their own rank.

“Let’s take an early break, Jack,” the Fuckvoice suggested, her – its, Jack reminded himself – warm voice rich with love and comfort, like a mother cradling her sweet boy to her breast, stroking his hair as she slid her blouse down over one shoulder and...

Jack fumed as he smashed his workstation’s STOP button and stomped off to the breakroom.

2.

“I heard Martin had the Procedure,” Amanda told Jack, her voice low and conspiratorial, over their coffees. The breakroom was filled with workers and the quiet rumble of their concurrent conversations, muted by the ubiquitous white noise generators. “That’s three now.”

Jack shook his head in disgust. “Martin, Linds, and…?”

She rolled her eyes. “Just look at the leaderboard.”

Of course. The new guy, Rashid. Word on the floor was that he’d had a falling out with his wife and requested his living quarters be moved to this sector. Yesterday it had just been Lindsey and Rashid jockeying for first place, with no errant thoughts to distract them as they traded the top leaderboard spot between them. And now Martin was right there with them.

“Well, that’s just great. Three bonus payouts no longer in play. Unbelievable.”

Jack was exhausted, and it wasn’t even noon. Most days he started off strong, in the upper quartile of the leaderboard, paced himself through the afternoon, and made a final push to reach top five – and the bonus credit award – in the last half-hour before shift end. But he was wearing down. He’d joined Supplementary Workforce a year ago and felt like he’d aged ten years since then. He hadn’t ranked top five in over a week.

“You could always have the Procedure done,” Amanda suggested. She tried to make it sound like a joke, an off-hand comment, but Jack saw the look in her eyes. He knew her. Knew what she liked. He wondered if she wouldn’t have undergone the Procedure herself, by now, if they weren’t friends.

They had been more than friends, once. In secret. At a time – in a life – that no longer existed.

“Sure,” he snorted. “Hell, why don’t I go all the way and just have them put the Fuckvoice in my head? You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”

“I hate it when you call her that. ‘Fuckvoice.’ It’s so… nasty. And it’s beneath you.”

“It is nasty. We already let AMBR feed us, clothe us, build our houses and police our streets – and we’re supposed to let it think for us too? Fuck that. Might as well bite the bullet and become hostform. That’s the next step, right? Thought-smoothing, then thought-erasure.”

“You’re making a slippery slope argument.” Amanda arched her eyebrow. “You taught us better than that, Professor.”

“It is a slippery slope,” he snarled. “It’s fucking oily. And I’m not a professor anymore. Don’t call me that. I’m just a goddamn factory worker, the same as you and Martin and everyone else.”

“Well then, Jack, either work smarter, work harder, or get used to not making top five.”

“Don’t be obtuse. You can’t ‘work smarter’ than a fucking AI.”

“’God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.’”

“Fuck off.”

“Sorry, Jack,” Amanda said, in that fake, coquettish, better-than-you voice that used to turn him on so much, as she finished her coffee and stood up. “I only fuck college guys.”

3.

An excerpt from AMBR and You (Hive designation AMBR-712 Primary Education Video):

“The Auto-Moderated Biomechanical Response system, or AMBR, was developed by scientists at the Human Continuance Project in response to the virologic event commonly referred to as the Great Plague.

“As COVID-31 continued to mutate at speeds previously thought unthinkable, a new solution, once capable of adapting as rapidly as the virus itself, was needed. An Artificial Intelligence that could sequence the viral genome as quickly as it mutated, and through rapid nanite modification, create antibodies within its hosts to keep the viral load at bay.

“That Artificial Intelligence was AMBR. AMBR: the savior of mankind.”

4.

“…in spite of itself the mind decides one way or another, and it prefers to be deceived rather than to believe nothing.”

The Makerbox dinged. Priyanka sighed and put down Jack’s dog-eared copy of Émile – it would be Osiris’ copy, she supposed, when he grew old enough to understand it. Everything was for Ossie, and her husband wouldn’t let her forget that, would he?

Unfinished paintings and abandoned manuscripts shared space in their home with wall-mounted display screens and ambient mood lamps tuned to the pale, warm “Soothe” setting. Pree fetched her son’s lunch – lentils, or at least the Makerbox’s approximation of them – from the device. Osiris sat on a cream-colored rug in the living room, humming a repetitive tune as he played with blocks. He was three now, and while it was a relief that he was no longer waking her up every night, his newfound independence presented its own series of challenges for her to endure.

Jack said he was “willful,” while Priyanka preferred “obstinate” - she wouldn’t say “pain in the ass,” not in front of Jack, anyway, but that didn’t stop her from thinking it. She loved Osiris, loved him deeply, loved him more than she had thought it possible to love anyone, but still occasionally seethed at being forced into the role of mother, of homebody.

The Priyanka Acharya of five years ago would have slapped the shit out of Jack for suggesting she be a stay-at-home mom. They had met at a protest march against the construction of a new Education Center in their sector, back in the early days of the Hive. Back when they still thought they could be free.

Four years ago, she had insisted that in a world of white noise and eggshell-colored everything, her work in the art collective was the most important thing she could do. Jack was still trying to teach, then, in impromptu classrooms in coffee shops and commissary stockrooms. She had traded her oil paints and palettes for spray paints and stencils, trying to rekindle the fires of independence in a society growing numb to the drumbeat of AMBR’s control. Back when they still thought they could make a difference.

Three years ago, she had agreed it would be better to leave the Hive, to try and make a go of it in the Wastelands, than to let a hostform raise their child. They married so they could be reassigned out of their apartments and into a shared home, one with enough space for him to write and her to paint and their child to run and laugh and play and be alive. Back when they still thought it didn’t have to be this way.

“Ossie!” Pree called to her son as she set a place for him at the kitchen table. “Lunchtime, mero bacca.”

Osiris looked, curiously, at his mother and then returned to his blocks.

She sighed with resigned frustration – the sigh of a woman who had performed this song and dance countless times before, knowing it would never change. She went to the home control panel on the wall and changed the mood light setting from “Soothe” to “Cede.” Warm whites melted into hazy pastel purples, and she called out to her son again.

“Come to the table, Osiris. Eat your lunch.”

The boy dutifully stood up and did what he was told. Priyanka felt the familiar guilt that twitched in her gut every time she used the mood lights on Osiris and did her best to ignore it. Jack would never forgive her if he discovered that she had used them on their son, if he found out that she used them at all, but Jack was gone. Physically, he was always working, sleeping, or obsessively searching for his “cultural artifacts” at one of the Hive’s black markets. Emotionally… perhaps he wasn’t gone, but he was distant.

She had loved Jack; she really had. Loved his determination, his intelligence – but over the years those qualities had curdled into stubbornness and egotism. It felt like the only joy he found anymore was watching Ossie refuse to do what he was told. Watching Ossie, repeatedly, stamp his feet and hold his breath and tell his mother “No!” It felt like her husband’s only happiness was when his wife suffered.

Osiris sat at the table and began to eat. Priyanka switched the lights back to “Soothe”, and felt a little better about what she had done.

5.

After lunch, after the toys had been put away, Ossie had gone outside to play in the little walled garden behind their house. The back door had been locked. And Pree played her own game.

“Thank you for coming over,” she told her guests. There was a delicious flutter of nervousness in her voice, and in her heart. The nervousness never went away, and that was good. She knew if she ever stopped being nervous about the game it would have gone too far, and she would have to stop.

Or she would no longer be able to stop.

“Thank you for having us,” Candy smiled as Brick walked over to the couch. This was how the game always started. She invited the hostform into her home. They thanked her for inviting them. They asked her how they could be of service.

“How may AMBR assist you today, Priyanka?” Brick asked as he sat down and peeled off his sky-blue latex shirt. He was a magnificent specimen of manhood; tall, chiseled, broad-jawed and shouldered, with the warmest eyes and an impossibly understanding smile. A man who would listen to you vent after a long day while he rubbed your back, who understood you, and at night threw you down on the bed and fucked you the way you needed to be fucked. Even as he asked the question, he knew the answer, because Priyanka’s answer was always the same.

“I need… I need you to make me feel good.” It felt deliciously forbidden to say it. It always did. The artist, the rebel, the woman from Chennai who was going to bring down the system, reduced to this sensual abandon.

“Say please, Priyanka,” Brick gently ordered.

The hostform always called her Priyanka. She only allowed Jack to call her Pree. That belonged to them, not to AMBR. Not to her enemy.

“Please.”

She was already getting damp down there.

“Again.”

“Please… please make me feel good,” she whispered.

“You’d like to sit down, wouldn’t you?” Candy asked her, her voice honeyed yet subtly firm. The female hostform looked like a pin-up model from before the Plague, her gentle eyes smoldering with barely-leashed abandon, her body proportioned on the edge of obscenity. She moved like a fetish video.

Priyanka nodded, tongue somehow too thick in her mouth, as she drank in the sight of them. Hostforms were still human – Jack would argue that point, of course – they just weren’t people any longer. They had given their free will to AMBR, and in exchange received purpose and belonging. They were physical extensions of the AI, acting on its behalf to protect, serve, and satisfy mankind. They were terrifying examples of what AMBR could do, to anyone, had the AI’s code not been carefully written to ensure it would not harm what it had been created to save. Hostforms were everywhere, walking, talking, living, working, and laughing alongside the people of the Hive. And yet they were things.

Things to be used.

That was their purpose.

Pree allowed Candy to take her hand and guide her to the couch, where Brick had already slung his arm across the back in an invitation to curl up next to him. He smiled at her. She only barely managed to suppress a wanton moan.

There was something about their smell that always made Priyanka feel warm and fuzzy. There was something about the way their skin felt on hers, as she slid into the crook of Brick’s arm, and rested her cheek on his chest, that filled her with starry-eyed adoration. There was something about the way the pink circuitry in Candy’s eyes, barely visible, glimmered when she knelt between Priyanka’s thoughtlessly spreading legs and hooked her fingers under the waistband of her skirt, that flooded her with desperate, needy arousal.

“Would you like Candy to take care of you?” Brick asked, his voice deep and warm, as he wrapped his arm around Priyanka and gently kissed her forehead. 

“Yes,” she murmured. “Yes.” Priyanka felt comforted by the hostform’s embrace. Intellectually, she knew – well, suspected – that when they wanted to – or their programming instructed them to – Hostforms could exude pheromones. The oils on their skin could become aphrodisiacs. It was never forceful; she wasn’t being made to feel this way… it was just an offer, a suggestion; a door being opened, directions on a map. It made Priyanka feel wanted. It made her feel loved.

And she felt resolute, as Candy delicately slid the tip of her tongue inside her pussy and drew it upward. She felt her determination strengthen even as her legs trembled and her hips rocked into the hostform’s soft mouth. She embraced the pleasure slowly growing within her, savored the warm slippery bliss blossoming between her legs, and reveled in her dominance over it as she refused to let it cloud her thoughts.

This was Priyanka’s game.

“Do it,” Pree moaned, breathlessly, into Brick’s chest as she reached down, wrapping Candy’s hair between her fingers and guiding her mouth up to her clit.

“Do it. Yes.” Brick had his hand beneath her shirt now, softly rolling her nipple between his fingers.

“Yes. That’s what I want.” Candy wrapped her lips around Priyanka’s bud, gently, gently suckling as her tongue traced lazy circles around it. “That’s what I… fucking… want.” She was gasping now and didn’t care.

The hostform pulled pleasure from her body like magicians drawing an endless rope of knotted silk scarves free from some small, secret place. Every leisurely tug was a delight, each knot that passed through her a tiny firework of ecstasy.

She gasped, half in pleasure, half in fear, as she toyed with the thought of just… surrendering.

“More,” she pleaded.

And yet Priyanka grinned, inwardly, as she reminded herself that she was in control. She exulted in the knowledge that her will was stronger than AMBR’s slaves. She danced upon a trembling tightrope of control as Candy teased her desperate sex, as Brick tilted her head back and kissed her deep, as they invaded her with their mouths, forcing her toward the sweet, falling oblivion of orgasm.

As always, it was all too quickly getting to be too much.

And would that be so bad?

Maybe she should let them take her this time.

If they broke her, she thought – as she had so many times before – she wouldn’t care that she had been broken after she came through the other side of it. She would just be happy. Blissful.

She could just let herself be taken, and used, and just come her fucking brains out.

She grinned. This could be forever.

She recognized, a rational thought suddenly flailing to stay above the surface of her drowning mind, that she needed to stop soon.

But… not yet.

She wasn’t going to fall. She would come closer. And even closer; oh, so fucking close to the fall, need and desire just a few unbearable moments away from exploding… exploding into euphoria that would drown her will and leave only empty, mindless submission in its place.

No more artist. No more rebel. If she gave in, the woman from Chennai would be gone.

“More,” Priyanka moaned, writhing wantonly in Brick’s arms, against Candy’s sweet mouth, bodies entwined, slick with lust and sweat and spit… “I need this.”

“You need this,” Candy agreed, looking up at her with her pink-circuited gaze before diving back between her swollen lips.

“You need this,” Brick agreed, gently smiling, understanding, tenderly brushing Priyanka’s hair back from her wide, blank eyes.

“I need this,” Priyanka thoughtlessly mumbled through lips that would no longer close, a mouth slowly spilling drool.

She was barely clinging by her fingertips to self-control as her orgasm began to swell, rising, towering over her mind like a tsunami, blocking out the light and the sun and everything fucking everything just before it came crashing down to wipe her the fuck out and it would feel so fucking good

Priyanka bit down hard on her lower lip. Hard. She bled.

“Stop.”

Candy dove her tongue deeper inside Priyanka’s folds and twisted it inside her. Brick held her down tight. Her body was trembling, and her thoughts were evaporating, and she was glowing with pleasure. And this was it.

“I said stop!” she shrieked in terror.

Candy slowly pulled away from her. “Are you sure?” she asked, innocently.

God, if Candy breathed on her clit right now, she would come. Her hips wanted to rise to meet the hostform’s glistening lips and just end it all right there.

But she was in control. This was her game, Priyanka reminded herself. Not theirs. Hers.

“I’m sure,” she half gasped, half muttered.

Brick shrugged as he relinquished his hold on her and stood, every inch of his thick, swollen cock plainly visible beneath his skintight latex. If Priyanka leaned forward on the couch, she could lick it. “You’re sure?” he smiled.

“Yes, Brick.” The woman from Chennai, the artist, the rebel, stood on her own still-watery legs, and smiled, because she had won again. She was undefeated. “Thank you both very much for coming over today. But it’s time for you to leave now.”

“You’re welcome, Priyanka,” Candy purred as she wiped the woman’s juices from her mouth with the back of her hand. “Would you like us to come back tomorrow?”

“I’ll let you know.”

“We’re always here for you, Priyanka,” Brick told her.

“When you’re ready to let go, we’ll catch you,” Candy added.

Priyanka clenched her thighs together, hard, before her sex betrayed her.

“I know. Thank you. Thank you both very much.”

“Enjoy the rest of your day, Priyanka,” Brick said, over his shoulder, as the hostform walked through the door, out of her home, and quietly closed it behind them.

Priyanka’s heart soared with the rush of victory. She was indomitable.