"Gooning?" Lucy's face twisted into one of confusion. Her ability to follow the conversation had slipped out of grasp, her friend had started speaking in another language. Well, friend was being generous, Maxine was more of an overly friendly colleague. One that would overshare with frightening nonchalance. 

"Uh-huh, it's getting pretty big online, our generation are going out and getting fucked less and less. The internet's a scary place y'know, if someone has the choice between struggling through social embarrassment to try and get laid or having instant access to the craziest porn they could think to look up, they might just spend several hours a day stroking themselves silly till the crack of--"

"Okay okay I get the picture, jeez!" A massive blush spreads over the 23 year old's face, hidden poorly by locks of curled black hair. Maxine was always bad with boundaries and social etiquette, she made a point to try and get a shocked reaction from those she knew wouldn't report her. Lucy was one such victim of this onslaught of inappropriate chatter, which realistically beat doing any actual work even still. "Isn't that like, kind of sad though?" 

Maxine pulled her phone out and started scrolling, which was never a good sign. "I mean, everyone's different right? It's not like I'm as bad as some people." She just casually announced herself a 'gooner', did she not? Oh joy, where is this going? "You should see the worst of it, there are dedicated groups of people that are in deep, jacked into the fucking matrix over here. You could prolly harvest their semen and end the fuel crisis!" 

"Eww Max please stoooop! We have lunch coming up, I don't need these images in my head." Lucy was trying to move things along, but then the dreaded phone screen was thrust into her face. 

"See? They all jack it together online and edge for hours, then they gotta admit when they bust. I guess it's like an honour system, but it's kinda weird right?" Just kinda? Lucy peeked at the screen hoping to avoid an eyeful of gross hairy cocks, which fortunately she did. It's just a chatroom, with a video player that's split into several feeds of porn. Wait, there's nearly a hundred people in there. Two words fill the chat, more than anything else. 

"I lost?"

"Oh my god Lucy did you just nut?" 

"Shut the fuck up!"

The two erupted into laughter and finally the conversation moved on, another mind numbing shift in the world's most nondescript establishment.

It wasn't until later that evening that Lucy's phone pinged with a WhatsUp notification, it was from Maxine with a smiling devil emoji and a link. Another messaged popped up below it. 

"In case you can't scratch that itch alone, love Maxie... fucking bitch!" Lucy threw her phone onto the bed and laughed wryly, it had been a while since she had any relief in that department but the idea of that weird online cesspit was the last place she would find herself getting turned on. She knew Maxine only sent it as a tease, but she was curious. Not for herself, but of the sort of creeps that she might find in there. Like an ant farm. 

After jumping out of her steamy shower, Lucy wrapped up and flopped onto her bed still dripping wet, pulling up the lid on her laptop and following the link to the online group chat. A whopping nine windows of porn were playing simultaneously to the left of her screen, while a white chat with different colours of text moved slowly on the right. The chat was divided between short lived discussions on one of the nine streams and those same two words. That admission of climax. 'I lost.'

What did they do after sending such a message, Lucy wondered as she sat cross legged on her memory foam mattress. She supposed they must either wrap up and move on with their days or evenings, or start afresh. The second idea troubled her, imagining this endless loop of edging and failing, then edging once again. Her own masturbation in the past had been very functional, getting the heat in her loins out of her system so she could focus on literally anything else. This was different, they were getting themselves off to get themselves off. It was almost opposite to her own experiences. What was the appeal?

Warm water rolls down Lucy's arms, her legs, the back of her neck. She sits and watches the chat roll like beads of moisture, confessions of 'gooners' that just lost their communal game. Was there a prize for the last one standing? Would there ever be a last one standing? Unlikely. The ant farm was real, Lucy was fascinated. 

Discovering that she could expand and minimize the windows at will, Lucy flicked through the streams to get a sense of what these people were getting off to. Were they mostly watching one stream, were they moving between them, or were they absorbing all at once as a sensory overload rotted away their sense of shame? The variety was impressive, all tastes well accounted for, from vanilla to fetish, straight, gay and everything in between. More warm drops rolled down Lucy's body, the stuffy air of her bedroom doing the towel's job as they hung loosely by her sides. 

Minimise the tab, she could now look at the mosaic of pornography with much more context. The scenes were seared into her mind, so even if some details were lost from the smaller windows she could follow several scenes at once now, imagining what the people on the other side of the screen would be thinking. Were they thinking at all, or were they mindlessly stroking their cocks and stuffing their pussies as they rode that edge for hours upon end? Lucy laughed, shifting onto her side and uncrossing her legs passively.

Her eyes almost glazed as she drank in the scene as an outside observer, the chat window never staying still for very long. Those same two words signalling yet another defeat, a victim of the mind virus that had them touching their sex to a never ending onslaught of porn. It turned their minds to mush had them thinking with their bodies and not much else. Lucy scoffed, the two words playing through her mind as they multiplied in a rainbow of colours on the screen.

I lost.

I lost.

I losst

ilost

lost

Lesbians sucked and fucked and kissed and tribbed and--

i list

ii losset

i lost

i lost

I lost.

A dick found its way into her mouth, warm and gushing, filling her with naughty happy drooling lust and--

i slot

lost t

I lost

I Lost.

And Lucy thought to herself, distantly...

I'm lost!

The moisture on her sheets felt strange and the light spilling through her blinds was coming far too early. The towels had somehow found their way onto her messy floor and her fingers felt sticky and hot. Her other fingers, the ones that had left an imprint on her soft skin moments before, was now typing something into chat. 

Lucy's eyes widened and she read the screen, a message from her own username. Since when did she have one of those?

I lost.