#billy hope

[idk-tbh-idk]

Chubby bunny walrider w Milessss

[vickylamborghini]

Slow morning sex with Billy!! He’s hurt from last night’s fight but you look so good while sleeping. Love making gotta be the best thing ever

this is perfect. 

summary : sweet morning sex with billy hope a day after one of his big fights 

genre / warnings : piv sex, creampie, hurting billy a little bit at the start with his bruises but hes fineeeee….idk if theres anything else…its short.     NOT PROOFREAD SO IT MAY BE A BIT WEIRD…

pairing : billy hope x fem!reader

words : 1.8k

you awaken to the feeling of a big body behind yours, and immediately feel a warmth spread through your own. as you stir, it's an indication to billy that you've woken. with this action, billy peppers kisses all over your bare back and neck. "morning honey." he whispers, his voice deep and slow paced, sensual.  

the sheets are twisted around at your feet, presumably kicked off while the both of you slept. the night of spring, warm at night but still comfortable enough for your temperature. the warm, amber sunlight peaks through the blinders, casting specific lines on each of your bodies sweetly. 

you eagerly roll around to press your lips to his, making his eyebrows furrow. "woah woah woah queen... slow down darling!" he chuckles, but when your hand strokes his hard chest playfully a vulnerable pained groan escapes him. you know it's because of his fight last night, evidence scattering his body with purpled bruises. 

"let me take care of my princess, yeah?" he smiles, his face coming close to yours to press a soft kiss to it before you stop him. "but you're hurt, i should be the one taking care of my strong man." your caring words make his smile curl up even more. "okay… okay queen." his smile turns lazy when you slowly crawl onto his lap, earning another groan from him. the sound is so unholy and hot but you feel evil for hurting him like this. you don't think he'd mind much though, his perfect wife sitting up on him. 

you arch your back down to pepper feather-light kisses all over his hurt chest, making yet another groan escape from his lips. but this time it sounds like a groan of relief, pleasure that your soft lips are relishing his body. 

you come close to pulling back up from your kissing, but a pair of warm hands stop you, keeping your body against his and chin close to his chest.

when you look up at billy, your eyes connect and you can't help but swallow hard. his blue eyes are linked onto yours, not looking away but seemingly darker. you know that he wants this, and you know he needs it.

you extract his hands from your back to remove the only pieces you have on, your undergarments. 

you slowly tie your hands to the clasp at the back of your bra, undoing it and letting it fall beside you naturally, your breasts spilling out of it as it falls beside his leg and yours. if he hadn't seemed nervous before, he certainly was for such a strong man, he seemed like he could barely contain himself. 

his toughened hands to your breasts, kneading the both of them lightly earning his favourite sound in the world, a small moan from you. the way his powerful hands left, which were always so angry during fights, so lightly squeezed at your twin mounds made yet another moan escape your lips at the thought. how billy was treating you so much like a queen. his queen.

only the feeling of you leaking through your panties made you remember that they're still there but billy didn't seem to care about that yet, wrapping his mouth around your nipple. his mouth was so hot, so wet and your eyes rolled back it seemed as far as they could go. 

he licked at the hardened bud and rubbed at your other one with his calloused thumb still so delicately. it was a repeated action of wrapping his whole mouth around what he could fit, going to the nipple then just flicking it with his tongue which drove you mental. it seemed your pussy had the same feelings as it had already leaked through your thin panties and onto billy. 

he can only now take notice of this, feeling the wetness seeping onto his bare body. he let's your nipple go and tries to take off your panties for you, but you stop him once more. "i thought we were agreeing that i was taking care of you?" you smile sweetly at him, earning another lazy smile to upturn his lips back at you. 

you take your panties off quickly, pushing your bra that still rested beside you off the bed as well as your underwear. it was just skin on skin now. 

"are you sure about this?" your voice is slow, your head dropping hesitantly now as if you're almost shy that you're completely bare. you don't want to hurt billy, but the drawl of his voice makes you even wetter as he agrees. his voice so deep, so low, sends things all through you. 

"tell me if it hurts." you whisper quietly, shifting back to adjust yourself right above the tip of his cock. your legs strain to hold yourself up for the period of time you inhale and exhale, slowly resting your pussy lips just against the tip of his cock, preparing yourself for the stretch you're about to feel. 

biting your lip, you rock yourself back and forth, earning an eager growl from billy as he anticipates having you tight around him. your wetness mixes with his pre-cum which glides together before you slide down slowly inch by inch. the movement makes the both of you let out a lewd noise and you finally reach the base of his cock, gasping at the fullness you feel. he's stretched you…many times before so it's not a big pain, but you can feel how big he is that it stings. 

your eyes focused on one another once more, before you started moving slowly. he both of you  gripped each others hands softly, the only difference how toughed up billy's hands are and how soft yours are, making a perfect feeling for the both of you as well as the difference in sizes. his big hand, and your rather smaller hand, fitting into his almost like a glove. 

you do all the work, gliding your hips softly up and down his thick cock, feeling every vein that pushes up against your walls lightly. your eyes appreciate his body like this, being able to see him below you giving you all the better view of his torso and upper body. 

his chest is clean shaven, tattoos on each of his pecs with symbols and letters. it's only a little different for his pubes, cut low but not completely bare there. a wet noise breaks through the sound of your moaning and pants, and his deep growls that escapes the both of you throatily of each of your bodies meeting, your pussy reaching it's limit of sinking down on his thick member. 

"you feel good handsome?" the words quietly escape your lips, as quiet as the ones before. "yeah…" he chuckles breathily, almost pantingly. your hands are still intertwined as you slowly ride him, your head falls down slightly as you relish in the pleasurable feeling of his shaft moving up and down inside of you. 

your hips, rolling up and down on him become quicker and deeper slowly, but remaining at that pace that feels loving and passionate. sweet. his cock swipes against something spongey inside of you which makes you cry out and your back arch and he can't help but look at how beautiful you look. your head tipped back, making your hair tickle at your back, your back arched to the peak of how far forward it could go, your full breasts closer to his face. it felt so amazing… 

one of his hands weakly disconnects from yours, to rub lazy circles on your clit, making those same feelings go crazy through your body and make you feel so perfect and pleasant.

you bend down to press a kiss to his lips, very uncomfortably but the taste you hadn't picked up earlier, a hint of whiskey and mint, and the softness of them made up for it. he tongue fucks your mouth, his tongue circling yours so passionately to the point the both of you are almost drooling.

you soon pull back up, leaving him lazily smirking at you as you continue to ride him. gosh does he feel amazing deep inside of you, better than ever. when he's not aggressively pounding into you before one of his fights or playing with you, you learn to cherish these moments of softness. not that you don't like the rough sex, you love it. but this…it just feels so soft. so sweet. so right. 

the thought of all of this forms a lump in your throat, somehow out of passion. you are so lucky to have his man beneath you, so lucky to have this man cherish you. so lucky to have this man. his gentle kisses when he passes by you, his gentle kisses that trail all over your body when you do something like this with him. despite having so much time with him, you barely ever get to do this and it feels so right. you wish you did this more with him. 

you swallow it down, realising that this is happening right now. that you can have this man beneath you right now, nothing matters for the future apart from taking care of your beaten up husband. you were getting this sweet, sweet pleasure right now. 

though, you can feel this is coming to a stop soon when you can barely control yourself, your hips are becoming wobbly and both of your noises are becoming shallower and turning into gasps of closeness. 

your fingers tighten around his and find the one hand that had left yours to circle your clit perfectly and he can tell you're closer. his eyebrows are furrowed and head tipped back against the pillow, jaw hanging open as he feels your hips ride him faster and faster with your orgasm approaching rapidly. 

"cmon honey…" he growls lowly, feeling as you sink down once more before completely clamping down around him. your vision goes blurry and you close your eyes tightly to the point it almost hurts, but the pleasure which feels like lightning going through your body feels so amazingly good. you gasp and mewl and thrash and orgasm tightly around him which draws something through him too. 

as if timed perfectly, his balls tighten and draw up and he shoots his spend inside of you, coating your insides deliciously in several pumps. 

the both of you calm down slowly, your heartbeats returning to normal, his cock slowly softening inside. all the both of you can do is keep your eyes closed and cherish this beautiful moment of having your bodies intertwined like this. the both of your bodies are shiny and slicked with sweat and inside of your body wet with his seed before he slowly removes his cock from inside of you. some of your mixed fluids drip out onto his lap and all he can do is lay there when you get more comfortable on his hard body. 

i love billy hope… and getting requests 👅👅👅👅 i was a bit lazy w this i admit its 11pm…

[hypnotic-delusion]

eyes 👁👁

[doqt33th]

DEUS EX MACHINA

THE WALRIDER/READER

SUMMARY: You are an on-call technician for Murkoff, and have done a very good job at keeping your head down thus far. However, when a late-night emergency warrants your presence down at the Morphogenic Engine, you learn that you may have attracted attention of a very different kind.

WORD COUNT: ~16k

WARNINGS: 18+, explicit PWP, dubious consent, canon-typical gore. Vaginal fingering + penetrative sex, lots of moral bankruptcy. Possession/mind control/mind break, with monsterfucking included. Splanchnophilia/organ fondling. Reader is fem but written mostly GN. No descriptors beyond the basics. No Y/N.

READ ON AO3 HERE

 There was a chapel on-site. You had never visited. Always had seemed ironic; your eyes slid over the cross that jutted up without registering it pretty much every day on your way into work. After some time, it faded into just another spire among the jagged little Romanesque skyline that the asylum provided, regardless of any moral weight it may have borne upon your soul. Unlike some of your colleagues, you were under no pretense that what you were doing was, in any way, helpful or for the good of anyone.

…Well. It was certainly for the good of Murkoff’s shareholders.

But you weren’t in the business of fixing, curing, or treating people. Or lying about doing so. You tipped your head in recognition to the guard at the gate after he handed your ID card back to you. Mumbled a thanks. Gravel crushed beneath the tires of your dinky little car as you rolled forward; the asylum eclipsed the breadth of your windshield, the dark form of it sucking away the light. It was grandiose, sure. Maybe once it had even been beautiful. Ivy crawled up the sides, long green fingers digging into the brick hungrily, and your eyes tracked it briefly as you wheeled the car into the courtyard and then off to the employee parking lot tucked in the back.

Murkoff didn’t do much to keep up the front of charity here. Scaffolding was still bolted to some external areas — wooden ribs, ugly and exposed — from occasional repairs ever since they’d bought the place a year ago. Visitors weren’t allowed in Mount Massive, though it wasn’t like the patients had anyone looking for them; you’d long since memorized most of your coworkers’ names and faces, seeing as you were locked in the same square footage as them for a minimum of forty hours a week. Cool wind — the air never seemed to still up here, always restless and shifting — sighed against your face as you exited your car, backpack slung over your shoulder. The last dregs of the sunset, all fading ochre splashed with blushes of pink, warmed the sky and your skin.

The nature of your job made these evening calls an unfortunate reality. You’d been hired  under enough NDAs to drown in and enough secrecy to choke out a KGB agent six months after Murkoff acquired the defunct asylum. No cellphones (the jammer mounted surreptitiously in the lobby killed signal in a mile’s radius), no personal electronic devices, no unmonitored correspondence of any kind. It had felt suffocating at first, sure, but you were adaptable. After all, you never did anything that warranted Murkoff’s attention, even with the sensitive nature of your job. Just showed up, did your work, went home. Unluckily, though, you had been more permissive than you should have been during your onboarding, and had let your supervisors slip a little clause into your contract that dictated that even your free time wasn’t truly yours. As an on-call engineering technician for Murkoff Advanced Research Systems, you were required to respond to any request for your assistance regardless of time. Or place. Or predicament.

Thankfully it hadn’t interrupted anything major so far. There was one time you had to kick someone out of your house on a Friday evening after bringing them back from the bar — awkward, but you’d just claimed a surprise appearance of your period — and drive the thirty minutes to work in a state of questionable sobriety. Slight embarrassment warmed your face at the memory as you entered Mount Massive, crossing under stately arches while digging a stick of gum out of your bag.

C’est la vie. You showed your badge to the crisply-dressed guard sitting alone at the sweeping front desk. No receptionists past five. The whole asylum seemed to quiet down a bit outside of daylight hours, disregarding the intermittent wails of the criminally insane that rang out from the patient wards. Those never stopped. Soft clicks of shoe soles echoed off the walls of the otherwise-empty lobby as you walked toward the elevator; your gaze wandered as it always did, taking in the disconcerting quiet. Murkoff’s legions of desk jockeys had been relieved of duty for the day, all those analysts and correspondents and people who knew how to click around a spreadsheet faster than most. Their computers had been darkened, mostly. Some were still on. Some were even still occupied. None of the few remaining analysts looked up as you walked by, tunneled into their work as they were. Anything to please the higher-ups, I guess, you thought with a tinge of derision, like you weren’t doing the same thing yourself.

Electronic doors slid open for you as you approached, sensors masked by the renovated glass and re-stained wood that comprised the walls. That was the whole motif of the place, wasn’t it? New things, fancy things, wires and circuits shoved into fifties-era wood paneling that buckled under the weight of progress. An orderly coming down the stairs brushed by you, his face carefully neutral and scrubs stained with some fluid or another. No other sign of life. Fluorescents hummed in equally spaced intervals down the long hallways that stretched away from you on both sides. Broken up allotments of white, smearing together with distance like blurred lane dividers. Floor one was all admin stuff. Security, patient records, meeting rooms. You were never up here long enough to properly remember the layout.

You hit the button for the elevator and drummed your fingers on the strap of your bag as you waited. No point in digging out your phone to check emails or texts, anyway. To entertain yourself, you watched the little wrought-iron arrow as it rotated over its axis, ticking down from the third floor to your level. 

Ding. Light fanned across your shoes as the doors slid open. Tubs emblazoned SHARPS stared back at you, alongside bloodied towels and other medical-adjacent supplies. The nurse stationed behind the cart flinched back upon sight of you, clearly not expecting another person. After a brief moment of considering each other — two different worlds — you stepped aside and let her out; she gave you a wan smile and only glanced at your somewhat-casual attire once before wheeling the cart out and down the hallway. Her shock wasn’t too surprising. There wasn’t much of a dress code for the technicians. Anything lab-appropriate was fine; there were coats downstairs in the prep rooms that you were at least supposed to don before doing any real work. Only half of you took that guideline seriously at any given point regardless.

You wondered if she knew what your job was. You wondered if anyone here on the upper levels did. The only thing printed on your ID, hanging off a loose lanyard slung around your neck, was your name and your clearance level. That was all they needed to know, really, but the thought still nagged at the fringe of your conscience. The stratification of Mount Massive was absolute, as far as you could tell. Nobody on the upper floors ever went lower than the basement, and if you were a lab worker called up to admin, you sure as shit weren’t going to be a lab worker for much longer. But maybe you were more alike than different. After all, those analysts were here just the same as you. As above, so below, or something like that.

All in all, that nurse probably did more important work than you, you reasoned as you stepped into the elevator and hit the button labeled B3. Lowest level, lower than low. Nobody with clearance beneath yours was supposed to venture past B1, where they housed the electrical for the whole joint and access to the sewers. Cold crept into the elevator at the same pace it descended; your skull filled with gentle grinding and creaking as sixty-year-old metal dragged downwards into the earth. Twenty seconds. You counted in your head. Right on the dot.

The elevator door cinched in on itself as it opened to a familiar concrete hallway and set of double doors. Ductwork, shiny and segmented like metallic intestine, ran above your head, caged by ribs of multicolored wire. Mint from your gum washed over your tongue, scrubbing your taste buds free of the counter-cold coffee you’d slammed earlier; it cleared your sinuses quite well as you inhaled the cool, recycled air of the lab. Regardless of what you wore, down here was always just a few degrees too cold. The Engine’s operating temperatures were too high to keep the surrounding air at anything close to comfortable.

Shiny granite gleamed at you when you opened the first set of doors, brilliant white replacing the dull concrete as the surrounding material. Glimmers chased after one another in time with your pace, little lines of sparkles along the bulbous protrusions of excavated rock, themselves tracing the veins of quartz within. That well-recognized trinity knot stared down at you from above the next set of doors, growing only larger and more distorted from perspective as you approached. Choosing to ignore any and all Damoclean sword references, you nudged your way into the reception area of Mount Massive’s underground laboratory, home of Project Walrider.

Large screens glowed down at you with Murkoff’s logo alongside the project’s symbol. One guard was stationed at the desk, looking supremely bored, much like his upstairs counterpart. The thought came back to you again as you approached, tongue unconsciously tucking your gum behind your teeth to speak correctly. As above, so below.

“Hey, I got called in for—”

“ID, please.” The interruption was swift but not unkind. So much for night shift rapport.

You tugged the card off your neck with your free hand and presented it for inspection for the third time. All routine. You’d gone through these motions countless times coming in for a shift in the morning. His eyes passed over it once before he held the card to a desk-mounted scanner. A soft beep, then it was back in your hands, and he waved you on.

At least he didn’t try to sugarcoat it. That was one of the nicer things about working down here. No pretenses, no facade to keep up. Just you and your coworkers and everyone’s respective research (and the Engine). It was difficult to suppress the shiver that crawled up your spine every time you interacted with one of the first-floor receptionists when they were on duty, their smiles and greetings as fake as the plastic plants that studded the lobby. Yes, at least you were real. As real as the nurses wheeling blood-spattered carts and as real as the orderlies with faraway looks in their eyes and as real as the polished granite beneath your shoes.

You swung a right and headed for the airlock. The guard unlocked it for you; green LED lighting caught on your clothes and bag as you stepped in. Pneumatic whooshing and sliding from behind you signaled the closing of the door, followed in short order by the hiss of the airlock pressurizing. A few seconds passed. Following routine, you swallowed; your ears popped. Accompanied by a confirmatory beep, the door ahead flipped from red to green before sliding open automatically.

Once more unto the breach. You resituated the backpack on your shoulder, jostled its weight around a bit to feel more official. Compared to upstairs, the lab was downright lively. Damn science and its habit of not sleeping, you thought with semi-amusement as you rounded the sloping curve of Block A. Researchers in lab coats brushed by you at a brisk clip, most of them holding clipboards or samples or something that made them appear busy. A few caught your face as they passed and waved, or offered a brief “How are you?” “Good, you?” “Good, thanks.” and then they were gone. Rinse and repeat, the same every time. Every twenty feet or so, a boldly stenciled A reminded of where you were, and you followed muscle memory to take you to the core of the laboratory.

White granite walls, white lab coats, white fluorescents. You nearly had to squint to adjust, pupils contracting down to zero after the dim, warm lighting of the topside lobby. You passed the examination rooms that comprised the majority of the sector with mild curiosity. The first was empty, save for a researcher leaned over a keyboard, frantically typing away at something. Monitors paneling the walls displayed what looked like MRI scans of a brain studded with tumors; even from outside the room, you could see the size of them, fleshy nodules nestled within folds of gray matter. 

The next room had a patient in it, sedated and strapped to the central operating table. Three people leaned over the body. Half-obscured by shifting arms, you saw stark red against the sterile whites and silvers; a clean line had been cut down the center, the layers of skin peeled away to reveal the internals. Yellow folds — subcutaneous fat — draped out from the sides. Spilled scrambled eggs from a pan tipped over. Can’t make an omelette without breaking a few. Blood pooled on the table and dripped in long threads to the floor, trickling toward the drain, even though one of the researchers was working dutifully with a cauterizer. A fourth hung back, writing dutifully on a clipboard while monitoring one of the many screens.

One of them looked up briefly as you passed; there was a flash of recognition in the only visible part of the face. Their eyes crinkled behind thick protective goggles and they brought up a hand to wave, painted with blood. Red against blue latex. You jutted your chin up in a responding nod.

Rinse and repeat. The rest of Block A was the same. One room you passed had a conscious patient in it; the thin, gnarled body fought against the restraints that held it down to the table with strength not befitting its frame. Garbled speech hit your ears, muffled by the sliding glass doors. The attending researchers leaned away from the writhing limbs; one kept an eye on an IV bag of fluids that was hooked up to a flailing arm. Slurred howls of “The dream! The dream! Sell me the dream!” followed you as you moved along, before devolving quickly into sobbing that faded out of earshot. 

Researchers ebbed and flowed past you in white-coated waves all the while, occasionally pushing semi-lucid patients in wheelchairs to and from the Engine. Glazed eyes met yours with no light of cognizance in them. Slack mouths drooled onto Murkoff-provided straitjackets. Mostly running on autopilot, you sidestepped outstretched fingers that had slipped free of a wrist cuff.

Onward to Block B. You opened the set of doors at the end of the hallway to a face you recognized. Dr. Jennifer Roland stared back at you from behind a gurney, looking generally haggard. Severe lines bracketed her mouth, accompanied by dark circles beneath her eyes. Light flecks of blood spattered across her scrubs, little dots that looked almost black under the fluorescents.

“Hi, Jen,” you offered with a wave of your fingers; you held the door for her to wheel on through. The corpse she was moving looked fresh, though it was just as emaciated as the rest, with tumors splitting the skin across its forehead and shoulders.

“...Hey.” she croaked.

“Another autopsy?” Rhetorical. Glazed eyes and a slack jaw stared up at you from the gurney. Huh. Deja vu.

A long sigh left her; she looked as though she wanted to pinch the bridge of her nose, then thought better of it. No telling what pathogens might be crawling around on the patients, regardless of their vital signs. “I guess. I don’t know. Feels like they just call me in to cut people open these days.”

“You are a pathologist,” you teased gently.

Her face hardened some. “I’m a pathologist that hasn’t gotten any useful results in the last month. All of them are the same inside. Tumors, sometimes hormonal elevation if I’m lucky.” She shrugged and shook her head, casting her gaze to the floor. “Just— it’s like a meat grinder, you know?”

“Sure.”

“I mean, you work with the…” She paused, swallowing as if she were going to say something untoward.

“...Nanites?”

A short nod. “They’re too complicated. I was going to suggest a mechanical engine for them, something easier to make that doesn’t require this, but…” She gestured loosely at the body beneath her, and trailed off with a purse of her lips. “They don’t actually work, do they?”

“When the host does, yeah.”

“So they don’t.” Her eyes flicked down again to the sewn-up corpse and its splayed limbs.

You upturned a palm, waving it a little to make a so-so gesture. “I mean, they work great when the host can achieve lateral ascension,” you said with sardonic air quotes for emphasis, “or whatever jargon Wernicke is using these days. Once the original body can start producing them without killing itself or, you know, producing a bunch of tumors alongside them, they  respond perfectly to every test.”

“Then why are you here at…” A brief lull so she could glance around for a clock. There were none. “Whatever time it is at night?”

“Oh, yeah, one of the other techs said that the nanites we saved from the last run with Hope weren’t coalescing correctly. I think I just drew the short straw. Gotta go fuck around with them and a field generator and see if it’s the new magnetic locks they’re installing on the doors that’s messing with it. I don’t know, they didn’t tell me much.”

There was a brief lull. Dr. Roland studied your face for a moment with an expression you couldn’t place. She looked as if she were going to say something else, but then thought better of it.

“I… need to take care of this,” she said, words stilted and something strained hiding beneath her tone. “I’ll see you.”

You waved her goodbye and pressed onward, swerving a little to avoid knocking your hip against the limp hand hanging off her gurney. Block B was less busy than A; you saw more people your speed, fellow technicians and engineers. Less viscera. Researchers flitted about as well, but there were markedly less lab coats billowing around people’s legs overall. You passed the employee lockers and a break room — light conversation met your ears, and you ignored the temptation to join — and waved at a few people you recognized.

Black signs pointed you towards your destination. Block B transitioned into C. Even fewer people now. You passed another lone guard at a desk, and he didn’t even scan your ID — just glanced at it cursorily and hit the button for the airlock. It made sense. If you had gotten this far without having proper credentials then there would have had to be a reason regardless.

Hiss. Depressurization. Your ears popped again. Red flipped to green. Onward. Three times you’d done this now. Three loops. You glanced downwards as you walked down another curved corridor and reached a massive door, limned in yellow and black caution striping; the project’s symbol was emblazoned on the floor beneath your feet. Three loops.

Sensors built into the ground ticked over, and the enormous metal doors slid apart, powered by hissing hydraulics. The Morphogenic Engine came into view as you stepped into the control room.

If the asylum had been grandiose, this was revelatory. Regardless of how many times you’d seen the thing, it always gave you pause upon first sight. If nothing else, it was an impressive feat of engineering, and you could appreciate that baseline quality. Hung suspended in the center of its chamber by way of thick support beams, you were struck with the impression of entering an enormous industrial cathedral, constructed for the veneration of some many-limbed spheroidal god. Multitudinous LED eyes blinked rapidly along the surface in no clear pattern. At its base it was wreathed by countless monitors, all displaying different numbers, letters, images. Four spheres sat beneath the screens, each pointed towards a main display of continuously looping inkblot footage. North, south, east, west, you thought with a huff of a laugh. Only one was occupied, its resident the sole survivor of every single Engine test thus far and the singular patient that had been able to submit to the psychological conditioning well enough to produce the Walrider.

Billy Hope was an average guy, all things considered. You’d seen his file enough times to have the major bullet points of his life memorized. Born in 1990, only son to a single mother, spent some time in the military before he was handed to Murkoff. Why, exactly, he was such a suitable host for the nanites was still up in the air, but it wasn’t a question you were equipped to answer. …Nor did you particularly care. You weren’t a doctor of the mind nor the body, and Hope’s various psychological traumas were not your field of expertise. All you knew (and all you really needed to know) was that his body was the only one capable of constructing the nanites that comprised the swarm — the nanites that you were called in to take a look at.

Had he been hooked up all day? The containment chamber glowed and his body floated within, curled backwards in a strenuous arch, supported by buoyant force and the various tubes that provided life support. Each muscle in his body was flexed and strained in one direction or another, cast in stark relief by the ebb and flow of the ever-shifting Rorschachs he was pointed towards. Your eyes followed the long, curved line of his abdomen for a moment, then flicked to one of the smaller screens nearby that tracked his brain waves.

Nominal. Everything was baseline, standard, normal. Someone coming up to your side broke you from your brief reverie; another technician. She followed your gaze with hers for a moment, before looking back at you and greeting you by name with that exhausted kind of familiarity that only arose by working terrible hours with someone.

“Oh, hey.” You turned your head, tearing your gaze away from the Walrider’s host.

“They called you in too, huh?” She was nursing a cup of coffee; the smell was strong in the otherwise sterile control room. Steam curled up between the both of you.

An amused exhale left your nose. “You know me and my undying devotion to this company.”

“Oh yes, that’s why I told Blaire that you should get promoted to head technician.”

That got a stronger laugh from you. “Right, and I told Wernicke that you just made a breakthrough in nanite production and we actually don’t need to stuff people full of tubes to make them anymore.”

A scandalized scoff. “You know that senile old bastard would never give up on his passion project that easy. Honestly, I bet he knows an easier way to make the nanites and just does this,” she gestured at the breadth of the engine beyond the central window, “for fun.”

“Or to get his rocks off.”

“Ew. Don’t make me think about that.” That got a laugh from both of you. “Well, they put me on Billy duty until you’re done. Come get me if you need something.”

“Yes, ma’am,” you said with a tired half-smile of your own, saluting her loosely before traipsing across the control room. Most of the chairs were empty — the Engine was always staffed, but late nights brought the roster down to a skeleton crew. Some other engineers were slouched at their desks, only offering loose waves of their hands or mumbles of greeting when you got close enough on your way past them.

Opening the door to the chamber was like cracking open an unprepared airlock. The loose collar of your sweatshirt was pulled at briefly by the vacuum, and you had to compensate for a moment with longer breaths just to equalize the air pressure. Quiet. Always quieter than you expected. The Engine itself made almost no noise beyond a low, rhythmic hum; as you descended the stairs to move to one of the adjoining clean rooms across the chamber floor, it nestled right up against your eardrums like always. Not quite a rumble, not a buzz. Just a continuous pulsing, right on the cusp of infrasound, heavy enough to press along the insides of your ear canal. Heavy enough to press along the insides of everywhere, actually, considering it was probably hovering around the resonant frequency of your eyes and making everything feel all jittery and blurred.

You walked briskly past the behemoth of a machine and the strung-up body powering the entire thing, and were grateful for the set of double doors that sectioned the adjacent lab rooms off from the main chamber. It didn’t matter how many times you’d made the trip (countless, at this point). That hum, it would always get you. Shaking your head like a dog flicking off water, you pushed your way into the adjoining lab section towards your usual workspace, itself cordoned off behind a set of newly-installed pneumatic mag-locked doors. Thank you, Jeremy Blaire, for getting around to that in a prompt timeframe of six months. 

Honestly, you were surprised it had happened at all. Murkoff was famous for their firm bottom line; getting magnetic locks on the underground’s doors probably had much less to do with the fact you’d asked for it and much more with the fact that everything beneath ground level had sensitive material relating to the overall project. But hey, you weren’t in the habit of looking gift horses in the mouth.

Letting yourself in with a press of your ID to the exterior lock, you glanced around the empty lab. You’d left yesterday without cleaning up much — oops — but luckily nothing seemed disturbed.

The magnetic field generator was still plugged in on the far end of the lab bench, squat and sleek and cubical. Thick insulated cables snaked from the back of it upwards, reaching a small pair of coils mounted on the stage of the electron microscope that the lab supervisor had wheeled in here seemingly forever ago. Beside the coils sat the sample chamber, encased in a thick acrylic hood for… somebody’s protection. Not yours, but maybe Murkoff’s. The nanites themselves had been harvested from the last successful sessions of Hope’s therapy; the swarm still proved itself vulnerable to high frequency sound (go figure, considering the incessant hum that throbbed in the main chamber) and you alongside a few other coworkers had been tasked with pulsing a very angry swarm with twenty thousand hertz until it dispersed like scattering sand.

Eleven. You had collected eleven. The sound had left your eardrums sore despite being unable to hear it, and it had only disoriented the swarm for precious few seconds before it dragged itself back into agitated corpuscularity.

You dropped your backpack — the company-provided laptop in there could wait until after you’d collected data — and halfheartedly glanced around for a lab coat. Nothing. Unsurprising. Everyone in Block A hoarded PPE anyway. You doubted you’d need it tonight regardless, considering this would probably just be another long stint with the microscope and another CSV of semi-helpful data sent to someone else to parse. God, you wanted to sleep. That coffee from earlier was struggling under the weight of encroaching exhaustion, especially considering you’d already dragged yourself through an eight hour shift earlier today. But it was in your contract, wasn’t it? If Murkoff decided that their precious swarm’s sensitivity to magnets was top priority, then it was top priority.

Wasn’t like you had anything better to do.

A long sigh left you as you approached the cold storage. Just work. That’s all it was. All the bodies — no matter whether they were cut open, still moving, splayed flat and still, or bound in a special kind of clinical torture submerged in life support fluid — were just work. Necessary work. All of what you did, deep beneath the topsoil, every single day, was just work. 

At least you didn’t have Jen’s job.

You retrieved the nanite sample and held it up to the light for a cursory glance, mostly out of habit than anything else. The cartridge looked empty to you (and anyone else); a shallow little pocket of clear fluid sat trapped between two impossibly-thin membranes, and you felt a twinge of apprehension at handling it. So delicate. You could envision the way the nanites might be floating in the cartridge, little fragments of fifty years of science, each small enough to slip between each individual cell of your body.

Your thoughts were dull and noisy as you fit the cartridge into the microscope’s stage.

High precision surgery— torsos cut open, prying fingers inserted— a knife the width of a strand of DNA— Jen’s face— tumors, bulbous and protruding over the brow— sell me the dream, sell me the dream—

The microscope’s monitor washed to life in complete monochrome, moving through stages of focus, then magnification; you hummed a tune just to fill the quiet as you searched the cartridge in slow iterations, flicking the controls of the microscope with one hand and following along on the attached computer with the other. Mostly empty fluid. Your neck was already starting to ache. You passed over a scratch in the containment membrane, and a few pieces of offending dust, and then there they were.

Each was suspended separately in the fluid, and each sharpened into view slowly. They didn’t resemble much of anything familiar — the closest you could articulate was a fleck of broken metal, a little shard of shrapnel with irregular edges wreathing a darker center. No obvious orientation or shape, nothing like more conventional nanomachines your supervisor had had you read up on before starting work here. Grown, rather than made. Each little structure had been assembled from a game of psychosomatic telephone; the therapy primed Billy’s brain, his battered mind, all its wires crossed, told his cells the wrong information, and those cells latched onto every injection of precursor molecules he got with their new, Murkoff-brand instructions for replication. And the result of the entire process glowed at you from the monitor you were sitting in front of.

Sell me the dream.

There were still eleven nanites in the fluid, which was good. Earlier attempts to shave off small amounts of the swarm had resulted in the separated nanites simply fragmenting into a thousand useless pieces. Nobody had an answer for that one, either, but once you’d started using sound to temporarily disperse it, it had mostly stopped. Mostly.

Someone had emailed you the specifications for the new magnetic locks already, and you opened them on another monitor for reference. Screen upon screen unfolded in front of you, and you blinked at the glow in the otherwise dimmed lab. You entered the usual operating strength of the magnets into the field generator and paused for a moment, thumb resting on the switch. Under the electron beam, the nanites drifted aimlessly, carried only by the motion of their containing fluid.

Click. On went the field, and all of them turned at once.

Little synchronized swimmers, you thought with a wan smile.

The motion itself was unimpressive and, more importantly, expected; each nanobot rotated until its longest edge pointed in roughly the same direction, à la compass needles settling north. You thought briefly back to the spheres situated at the base of the Engine. A few overshot and corrected themselves, then stilled.

Nominal, baseline, normal, the list went on. The nanites themselves contained enough magnetic material to respond to the field, and the static field gave them a direction to point in. None of them skittered across your screen, which meant that steady fields weren’t influencing it. Good. Good.

Your hand slid across the field generator and flicked up the current, doing your best to mimic the uneven field that was being produced near the edges of the new door locks.

That did something. As you watched, the nanites dragged, slowly, across the provided window, coalescing toward where the field was strongest; within a few seconds they had knotted a loose, dark collection of shapes, slowly writhing over itself. Huh. If anything, the uneven field was helping the greater assembly process instead of inhibiting it, so what was your supervisor bitching about?

…Maybe time-varying was the answer. You flicked off the field for a moment — the nanites pulled apart slowly, lingering as if they didn’t want to leave each other — and squinted at the monitor with the locks’ specifications. It took a couple of read-overs, but you caught it; the locks weren’t maintaining a steady current, but instead readjusting the strengths of their fields to compensate for heat and movement in the door. An annoyed huff left your nose.

“I guess,” you muttered to yourself, your own voice sounding odd after the long quiet. Briefly, you wished for the companionship of your coworker back in the control room. Something about the empty lab space was giving you the creeps, which was odd in and of itself. How many times had you been in this exact scenario? Late nights alone in the lab weren’t uncommon, but this was the first time in a long time you’d felt truly disquieted by it.

You turned your attention to the field generator, flipping it from static to oscillatory. Normally, the fluctuations in the locks’ fields would have been too slight to matter, but nothing was ever too slight when it came to working on the scale of the nanites. When you had successfully reconfigured the generator, you turned it back on with a degree of lukewarm curiosity.

The nanites twitched on-screen. The next timed pulse came through, and the little formation they had lingered in suddenly loosened. For a brief moment, they turned towards the field, only for its direction to change before they finished moving. Naturally, they corrected themselves, but it shifted again before they could catch up. By the fifth pulse of the field, the group had fallen into disorder, each nanite spinning awkwardly as it attempted to follow a signal that wouldn’t stay still long enough for self-alignment. Yeah, that seemed better. More reasonable. If the fluctuating fields from the magnetic door locks were forcing the Walrider to disassociate, that would explain why it was able to coalesce just fine everywhere else; there wasn’t some overarching extraneous contaminant in the main chamber that had to be dealt with.

Lowering the pulse rate of the generator settled the jostling nanites down, and raising it sent them scattering across the visible area. Sure, this was a start. It was good to know at least that the locks weren’t damaging the nanites, just interrupting whatever communication mechanism they used with each other to move in sync. Blaire would want to know for shareholder purposes. Wernicke would want to know for scientific purposes. You sighed.

Tap-tap-tap. You slogged through collecting results, moving through different field strengths, different oscillation rates, different distances from the lock. Half your time was spent waiting for the plate inside the microscope’s vacuum chamber to move, its little motors whirring quietly to keep up with your avarice for data. More or less the same thing every time. The nanites liked static fields, regardless of whether or not they were uneven; time-varying them sent them into a veritable tizzy. The faster you set the pulse rate, the more violent the struggle was for the nanites to correct their orientation and move as a unit.

You moved upwards in frequency, and then they started to vibrate, and then you paused. This time they weren’t spinning, but shaking — their outlines blurred into low resolution, each nanite trembling in place so hard that the microscope couldn’t resolve their shape. A warning popped up in the bottom corner of the software regarding the sharp spike in the sample’s temperature. You turned off the field generator, and nothing changed.

Cool dread began to solidify in the pit of your stomach. All you could see were dollar signs mounting in front of your eyes — broken field generator (not bad), broken electron microscope (bad), broken Walrider, somehow (extremely bad). You prided yourself on keeping your goddamn head down, and this was so far beyond the antithesis of that. What the hell was going on? The nanites shuddered between the membranes trapping them; the temperature inside the microscope chamber ticked up three degrees at once. One of the nanobots flashed white on the monitor and you flinched, a pinhole afterimage burned into your retina momentarily.

Off. Preferably now. You ripped the power cord out of the back of the field generator, and its display went black. For a second — too slow to think it was hallucinated — the overhead lights flickered, and something prickled down the back of your neck. You glanced wildly around the empty lab before your eyes returned back to the main monitor.

You should tell your coworker. Or anyone sitting in the control room, really, but shouldn’t you do damage control first? It’s not like you’d leave a fire in the lab—

Your sample escalated from trembling to moving. One nanite flung itself at the edge of the containing chamber, rebounded off it, and then struck it again with seemingly renewed determination. The rest all followed, the little fragments slamming silently into the edge of the visible field over and over.

Not random anymore. Not spinning, not jostling, not even attempting to coalesce beyond all of them having the same goal. They were all attempting to go the same direction.

…They were all attempting to go toward the Engine.

You stepped back from the monitor, eyes flicking wide for a moment, before turning on your heel. Something heavy pressed against your eardrums, and it took you a second to realize that it was the hum of the Engine itself, loud enough now to reach you through two sets of doors and just as unnerving. You weren’t dumb. Something was happening — something was happening with the Walrider specifically — but what were you supposed to do?

Pressure swelled behind your eyes as the machine’s throb intensified; you swore it was vibrating your teeth, too, and you swayed on your feet from the odd sensation. A few loose instruments crept across the lab bench, inspired by the frequency currently liquefying your organs. You turned to glance back at the monitor with the microscope display still pulled up; the nanites there burned ever brighter, white specks writhing angrily in their medium.

You needed to contact your coworker. They needed to shut off the inkblot footage, needed to take Hope out of REM sleep and put him back into whatever coma they drugged him into when he wasn’t churning out nanites, needed to shut everything—

Something moved through the main chamber beyond the narrow window in the external door. Nausea swam in your stomach and pressed right up against the bottom of your flexing diaphragm. That hum, that hum, that hum. Warm spit filled your mouth in preparation to vomit, and you shook your head violently, swinging it up just in time to catch what looked like smoke. It wasn’t smoke. You knew it wasn’t smoke. You stumbled to lean against the door to the lab — the new locks whirred as your weight pressed against it, adjusting for the new force being applied, feeling as though you were watching a car crash.

The corridor’s doors outside your lab hid most of it. You caught a thin slice of view, too scared to venture further outside, and watched as black bloomed across the visible concrete floor. Distinctly non-Newtonian — it stretched upwards, then collapsed, then gathered again, a fluid struggling under its own weight. No, not smoke, though the edges of it wisped away perpetually; some of it pulled together into the suggestion of shoulders before peeling away into long streams.

Static hissed in your ear and you flinched away from the lab window — the intercom mounted on the wall of the lab erupted into white noise. Undoubtedly, your coworkers were trying to contact you. You moved to it, your head still spinning, and jammed your thumb against the buttons. Nothing. What sounded like words fuzzed in and out before it abruptly cut; when you turned back around, the Walrider was gone from view. Just like that.

There was no manual that even began to describe what to do in a situation like this. Every previous interaction you’d had with the Walrider had been tightly controlled — the attending researchers would administer the precursor molecules, and the ever-dreaming Billy would begin the production process. Decontamination chambers isolated the thing — for whatever reason, it couldn’t move through them — and you had studied it from a safe distance every time. Protocol. There had always been protocol to follow. Now it was loose in the main chamber, and more importantly, it was loose with you.

An alarm started up from down the hall, no doubt relaying back that the Walrider was currently outside of normal testing parameters and also currently ripping its way through the Engine’s chamber. You heard things smash and clatter — metal slammed against concrete, and even the shattering of glass — and backed up several quick steps from the door. Briefly, you glanced sideways at the microscope software, watching as the nanites still flung themselves against their containing wall.

When you looked back at the lab door, the Walrider was already there.

You couldn’t help it. You jumped, the flinch reaction so instant that you doubted your brain even processed what it was looking at before you startled backwards; your hip knocked into the table behind you and jostled the equipment atop it.

It was looking at you. That much you were sure of. Despite its lack of facial features, it hovered right outside the lab door and you could feel its alien attention even through the inch-thick glass. The darkness that comprised it reflected yourself right back, your face damp with sweat and eyes wide with shock.

Fine particulate streams ran off of it, ribbons of nanites trailing from its form. Some of them seeped upwards, pressing along the seams of the door as if testing for weaknesses. Cortisol flushed down every limb, introducing a curiously cold sensation in your extremities. Sweat beaded on the back of your neck, collecting between where the hair on your nape stood straight up.

The locks. It still struggled with the locks. Exploratory nanites recoiled when they neared the mechanism holding the lab door shut, and you exhaled shakily—

Only to gasp involuntarily when the door began to scream. Like mold staining the wall, black leached into the gap between the door and the frame. It should have been airtight. All the new doors were, with their fancy magnetic locks and updated sensors. You supposed airtight didn’t matter when the nanites were on the same scale as the air molecules themselves.

Metal shrieked under strain as the Walrider forced open the door; it bent awkwardly under the force of its grip and all that ersatz smoke spilled in immediately. Contaminant. The emergency decontamination cycle that the clean room was equipped with didn’t even have time to engage. It was everywhere immediately, nanites swarming the lock mechanisms at the top and bottom of the frame and flocking to the vent control for the room. Sparks showered across your field of view, and the magnetic whine of the lock pitched up into a distressed squeal before cutting off.

Pure, dumb, animal fear had rooted itself in your chest cavity. It doubled (maybe tripled) your heart rate, and you were struggling to breathe around the insistent need to scream that was welling up beneath your lungs. You couldn’t do anything. Not against this. The Walrider was too quick, too smart, too utterly hostile for you to even attempt to skirt around it. You were sure that the swarm remembered the way you and your coworkers had taken it apart, piece by piece, dissecting its constituents for study and keeping it summarily chained through a series of decontamination chambers and Billy Hope’s cocktail of intravenous drugs.

You wondered briefly if it felt what its host did.

You hoped not.

Freed from the fluctuating field of the lock — the mechanism itself was badly warped and still sparking atop the door frame — the swarm coalesced, coming together an inch or so off the ground. An arm first, curved and thick, padded with sinew and ending in sharp-tipped fingers. The long slope of its shoulders followed, then a head that bowed beneath the upper frame for no physical reason as it entered. Its torso came together, an inkblot collapsing on itself, and the contours of lean muscle that snaked up and down its frame glinted under the dimmed fluorescents.

It faced you, but it wasn’t looking at you. Whatever static that made every nerve ending in your body stand on end under its scrutiny had disappeared — it was looking over your shoulder, and it took you a moment to realize. The sample. It was looking at the sample. Although you hesitated to take your eyes off it, something in the back of your head reassured you with no small amount of cynicism that it was too fast for you to react even if you were looking at it. Defeated by your own impeccable logic again, you glanced behind yourself to look at the monitor, still displaying the live feed from the microscope.

The nanites in the fluid had long since gone out of focus, but you could see them bashing themselves against the wall of their containment, clearly eager to return to the swarm at large that stood (floated) no less than ten feet away.

Arrhythmia had long since seized your heart, and you marveled at the fact that you hadn’t passed out yet. Adrenaline must have had something to do with it, considering everything seemed sharpened into high definition and very far away all at once. One sweaty palm slowly slid behind you, feeling blindly for the magnetic field generator. The Walrider hung across the room from you, clearly seeking the nanites locked away in the vacuum chamber of the microscope but unable to reach them conventionally. Precious seconds ticked by. You reached back a few more inches and found the power cable, fumbling with it briefly before scraping it along the correct slot and snapping it in.

Ripping out the cable had killed the programmed cycle you’d set up earlier, but there would probably still be charge. Enough for one, maybe two pulses if you cranked up the power. The lock was busted, but you could mimic its field fluctuations well enough and hopefully, hopefully disperse the swarm for long enough to slip out of the lab and book it to the nearest decontamination chamber.

Hopefully.

You slid your fingers along the edge of the generator and found the power button.

Click.

Like a sand castle in front of a power fan, the Walrider’s entire body convulsed and then exploded, a cloud of black fragments diffusing instantly across the room. Holy shit, it worked, you thought with a brief stab of pride in your own genius, made jittery by the thrum of panic coursing through you. 

You got in two steps toward the exit before you were thrown.

Not even hit. Picked up and thrown. There was the sensation of being grabbed everywhere — around your torso, your arms, even hooked under the backs of your knees — and then your shoes left the ground and you were weightless for a brief, terrifying second. Slam. You felt the impact first, then heard it, then felt the pain in slow succession. The force of it had knocked the air clean out of your lungs, and hoarse gasps tore out of your mouth as your diaphragm spasmed on reflex. One of your hands smacked loosely at your chest, fingers clawing weakly at the material of your sweatshirt as if that would inspire your body to work properly again.

It took you a moment to process, but when you looked up, the Walrider was not looming over you; it was caught between the fluctuating field of the blown-out generator and the mangled locks, struggling just like the nanites had done earlier but simply on a larger scale. Every pulse sent the nanites scattering, fraying its outline into smudged oblivion, and its head swung towards you in between beats before dispersing again. Too many competing fields. Regardless of how powerful the Walrider was, it was still a slave to the components of its constituents. Thank you, Maxwell.

When your breathing was no longer substituted by strained groans, you dragged yourself up into a standing position. Your back ached. One arm folded over your ribs out of an instinctive desire to safeguard your vitals there, though you knew it didn’t matter. What good was any physical protection against something capable of tearing you apart on the cellular level? You leaned heavily on the lab bench, squinting at the field generator; it had defaulted to a stuttering pulse. Ah. So it was keeping the Walrider unstable (and from tearing you apart), but it was effectively torturing every nanite that comprised it.

Whatever pride you had in your earlier genius, you rescinded. This was about to top the list of dumb decisions you’d made in your life, right above taking a job that had you drunk driving to work at 11:30 P.M.

Your sweat-damp thumb slid across the interface of the generator and turned off the pulse setting. The field steadied.

A bang from across the lab made you jolt. The locks on the door blew. So much for those expensive prototypes. Thin white smoke curled up from the mechanisms on the frame, and the warped door slammed shut on itself, jostling on its track. Every monitor behind you flickered, and the software for the microscope closed on its own. 

Ears still ringing, you leaned your hip hard against the lab bench, watching the roiling swarm slowly, slowly condense and making peace with… well, not God. Definitely not God. Maybe you should have stopped by the chapel once or twice, if this was how you were going to go. Beyond the slammed-shut door and the corridor, you could still hear the faint wail of the alarm in the main chamber, and the field generator’s thin electric whine. The swarm itself made no noise, which was maybe the most disconcerting part of it all.

Nanites pulled towards each other in plumes; long arms hung by its side, sharp fingers flexing false tendons. Thick legs drew together beneath its corded torso, and without the interference of any field fluctuations, it held its shape as it stared at you; its head rolled forward, the smooth plane of the “face” pointed directly at you. The static returned, an odd buzz that danced along the surface of your skin.

Did it understand you’d shown it mercy by switching off the time-variance? You had definitely stopped it from tearing itself apart — you could hear Jeremy Blaire sighing in financial relief, that pompous asshole — but you had also successfully locked yourself in a room with it.

It approached, and you scrambled backwards, as if leaning back against the lab bench would save you. Closer, closer still. You had seen it before through reinforced glass, caged in by decontamination spray — had watched fragments of it beneath your hulking microscope, reduced to measurements and response curves and lines on a monitor. Nothing prepared you for being an arm’s length away from it. Endless shifting darkness rolled beneath the surface of its body. Every movement sent particles spiraling off of it that returned a moment later.

Tall. So tall. It was only an inch or so off the ground, and you were still looking it square in the chest. Protruding veins webbed across its pectorals, and you refused to move your eyes upward. It had no face. God had no face. You still felt buzzing all across your skin, still heard that damnable hum. Oxygen fluttered wildly in your lungs as if it had forgotten where to go, and you struggled for breath as if the thing looming over you had not just blocked out the light but the air as well.

“They’re in the microscope,” you blurted, tongue thick in your mouth. “The nanites.” Your nanites. You. Did it qualify as a you?

The Walrider stilled. Its chin inclined a few degrees, and then its head tilted fractionally as if it were considering your words. Like an ebbing wave, it retreated. There were several seconds of silence as you fought down every animal impulse that screamed at you to get away from this thing. Nestled deep in the uncanny valley as it was, your amygdala couldn’t parse if it was interacting with a person, a predator, or a deity, and instead decided it was all three. Vicious trembling started up in your hands and danced down your thighs. When you finally peeled yourself off of the lab bench, the Walrider didn’t move. Just watched. Snaps of static tingled over the back of your neck as you turned away from it to face the monitor; the dampness on your palms nearly chased the mouse out of your grip as you re-opened the microscope’s software.

A soft hiss filled your ears as it depressurized. Dewy smears of your sweat glossed the edges of the microscope as you retrieved the cartridge. Edging a fingernail into a seam, you popped it open and held a shaking arm out to the swarm.

Nothing happened. It drew closer, turning its blank face downward as if considering the eleven nanites you’d handed over as an approximation of an olive branch. It was all you had. You wouldn’t be able to use the field generator anymore, and you were certain that whatever skeleton crew Murkoff had on night shift tonight didn’t want to come near this section of the lab until they had decontamination zones set up for proper containment.

It reached a hand out, the motion tracked by black streaks, and its fingers dissolved near the cartridge. You presumed it was collecting its lost constituents, and in your head, you were taking notes like the dutiful technician you were. During prior tests, the swarm had never shown such vested interest in retrieving any harvested nanites. After all, the entire reason Billy was still around, twisted up into that unfortunate pretzel-esque pose of perpetual torment, was to make more nanites.

A new psychological development, then. It would be the shrinks’ job to determine whether this was bleedover from the Walrider or Hope. It was your job to not bleed all over Murkoff’s most prized asset.

It grabbed your wrist, and you gasped. The cartridge clattered to the floor noisily. Every hair on your arm stood at attention, and your throat burned just slightly from how harsh the intake of air had been. The swarm leaned down at you, getting in your face, and this time you couldn’t look away. It felt so odd against your skin — like compacted sand, but not quite — and you were certain you’d already breathed in a nanite or two.

Your first impression was incorrect. God had a face. Veins, barely visible, tracked down its smooth face; they followed a peculiar symmetrical pattern and webbed across the planes of its cheekbones and jaw. Like an overlaid Mandelbrot set — even the hollows of its false eyes followed the fractal embossed down the front of it. It got closer, its impassive expression hovering inches away from your face, and you really, truly fought the urge to scream. The longer it held your wrist, the more solid its palm felt, though you could feel the miniscule brushes of particularly large plumes of nanites flaring off of its body.

So quiet. The panicked slam of your heart against your ribs and the blood rushing in your ears felt deafening compared to the swarm’s silent, undulating mass. Only when you held your breath could you barely pick it up — a nearly inaudible, sonorous little hum. Not the oppressive throb of the Engine, but something else, a little more virile and dynamic. When you flexed the fingers on the hand it was holding hostage, the hum pitched up slightly.

It rotated your captive wrist, and your heartbeat spiked for a moment; it must have felt it, considering how it pressed a pointed thumb into the veins gathered at the nexus there. Shaking breaths rushed out of your lungs as it examined the jacked-up thrum of your pulse. The apex of its thumb dug into the clump of blood vessels, massaging with not so much gentleness as it was the same clinical curiosity you’d shown towards it in far, far different circumstances.

What was it doing? You were being studied, that much you understood. If it wanted you dead, it was more than capable of just killing you in any garden variety of ways — your eyes flicked to the warped metal of the door and the mauled remains of the door locks — so was it… scaring you intentionally? The swarm was sentient, or at least supposed to be, according to Wernicke’s notes, as cryptic as they were.

Maybe it was just playing with its proverbial food. Maybe it was just curious. Either way, you let it use the tip of its thumb to slide your veins around under your skin without complaint, even though there was an odd discomfort from the sensation.

It tugged. The strength of its body (?) was well-communicated by all of the muscle that was packed up and down its frame, but it still took you off-guard. An awkward yelp was startled out of you, and you stumbled forward to follow the direction of its pull. Your spine craned backwards to avoid colliding with the swarm, your gaze flicking unbidden up to its face; it tilted its head downward to catch your gaze again, seemingly not comprehending why you were resisting it.

Terror washed down your spine in one all-consuming, icy wave.

The Walrider wasn’t going to kill you. It wanted another host.

“No, no,” you stammered out loud, regardless of whether or not it cared about what you said. In your mind flashed an immediate and endless parade of patients, all of them either catatonic or utterly broken by exposure to the Engine, and all of them decorated with countless tumors and open wounds, some self-inflicted. Every single patient they’d thrown at the Engine with the hopes of finding a host for the nanites had come away irrevocably scarred inside and out. Hell, you’d walked past more failures on your way in.

And that was with the preliminary therapy. You know, the process that was supposed to make hosting the Walrider easier. You couldn’t even begin to imagine what attempting to host the swarm straight off the rip would feel like, much less what it would do to you.

It wouldn’t work, anyway. Wernicke had always stipulated that only those who had “witnessed enough horror” were capable of activating the engine. You didn’t witness horror. You weren’t suffering through the therapy. All you did was show up, come into the lab, fix whatever your supervisor told you to fix, and leave. You blinked rapidly, still resisting the steady pull of the Walrider’s grip. Was that all you did? Each time your eyes shut, afterimages followed; the patient you saw cut open, the one they were wheeling out all bundled up in a straitjacket, the corpse that had been splayed across Jen’s gurney.

How much horror had you witnessed, really?

That living hum pitched up in what you interpreted as irritation as you shook your head, struggling to form words in the face of something so otherworldly. Before you could react, a wave of nanites swarmed up your arm and forced it down hard enough to bounce your wrist off your hip. Fear lanced through you and you instinctively attempted to wrench your arm free — not that it mattered. The nanites pulsed all the way down your arm, a black sleeve over top of your sweatshirt, and held it firm to your side. Your other arm was immediately restrained in a similar fashion, and your lips fell open to breathe, to talk—

It pulled fresh hands out of its torso, ribbons of particulates immediately coalescing into a new set of limbs while indeterminate hip-level tendrils kept your arms pinned.

Cold sweat on your neck. Rapid heartbeat right against your sternum. Nausea roiled your stomach. So much noise you were making, what with all the shuddery breathing and the panicked throb of your organs and the rush of your blood. The Walrider crowded into your personal space, its nearly-featureless face getting far too close for comfort. One half-tangible hand grasped your jaw — your heart stuttered in straight, honest shock — and as it tilted its head, you caught the glint of teeth formed in the hollows of its cheeks, hidden behind a webbing of nanite-flesh.

The swarm pushed a thumb into your mouth. Confusion pitched up the groan you made around the press of its digit, though it was accompanied by a spike of underlying fear. Predictably, it tasted like nothing. Just felt like an intrusion. Maybe a faint metallic hint if you focused, but it was hard to focus on taste when it was pushing its thumb so far in that your lips butted up against the base of the digit. It stroked along the inside of your molars, nanites dispersing into what felt like insects — multitudes, tiny and buzzing — flitting along the flesh of your inner cheek. You attempted to tug your head back, feeling perplexed and somewhat violated, but you really were no match for the strength of it.

Its other thumb pressed in, and your jaw hinged open further. Both digits diffused along your tongue; little waves of nanites ebbed and flowed over your tongue like a viscous, sloshing liquid. You blinked rapidly, brows furrowing as its fingers tightened along your jaw and neck and the rest of its body kept your limbs firmly in place. What the fuck. What the fuck?

That impassive face stared down at you like it actually had eyes to track you with; you returned its “gaze” with your lids stretched wide. Every muscle in your body twitched, tight and tense and itching to get away, but the swarm was seemingly intent on keeping you very still while it fed nanites into your mouth.

And then further than your mouth. Buzzing that had once danced across the surface of your skin was now also centralized inside your mouth, and then— oh, shit. Tingling began to wash down your esophagus, and you instantly gagged at the realization that the Walrider was pushing itself literally down your throat, threading long particulate ribbons down into your guts. You jerked in its grip, tears welling in your eyes as you attempted to pull back. The resonant hum that accompanied the presence of the swarm pitched up again, clearly piqued by your struggle, and you felt long fingers snake across the curve of your cheek.

No, no, I can’t, I can’t do this, it’ll kill me—

Throngs of nanites, some stirred by your retching and some supplied by the fingers that now brushed your nose, poured over your sinuses as your orifices became flumes for the swarm. Hot tears finally broke along your lash line and spilled down your cheeks — the nanites dispersed briefly to allow the droplets to pass before returning back to their position comprising the Walrider’s hands. Every time you breathed, you sucked more of them in. Every time you swallowed, they were pulled down your throat. Drool beaded at the corner of your mouth around the insistent, endless push of its thumbs.

Somewhere along the line it must have broken the blood-brain barrier, because your mind snapped into awareness with a wave of white noise that surpassed the dull haze of fear. Several voices spoke at once inside your head, all of them angry and loud, and you reeled in the grip of the Walrider as the nanites nestled themselves right at home inside your cells’ reproduction centers.

You blinked and you were no longer in the lab, no longer surrounded by white and black but staring at white and black Rorschachs, and there was no longer a stream of nanites pushing into your mouth but tubing. What? Blinking again brought you back to the present. Memories flashed into your buzzing skull, imprints of past events that you’d never witnessed accompanied by emotions you’d never felt.

Drugs, so many drugs. Wheeled downstairs, down to hell, so many hallways. Pulling me out of the chair. Feeding tubes, breathing tubes, reverse oral prolapse of the intestines. Plastic guts being shoved back in, the ribbing on my tongue. “Just relax, Billy.” Hands on me. Tubes in me. “Look at the screen, Billy.”

Billy. You were seeing Billy Hope’s memories, because the Walrider was in your fucking head. Your back ached with phantom pains from being folded into a permanent Opisthotonic death pose, your skin tingled with the sensation of surgical scars for life support equipment you’d never needed. Hot flashes of emotion hit you like a fist — anger, exhaustion, and a burgeoning confusion that flipped to curiosity. Billy was still alive. You had walked by him earlier. He was still alive, and you were in his head as much as he was in yours, linked by the nanites that bridged you both. Had he seen the memory of you brushing past the sphere where he was perpetually strung up as a part of the Engine? Scratch that, not just memory but memories. Plural. God, how many times had you just waltzed on by him?

Oh, Jesus, fuck. You actually went to puke then, and even felt the bile rush up your esophagus, until—

A little wall of nanites swelled at the back of your throat, right beneath the protective flap of your trachea, and you felt the vomit hit the blockage and then seep back down, aided in its progression by the swarm. It was in you. He was in you. Your body was no longer yours, and you couldn’t even perform reflexive actions anymore. Tears seeped down your cheeks, both from the act of gagging and from the overwhelming dread that was hitting you like a truck. The Walrider did not care to block those. How ironic.

The swarm had its own consciousness too, crammed into your skull next to yours and the imprint of Billy’s. Attempting to sense what it was thinking was like throwing a flashlight into a borehole. Everything there was just a writhing black abyss, with occasional fragments you were able to parse. Some hatred, some hostility. A sense of ego you had not expected from something so collectivist in nature. It seemed to understand how revered it was among your colleagues — then again, if it hated it here so much, why did it not just kill you?

One word dredged up from the recesses of your brain as an answer, and it certainly was not your mind that came up with it. Suitable.

Great. Past the panic and fear and general overstimulation that came with nanites tucking themselves between the folds of your gray matter, you also had to deal with it negging you. But then you really processed it past the wall of defensive cynicism, and it made fresh dread wrack you. Suitable. You were a suitable host, and Billy was a suitable host, too.

Suitable hosts got tucked into spheres and plastic fed into their organs and lived submerged in fluid for the rest of their lives, perfectly preserved specimens used for nanite production and nanite production only. For a brief second, the thought of your supervisors finding this out terrified you more than the Walrider leaching into your body, and it caught that instantly.

“Get out of my head,” you groaned, finally able to yank your skull back. Its hands still cradled your jaw, fingers large enough to span the width of your cheeks and temples as well. Thick black strings of nanites connected your lips to the broken-off bases of its thumbs; as you watched, they rebuilt themselves anew. “Please.”

Like begging would do anything. No sympathy reflected back from the depths of your mind. Only a distant echo of satisfaction answered you. The digits holding your head tightened in a brief squeeze.

With your limbs still restrained, it released your jaw in favor of exploring elsewhere. One broad hand snaked down over your neck, smearing brief trails of nanites across your sweat-damp skin. Now that it was inside you, the swarm’s sonorous hum was loud enough to feel, vibrating your teeth from the inside out. Its palm settled over the center of your collarbones, long pointed fingers dragging slightly over the fabric of your sweatshirt; its hand was big enough that the tips of its digits nearly brushed your shoulder. Nanites leaked down beneath your collar and spread over your skin, and the hum warbled for a moment in response to the heat. Touching you. It was touching you. Its other hand slid around to the back of your neck and ran fingers through the collected sweat there, slicking down the hair on your nape, and you shuddered violently.

A plume of nanites flared from its throat and slipped between your parted lips. You didn’t even cough. Something buzzed to life inside your skull, and tingling washed down your fingers, a curious lag introducing itself to all bodily sensation.

Your hands moved of their own accord.

What? What the hell? This whole fucking thing had been consecutive utterances of what the hell, but this was new, which didn’t mean anything good. You attempted to dislodge the encroaching fog in your brain, but you couldn’t even shake your head. Only your hands moved at a normal pace, and you realized (even your thoughts were on a time delay) belatedly that the Walrider was puppeting you. The nanites swimming in your veins and tucked in your muscle fibers were snapping action potentials across cell membranes and piloting you very, very effectively.

You were taking your clothes off. Actually, it was taking your clothes off. Hot humiliation flooded your face — that response the swarm didn’t care to stop — but you couldn’t do anything. Forced into riding along, you watched as your hands grasped the edges of your sweatshirt and pulled it up and over your head; the motion caught the hem of your underlying tank top and that rolled up as well, exposing the soft flesh of your stomach to the cool, recycled air of the lab. Oh, God, the cameras. This was all being recorded, wasn’t it?

The sweatshirt was discarded, flung across the lab bench behind you to drape over the monitor for the microscope. All of your skin was so, so hot. The combination of fear and stress had left all of your capillaries expanded and ready to supply oxygenated blood to a body that wasn’t going to use it. You weren’t fleeing anywhere, that was for damn sure.

Brief flashes struck like lightning across your crowded brain — memories of being perched atop a woman in the backseat of a dark car, accompanied by hushed giggles and fumbling with belt buckles — and nausea slapped you across the face. You couldn’t see into Hope’s head beyond the mental equivalent of words shouted across a chasm, and God, all you did was pray that it was the same on his end. Or was the Walrider bringing these up on purpose? That thought made you even sicker. You really, really didn’t want to broach the subject, because entertaining it made it real (especially considering you were pretty sure the swarm could read your fucking mind), and if it was real, you were fucked. Literally.

It loomed over you, its mimicry of a spine curled to crowd you against the lab bench. The swarm spread its hands over newly bared, blood-hot flesh, the nanites buzzing against you in a way that was starting to be, horrifically, more pleasurable than frightening. Is that really true? Considering that it was able to puppet your muscles, why wouldn’t it be able to do the same thing with your brain? Was it mercy that drove it to flood your brain with engineered dopamine, or was it just sick of you resisting?

Internal warmth dripped down your spine regardless. Long, sharp fingers traced over the skin of your collarbones, then down your naked arms. Unable to move (and unsure that you really wanted to), you stared down at how the nanites occasionally parted, then reformed. Clumps of them lingered briefly on your skin before returning to the swarm at large like shoreline waves pulling back to sea. Goosebumps followed wherever it touched you.

Ironically, it was the gentlest you’d been touched in a long while. A momentary memory of the closest thing you’d gotten to sex since starting your stint at Murkoff resurfaced — kicking that person from the bar out with a lame excuse about your period — and you blushed all over again. How much of this could be blamed on the interference of nanites in your hypothalamus? Were you really just that deprived? That sick?

Shiny black muscle filled your vision, its edges fading in and out of existence, as you dragged your eyes down its body. Obsidian sinew comprised pectorals, deep-cut abs, a sharp V-line that you considered for longer than everything else. So unmistakably male. Maybe a byproduct of Billy being the one to manifest it, maybe just the form the swarm wanted to take. Either way, there was a sudden, terrible urge to touch it.

Now that the Walrider shared your body, it seemed perfectly in tune with you; the hum accompanying it strengthened briefly as you (or maybe it…?) reached a shaking hand out. Your fingers brushed the hard plane of its constructed abdominals, and every nanite you touched buzzed intensely for a second before returning to baseline. It mimicked your motion on your own body; one hand lingered near your throat while the other slid downward, over the swell of your chest and the rucked-up fabric of your tank top, and came to rest on the fat of your stomach.

The organ fluttered, and you were certain that it did not go unnoticed.

Nanites parted for your touch as your fingertips dragged downwards, reaching the bottom slope of its abdomen, right beneath its navel. That was definitely a leftover from Billy. As you watched, your fingers sank into its lower stomach, nanites pulsing around them in what seemed to be excitement.

Mirrored on your own body, of course. Fingers tracked upward from resting on your throat to pressing at your spit-wet lips again, and you accepted them much more willingly this time. Long streams of particulates flooded down your throat, gushed down into your stomach in waves, and you found that you were starting to suck on the two digits pressed firmly into your mouth as if you were drinking from them. That pang of satisfaction in the new abyss inside your skull came back louder.

If you closed your eyes and flattened your tongue along the bottom of its fingers, you could almost pretend it was someone else; the illusion was fragile, though, and shattered as soon as you cracked a lid to catch its unseen gaze again. It must have liked this, considering how it leaned in close enough for you to see the way the webbing across its cheeks shifted and broke with each movement. It would not be remiss to say that you were liking it, too.

Knuckles bumped gently against your swollen lips as it started to pump, its other hand pressing firmly on your stomach. Soft, wet noises filled your ears — fresh humiliation seared through you at the sound of your lips sucking around its fingers — but the steady motion and continual touch drained the blood immediately downward to the seat of your pelvis. Each pull of your lips around its digits made the nanites inside your mouth flare; light buzzing rasped along the surface of your tongue, and you curled the slick muscle as if to catch them.

It retracted its hand — thick threads of spit connected it briefly back to your mouth — and you panted, feeling beyond dizzy and more like you were free-falling. The hand on your stomach pushed.

You jolted and looked down, and its fingers were sinking into your skin; for a moment, you thought you were hallucinating, but the extraordinary wash of stimulation from your gut outward dispelled that immediately. Tingling — localized bursts of lightning — fanned across your abdomen, and you watched as it sank into your stomach up to the wrist, the nanites spreading into a thin enough layer to slip between the cells of your epidermis.

“Oh my God,” you breathed, ecstatic terror weakening your voice. The swarm hummed.

A curious sensation started up in your stomach — not on the skin, but inside. It took you several moments to process what was happening, considering that that tingling was spreading not just out but down, prickling along nerve endings in a stop-and-go march right towards your cunt. It was feeling around in your guts just as you were feeling around in its. All of those nanites it had fed to you over the course of the encounter throbbed inside you — spread across your stomach, your liver, your small intestine. Everywhere. Coating every wall of every organ, every fiber of every muscle, every strand of connective tissue.

Gentle stroking in the deepest part of you made your toes curl in your shoes and your knees buckle. Nanobots inside you linked together and slid fingers into all your viscera and lifted, and the sudden feeling of your stomach dropping made you actually moan. Nothing in your life had ever come close to this. Nobody had ever touched you like this, and nobody ever would again. Your fingers curled inside the Walrider’s abdomen in a poor mimicry of its ministrations, but there was nothing inside it. Just nanites that surged around your fingers like sand.

That didn’t matter. The swarm ran exploratory touches along the walls of your organs, and your head lolled briefly, watching as it remained buried in your stomach up the wrist. Each rub along segmented muscle and slippery visceral fat roughened your breathing until you were a mess. Every time you felt as though you clawed your way to the proverbial surface, the Walrider collected the reins smoothly back from you; nanites embedded in your brain triggered another flood of dopamine and you sank all over again, leaning heavily against the lab bench and depending on the swarm’s strength to keep you upright.

“Please,” you choked out again, with decidedly more desperation than last time. “God, please just touch— touch me.”

Jesus Christ. As soon as the words left your mouth, your jaw snapped shut, driven by springloaded humiliation. You shifted back and forth restlessly on your feet, every square inch of your body buzzing with engineered need and the nanites responsible for it.

The Walrider pulled back, though its hand did not come with its forearm; the stub looked as if it had been lopped off at the wrist. Whatever nanites had been playing with your internals stayed there; there was a brief, horrifying moment where your skin bulged, throbbing with undulating pulses of the swarm that smoothed themselves out and made themselves at home amid your guts. Suitable.

Whether or not it was the nanites that drove you to pull off your shirt didn’t really matter. You were so hot; sweat was tracking down your back and collecting on the nape of your neck, chilled instantly by the cool air of the lab. The tank top was discarded haphazardly, and it took you very little time to decide that your bra had to go as well; your damp fingers slipped over the clasps multiple times until you finally managed to unhook it.

When your chest was bared in totality to the swarm, it tilted its head again (one of the few expressive things it seemed to do) and immediately smoothed a newly-reformed hand over your breasts. Helpless to the touch — every part of you seemed to sing at just the right pitch in response — you melted, spine arching slightly as pointed fingers pressed and pulled at your chest. Ribbons of nanites elongated and thickened, forming gauzy black ropes that encircled your torso. They ran continuously, as if someone were dragging cords over, under, across your breasts; you shuddered and swore aloud, watching as the soft flesh pillowed around the stream of nanites.

The living ropes squeezed once, twice, three times; if nothing else, the Walrider seemed especially taken with how warm and yielding your body was. You whined and kicked your feet apart on the sealed concrete floor of the lab, every square inch between your legs screaming for attention. It had to know. It was in your head, wasn’t it?

Why it simply didn’t shred your clothes at the molecular level, you didn’t know. But when you finally gathered enough sense to pull your sweat-slick hands off the bench behind you and bring them to the fly of your jeans, encouraging hordes of nanites looped around your wrists. Not restraining, simply holding. When you paused out of trepidation — unsure if it was going to lock your arms to your sides again — the black tendrils that cuffed you tugged gently downwards. Yes, you could do that for it. Maybe it was puppeting you again, maybe it wasn’t. Distinction between the two was quickly failing.

Several awkward seconds of fumbling with your button left you flustered — the Walrider hung above you silently, the weight of its hidden gaze heavy on your skin. The distinct sensation of embarrassing yourself in front of something better — superior in all ways — crawled over your face and down your back. You wrenched your jeans down your hips and took your underwear with them, trying to avoid looking at the humiliating wet spot that had formed in the seat of them.

Every sensation felt magnified. Whatever parcel of the swarm that had taken up residence in your head was learning you as much as you were learning it, and part of that included tallying up all the stimulation and emotion and reflecting it back to you via nanites dancing along your hindbrain. It knew you. It knew you, it knew Billy, it knew everything. You nearly stumbled kicking off your shoes and your pants, caught only by the tightening of the black bands around your chest that held your weight effortlessly. 

You stole back a snatch of lucidity — just enough to feel a pang of hot humiliation at being naked at work, in the lab, stripped from head to toe to get violated on camera by Murkoff’s latest and greatest advancement in biotechnology. But the black fingers rooting themselves into your gray matter smoothed it over without incident, flooding your poor neurotransmitter receptors with more, more, more of every happy hormone they could come up with, and you felt a rope of drool slip past your lips. Whether or not it was on video didn’t matter; you felt so heavy, blood collecting in your slick, swollen cunt and everything between your legs throbbing desperately in time with your frantic heart.

 It lifted you further; tendrils sprouted from its back and hips and encircled your ankles first, then slid upwards. Such an odd feeling. Not quite sand, not quite fluid, not quite living. But it reached into your head regardless and sorted through neural pathways until it found your memories of sex, and you swore you felt the throngs of nanites trailing up your legs bear down as if to better mimic a human’s touch. Up, up, up. Over your knees, brushing briefly along the sensitive skin on the back of the joint. Outside and inside your thighs — the muscles twitched — until they coalesced into a single large hand that cupped the entirety of your needy cunt.

“Oh,” you half-sighed, half-groaned, and your hips immediately jerked in the hold of the swarm. Ironically enough, the ebb and flow of nanites across your body nearly made up for your lack of clothes; black waves surged and pulled across your skin, leaving goosebumps in their wake across your stomach and breasts and ass.

Curious fingers sifted through the arousal-wet curls that hid your cunt, trailing through them and running a pointed tip down your slick folds. You whined, the noise stupid and desperate, and clenched around nothing. Where had it gotten the idea of teasing from? Or was this more exploration of a body it had clearly never interacted with before?

The apex of its finger caught briefly on the dip of your entrance, then slid upwards to— Your hips twitched. It pressed the pad of its finger to your swollen clit and pleasure sparked across your commandeered nerve endings instantly. Whatever you felt was catalogued and reflected back to you by the swarm with… interest, maybe. Its mind was still just as unreachable and unfathomable as it had been prior.

That part didn’t matter, though. Not when it felt this good to have it touch you. It started to rub, mimicking the exact pattern you used when getting yourself off — another handy trick it pulled straight from the recesses of your memory — and you melted in its grip. The motions were familiar, but the rhythm was the exact same as when it had been massaging your organs earlier, and the connection made desperate, sick need throb right in your center. Tendrils resituated themselves — looped around the junction of your hip and thigh to keep your legs spread and circled around your ribs to keep your body up in the air.

It tilted its finger slightly and pushed under the hood of your clit, seeking direct contact, and you groaned helplessly. Pleasure, so raw and hot that it started to burn like bad friction, surged up from your cunt; it doubled back through you in an echo from the nanites swimming in your bloodstream. Dumb with ecstasy, your thoughts felt as though they were being dragged through sand — black sand, glittering black sand, each its own component of the whole — and you struggled to chain them together coherently.

Blearily, you wondered if it had pulled this solely from your own mind, or if it was some combination of your brain, Billy’s memories, and its own ideas. It pressed down, flattening the swollen bead of your clit against your pubic bone and rubbed harder circles into your sex; your hips jolted in response, squirming in its inescapable grip.

Something was inside you. Your eyes shot open from where they’d been screwed shut, and you lifted your heavy head to stare at the Walrider. Fear, instinctual in speed and nature, wracked you for a second at the sight of the ghostly thing hovering between your legs, no matter how human-shaped it was. It still had you lifted — your head was level with its own now — and still kept your thighs open, and… its fingers were still sliding over your clit. So why did it feel like something was pushing into you?

Further now. Your jaw dropped open, cunt clenching around— nothing, there was nothing there, what was it doing to you?

Buzzing started up beneath your skin, weaving in between the ladder of your ribs and trailing downward. A steady pulsing thrum accompanied its trajectory — like the sensation of blood rushing to your head, but not quite — and it took you what felt like eternity to process it. The nanites in you were plucking the nerve endings inside your cunt. Along the walls. Your muscles spasmed, seeking an intrusion that wasn’t there, and you gasped and choked on your spit.

This was never meant to happen. The human body was never meant to experience this.

It was still massaging your clit — two fingers now — and you jerked and moaned in its hold, your breathing fluttering in your chest. For a brief, terrible moment, it pulled back — you surged up with a gasp of “No, please—!” — and then it rotated its hand, pressed the pad of its thumb to your clit, and pressed two fingers against your dripping entrance.

Lightning shot up your spine at the sensation of being touched inside and out. It was everything you’d ever wanted — because the swarm was building itself from your brain. It was taking in your electrochemical signals, reading your brain waves, responding to what made your body feel good because it was in your body too. Cohabitating. Suitable. It was an answer, not just a copy reflecting you but something bigger in scale and scope, some kind of deus ex machina dragged from the bowels of the earth through a flume of human suffering to give you a greater purpose than your stupid, menial lab job. You could understand why some of the program’s subjects worshipped it now.

Its fingers were big. Inch upon inch of coalesced nanites fed into your aching cunt; your muscles responded immediately, clamping down around its knuckles as you groaned. Almost immediately, it curled them inside you, dragging the pointed tips along the ceiling of your cunt with enough pressure to border on painful. The little bite sweetened the incessant, syrupy pleasure that much more; you bucked your hips up against the firm grasp of its tendrils in a desperate attempt for more.

More it gave. The black bands encircling your body squeezed encouragingly, and it flexed its fingers inside you — you swore you felt them disassociate into a shapeless mass of nanites for a second — until the pads of them were rubbing against the sides of your cunt. The motion was much more intentional than it had been before, and you got the distinct impression that it was looking for something, but what?

You felt that strange under-the-skin buzzing again, and that made it hit you. Like pressing two magnets together through a sheet of paper, it was making contact with the nanites it had already fed you through your walls, and the swarm was evidently very happy to see itself. The humming localized, surging through your core like some twisted version of a very expensive vibrator, and you gasped your way through the sensation like a dying animal.

The Walrider curled over you, its body going shapeless for a moment before reforming over your flushed, sweat-damp face as if it were trying to look you in the eye. You stared back into the void of its featureless face from under heavy lids, too far gone to care about how you looked to it or the cameras or, really, anyone else. Your thighs twitched errantly as it crooked thick fingers inside of you — each drag of its fingertips along your walls lit up a trail of nanites that buzzed in response — and even with your submission, it seemed to want to go deeper. Its knuckles pressed insistently against your swollen folds, and its thumb rubbed your clit hard, pressing firm circles into the slick bead of it just to watch your body jerk and seize.

“God, I’m— ghh— fuck!” They were barely words. Mostly spit-flecked syllables that wrenched themselves free of your throat and left a shiny trail down your chin. You came with a broken noise, walls spasming and sucking around its fingers, and the swarm hummed in reply. Harsh jerks of your muscles shook your thighs and hips as they locked up — hot pleasure unfurled from your cunt and it took you a long time to pant your way through it.

It did not pull its fingers out. There was a brief sensation of expansion inside your still-fluttering walls that made your heart stutter with instinctual fear before its digits dispersed inside you, nanites slipping between the squamous cells there to give itself a better foothold in your body. You were so beyond the point of caring. If it could make you feel like this forever, nothing else mattered.

The Walrider retracted its hand — there was a momentary glimpse of it reforming its lost fingers under the fluorescent lighting — before the tendrils securing your thighs and torso squeezed again. An altitude change made a short wave of dizziness hit you, but it was simply pulling your body down further. Further and closer. It spread your thighs until the tendons ached from the stretch, and you felt the press of its pubic mound against the wiry curls between your legs. Your stomach fluttered in either anticipation or fear — the distinction was irrelevant — and your mouth hung slack as its hands smoothed over your splayed, strung up body.

Strung up. Billy’s twisted frame flashed behind your eyelids, and the swarm did not wipe that thought from your brain. 

Your cunt dripped down to your ass, sweat and your own arousal commingling over your skin; some of it smeared along the more solid planes of the Walrider’s lower abdomen. Even though dregs of your previous orgasm still wracked you, you still itched. Still felt empty. The swarm knew. Its hands squeezed at your breasts, at your stomach — they lingered there, as if remembering what your internals felt like — before grasping your hips in a way too human to be anything but an imprint of its other host.

The jut of its pubic mound pressed against your slick, still-throbbing cunt and rubbed, its hips slowly rocking against yours. Very, very good mimicry. The hard plane passed over your sensitive clit and you jolted before it slid down; it stayed in contact with you the entire time. Obscene noises eked out from between your bodies, filling the cluttered lab space alongside your shaky breathing and that ever-present hum. Had it gotten louder?

Pressure against your entrance intensified your exhales. You rolled your head up to cast a trepidant glance down your body, past the pulsing ropes of nanites squeezing at your available flesh; as you watched, a long dark length extruded from the well of its pelvis and slipped into you with surprising finesse. A sharp gasp inflated your lungs; the Walrider rolled its hips forward in a smooth push and fed more of its growing cock into you. Stars flickered behind your eyelids.

It seemed to take your impression of its fingers being big as an affront, and this was the comeuppance. Whatever was inside of you was a far cry from any previous experience with sex toys or people; it shifted, moved, pulsed against the greedy suck of your walls like a writhing appendage. Pulling and dragging sensations — as if it had sprouted curling fingers — lit up inside of you and you groaned through gritted teeth. So utterly foreign, and so utterly familiar. The rock of its hips, the way it squeezed your body, the way its muscular form slotted between your spread thighs — all of these were familiar. Brief flashes of sensation that were not your own hit you — a warm mouth welcoming your cock home, a soft body beneath yours, high moans on broken exhales. Billy’s? The swarm’s?

Deeper, deeper, deeper it went. The press of its cock warped in accordance with the shape of your cunt, slipping beneath your cervix into your fornix, and you gaped helplessly. Something warbled in your ear, maybe the Walrider’s expression of pleasure, but you were too far gone to focus on anything except for the shape of its cock pushing its way between your lungs. Momentary dripping sounds — all that slick hitting the concrete so, so far beneath — joined the wheezing from your parted lips and the vulgar noises pulled from your stretched cunt.

Literally between your lungs. The Walrider started to really rock its hips, drawing off the spikes of pleasure it was inducing in your exhausted, aloft body and Billy’s provided memories in order to fuck your brain right out of your skull. That was okay. More room for the swarm then.

Shifting inside your gut made your body twitch. With a flash of horror that was instantly eclipsed by hot want, you realized it was back among your organs again; with each shove forward of its hips into your slack body, it massaged the external walls of your stomach and the underside of your diaphragm with nauseating tenderness. Pleasure wracked you near-painfully, white-hot and incessant. The skin of your stomach bulged and warped in erratic peaks as nanites wove into your tissues and stroked your guts; all of this, though, and not once did it feel like your skin would tear. No, never. The nanites never wanted to leave your body. 

Maybe your hips tried to meet each thrust, maybe they didn’t; the tendrils secured there moved them for you.

Just relax.

You didn’t have to do any work anyway. Wet smacks of skin-on-swarm met your ears alongside the weak sounds of your own moans; you were like a broken goddamn faucet, unable to stop the senseless noises that poured past your spit-wet lips. Its cock hummed and throbbed ceaselessly in your cunt, twitching in response to every time you clenched reflexively around it. Unable to do much other than take it — considering how your limbs were either spread apart or restrained together — you bucked your hips in an erratic tempo to try and match the swarm’s, the motion your own for once.

Its cock curled inside of you on one withdrawal, dragging along your overstimulated walls and lighting up a trail of nanites swarming along the muscle there. Right back in it went with a perverse squelch, slipping the tapered head past all the connective tissue and mucosal linings and beyond all reason. You would pray to this. You would submit to this. It wasn’t ridiculous to entertain the concept.

The Walrider’s hips never stopped — it didn’t get tired, it didn’t feel exhaustion nor overstimulation — and it curled its sinewy frame over you. Your spine followed the motion, puppeted by internal and external nanites, until you were bent backwards. Your eyes flickered open just in time to catch that endless void of a face descending upon yours, and then it caught your slack, drooling mouth in a kiss that was not a kiss at all.

Just relax.

It started as a tongue, and progressed into something else. Maybe fingers, maybe a cock, maybe a plastic tube. It was long and ribbed and pressed all the way into the wet clutch of your mouth until it was snaking down your throat. You didn’t even gag. Just swallowed hungrily, body writhing against the compact muscles that were pressed against the soft fat of your stomach and flattened your breasts to your sternum.

Just relax, Billy.

The intrusion in your throat pulsed as it fed you more of itself. Held aloft as you were, back bent with both mouth and cunt filled, you were reminded briefly of the way that Hope was positioned in his sphere, a perfect wet specimen to be preserved and used forever. Nanites swarmed and buzzed along your cunt, leaking from your entrance and instantly surging upwards to focus on your clit, and you were gone.

They buzzed and massaged and sucked, and combined with the rest of the sweet torture you’d undergone, the second orgasm of the night hit you like a fist to the face. Ecstasy surged through your exhausted body and sent your cunt spasming around the cock inside of it; the Walrider’s hum hit a peak and it pressed its pelvis flush to yours and rocked firmly. Something throbbed inside your cunt, and it felt like fluid — plumes that spilled against your oversensitive walls in a familiar fashion.

Not fluid. More nanites. Brain struggling under the weight of the encounter and the new thing living inside of it, it managed to feed you a few more seconds of sensory input — a few more moments of raw, hot pleasure from the writhing cock stuffed inside of you, and from the fingers pulling and massaging your intestines, and from the ersatz fingers relentlessly rubbing your swollen clit — before you blacked out.

Consciousness did not come back to you for a long time, and when it did, it was in short, fragmented flashes. Words, mostly, and some blinks of harsh light.

“—decontamination process—”

And then there was pain — blinding, even with your eyes shut — as something was sprayed around you. Cool concrete pressed against your hot, bare body; it was the only thing you had to ground you as your brain struggled through thick tar. Something was tearing at you, accompanying the hiss of gas and a harsh blue glow — it felt like duct tape was being torn off your bare skin.

“—shut down the Engine, call Blaire—”

You were being lifted again, but not by the effortless swoop of nanite-made ropes. Hands, human and warm with effort, were scooped under your naked limbs, and then you were deposited somewhere, and then you were moving. Being wheeled. Errant drool dripped onto your chest.

“Call Wernicke too. Tell him we found another host.”

[ratmonkeys]

me fr

[girlvasectomy]

jake gyllenhaal over the years

[slushieplanet]

You know what's funny but also drives me crazy about the Outlast fandom?

They swap Miles and Waylon's personalities.

and I think it's all because if Gluskin. Because the world wanted Waylon to be an innocent twink 🥺 for the man obsessed with wanting a bride👰‍♂️. When he's. You know. The whistleblower???? The guy who was sick of keeping silent over all the fucked up stuff he was a part of?

and then people portray Miles as some sorta stoic badass because the walrider chose him??? You do realize the walrider hosts can only be deeply traumatized individuals, right?? I mean, yeah, Waylon's also traumatized but his bitterness is what keeps him going.

During the game the protags leave notes over what they experience. Miles's notes can be summed up to "holy fucking shit"😫😭 and Waylon's notes can be summed up to "fuck this fucking place"😠😡. He even writes a note to his wife that if he dies he hopes she'll burn the place down.

Waylon is the one with the angry and jaded pov. Miles is not a fighter. His only options are run, hide, or die. Waylon is the one who drags himself out with a leg injury and survives.

[midnight-x-muse]

Jake Gyllenhaal por Hyea W. Kang para GQ Korea, Marzo 2024