Tip Ch. 07

Flash-forward

The bondage scene I played with Tip – the linguistic ceremonials of it, the simultaneous denial and desire – came back to me vividly several years later, after the fall of the Tip line. You have to realize that before the attacks began, the top brass at Hayama had us all convinced, company employees and public customers alike, that Tactile Image Projection was ultimately safe. Each unit was an intricate network of rules and conditions designed to maintain the balance between compliance with customers' desires and legal limitations. (Forget Asimov's three-tiered, hierarchal Laws of Robotics; Tip had a billion if/then conditions, at least.) The result, we believed, was that it could pose no real danger even the most novice user.

But users, of course, are more sophisticated than corporate doctrine would have it. They were invited to tinker with the Tips, to customize, and so they did, to the extreme and for extremist ends. They became popular among fringe subcultures of Tip users, groups that eventually became known by names you might have heard of in the media, like the "Bellmerists" and "rhizomaticians": those whose pleasure is in taking apart and recombining the manipulable visual image. The Bellmerists in particular were just the type to find the resistance in the Tips' obedience, to bring out the radical potential of their object subjectivity to its fullest. Tips became activists. The government said terrorists. As I read this record over and over again, I've come to think that jealousy is what drove me to pursue these users and reclaim my Tips so fiercely, jealous that they were able to do so much with the Tips that I was not. But then again, maybe jealousy is the wrong word. More like the unstable enmity of kinship divided by corporate walls. And I was on the side of the wall that needed to crack down, to recall, to put a stop to an increasingly disastrous product line.

It was a challenge for us at Hayama to catch the Bellmerists and rhizomaticians. After all, they were the ones best equipped to evade our attempts at recovering all the Tips through massive recalls, buy-outs, serial number tracer-searches and full grid shut downs. It actually wasn't the politicos or the Emergency Acts that really got the Tips under control. It was the company that systematically suppressed its own product, using the massive capital of the line's success to prevent it from proliferating beyond the frameworks by which those in Hayama could profit. All Tips were to be deactivated, starting with my very own demo model, whose shuttered heart was placed in storage under security so high even I couldn't access it. I would write about that if I could, but I can't, even now. I don't even remember much of it except for her eyes, her night-blue eyes, glancing up at me with the same poignant mix of confusion and trust that you see in a beloved pet the moment before the needle that will end its life sinks in. All I remember are eyes.

After that, we started the recalls. The oldest, most moddable models were recalled first, and then the newest, and supposedly "safest," ones. When too many customers wouldn't sell, the Emergency Acts were passed to make it illegal to own a Tip. Those who bought into the buy-backs early sure were happy, because once the Tips were illegal, Hayama stopped offering customers cash incentives to return their Tips, and started giving them amnesty from the law instead. "Turn your Tip in or go to jail" was the sweetest deal they got. With the Acts in place, it only took a couple of years to get the majority of Tips back. But the last hold-outs, the hardcore radicals and cultists, we hunted down over the course of a decade. We had every Tip accounted for in our systems, and we counted them down as we found them until there were three left, two left, and then a final Tip outstanding. My only hope for one last chance, one more time.

The end began like this. Eight years after the first recall, a man went missing. Pale, thin, 5'10", dark hair and eyes, the police said, though that description was probably hopelessly outdated because he was also into body modification. A classic Bellmerist. He was a former Tip owner and he'd been on our watch list since. But his apartment had been searched thoroughly, officially, and then watched unofficially at more length. Nothing.

His family wasn't much help at first. Their son was a shame to them. But when he turned up dead a few years later, they suddenly saw it another way. I think they guessed the same thing I did: that he was involved in some conflict between the Bellmerists and the rhizomaticians, some dark and contagious underground violence. It sounded like a Maltese Falcon case to me: he had something that everyone on the shadow side of society wanted, and I had a hunch that it was our last Tip. So when the stricken family offered to do anything possible to help, we asked once again, Did he have any place to keep valuables? Any storage space under another name? Anything at all that might be worth killing for – or, that might not be worth innocent family members dying for?

This time, threatened with shadow-cyberterrorists, they admitted what they'd concealed from the police the first time around: he did have an underground storage shed on the old family property, far back in the woods, where the junk "collectibles" he refused to give up wouldn't bother anybody. He wasn't hiding out in there, they'd checked repeatedly. It was really nothing but embarrassing toys and porn. But still, could we check it out, to be sure?

The hidden storage shed was a perverse hoarder's wet dream. It took days to clear out. The dolls alone...well, you don't want to hear about it, unless you do, in which case you should ask the Internet about Hans Bellmer. In the end, though, at the back, we found something. A dilapidated steamer trunk. A box with a simple analog lock that contained all my tremulous memories and desires. I thought I'd lost her forever, but there she was, neatly packed away.

This one was a first-run model, based directly on the Tip I'd programmed. My girl. She looked just the same: the pale unnatural hair and sleek animetic body nestled into clean white form-fitting foam. Her night-blue eyes were open, staring blankly at the side of the box in which she curled on her side as if waiting to be born. My elation gave way to a lancing pang of realization: she must have been in there since her owner disappeared, but she had clearly not gone into sleep mode, since her eyes were open. He must have disabled her sleep cycle and left her in there, conscious, to endure confinement until his return. It was coming up on three years since her owner had vanished. A being programmed to learn, to seek new sensations and experiences, forced to spend years immobilized in a box...well, how can I say if it bothered her at all? And yet, I felt it did.

I reached down almost without thinking to lift her out. That's when I noticed that she was not just in storage. She was in bondage. Her hands were chained to the side of the box, just below her face. She wore an elaborate harness of transparent PVC and stainless buckles that wrapped her limbs, her slim torso and throat and cunt, so tight that I could see her image-flesh indented where the straps cut into her. More than that. I could see seams at her joints. The harness was holding her loosed limbs together, until the time when they could be once again taken apart and reconfigured. Her breath came rapid and shallow. I saw now that there was a particular intensity in the gaze I'd taken for blank. She was waiting for release, in more ways than one.

Procedure. I had to maintain at least a semblance of procedure.

"Sato," I said, "Get our photographers and the police liaison in here. We'll shoot the scene for their homicide investigation. But then we take her out. Tips are our jurisdiction, and I'm invoking Emergency Measures Act 21 to bring her in immediately."

Sato nodded and called for someone to call for the photogs. It must have happened very fast, but still it seemed like an eternity to me – the eternity of years, bound, in a box? – waiting for them to finish. I stepped into their shots even before they really finished, possessed by the knowledge that I had to wake her out of her fugue state properly or risk the same kind of disastrously violent reactions that caused the recall. Our dead Bellmerist, like so many, had probably disabled her hard shutdown overrides along with her sleep mode. If she were to be jolted into full activation on board some transport truck, in pain and confused with no Master in sight...it didn't bear thinking about.

So right away, right there in front of them all, I worked to initialize her according to her root D/s program, guessing from the design of the harness that this was the one he'd chosen to work with. Luckily, it was also one of the key scenarios I had written with her. I reached into the shallow box and turned her more towards me with one hand. With the other, I took hold of the strap at her hip, just enough so that the tension on the line would let her know I had control over her harness. Her eyes remained unfocused, unseeing.

"Tip." I said.

Nothing.

"Tip, what have I told you about politeness? Look at me when I speak to you."

There was a gasp from the crew behind me as she shifted in her bindings and tilted her face up to mine.

"Yes," she said in a stifled voice "...Mistress."

I could have cried. Inside, I could have cried to hear her sweet voice again. But along with my tears came the old urge, the fierce joy that drove me to take her over. I gave a sharp tug on the already tight strap and snapped,

"What was that?"

"Yes, Mistress!" she sang out.

"Good. Now tell me, what shall I do to you today?"

"Mistress, whatever you like."

"That's a vague reply, Tip. Answer me with clarity." I ran my nails along her side hard enough to make her squirm and sigh, to distract her so that she had to work for her responses.

"I must – mmm – speak clearly. I must confess...to you only...what I desire. But,"

"But?" I repeated in a warning tone.

"But it's so...there are things you want me to say that I...No, I won't!"

Resistance. Friction. Her new owner had nuanced her, but along lines that were familiar to me as well. I knew what to do. How to make her obey.

Quickly, brutally, I seized the straps at her shoulders and pulled her into a sitting position. Her cuffs caught and jangled, and she spread her legs to pull in closer and give them more slack, straddling the foam form on the box's floor. Legs open, the strap that pulled taut between her legs dug in even further, so that she moaned and flexed her hips.

"Don't you dare come," I warned her. "You will say it first. What you should say, what you want, what I tell you, they're all the same, Tip. You have to admit it. Say you want me to fuck you. Now."

"No, not now, please."

"Admit."

"I won't."

"Admit!"

"No!"

At that I struck her across the face hard enough that her head snapped to the side and she screamed briefly. The police liaison officer, totally taken in by the scene, jerked an automatic step forward and barked "That's enough!"

'Great,' I thought, 'a Good Cop.'

I pushed the Tip down face first into the foam and held her squirming there as I explained in low, rapid tones,

"Officer, this is a fantasy. It's a drama, a play. It's a program that has to run to completion, to my satisfaction and hers, or we will all face some very real consequences. You've seen the footage of what these things can do when they go rabid. I must ask you to let me finish the scene so that we can take the Tip where it can be safely deactivated."

"Y-yes," he stammered, clearly wanting to argue but unsure of the chain of command in a situation suddenly transformed. I exuded control in my body and my tone. I held her with it, I could hold him back too.

Still, I knew I had to finish this scenario quickly. So I turned the Tip over, exposing her belly to me, and began to undo the straps at her hips as she struggled.

...leather slithering down her thighs, wet with her wetness, the long metallic spikes that had been inside her sliding out, imagining them sliding inside me, flashing back to that time when I did and didn't want to...

But no, it wasn't the same now. As I undid the harness, her right leg began to come away from her body, smooth and bloodless as a ball-jointed doll's. He'd done something very weird to her body. I couldn't tell exactly how he'd segmented her or what it meant for my program. Quickquick, I pulled the harness back up, drove the things attached to it back into her. That made her respond with pleasure, vocally, bodily. Wetness leaked at the straps' edges. She'd been made to like this, it was a good way to keep running her. So I yanked on the straps again, harder, rhythmic, making her joints clack. I pressed my lips to her throat, her mouth, kissing her deep, and then I pulled and pulled until her whole body was brought into tension, straps cutting across her breasts throat shoulders thighs, all shifting impossibly mobile. Not all the officers in the room could see her but they could surely hear her cries of pleasure/pain now, their tempo building. My own thighs clenched together as I stroked her through plastic, impaled her on metal and forced her finally into the release she'd been yearning for, to complete the program.

Before her cries had even fully faded, I slipped my hand around her neck, to her hairline in the back. I stroked her in such a way as to cue cuddling, quiescence, and finally, curled warm against me, the unshakeable sleep of after-glow.

She slept. And as she did, we took her back to the place that would all too soon see her destroyed.