Escapism can take many interesting and frequently arousing forms

Content Warning: Dissociation from Physical Reality

The joint nests finger-thick on the ashtray, its smoke still warming your lungs, numbing your mind. You eye your dating accounts on the cellphone, no longer matching just scrolling through all the apps, the failed conversations. A celebration of your incompetence at finding a partner, even for one night.

Cannabis starts to take effect, numbing the part of your brain generating what you used to give.

#

Weed had always helped. When life got too much, the smoke carried your thoughts away into blissful detachment. But then you returned from that date—the Date—and weed could not help you. Weed gave you insomnia.

You first thought of it as a date, but they were already pitching it as the Date. A mysticism and uniqueness to it, because the girl was special. Not in any conventional way though. The Date was a service, and the girl a product of the new company, Build a Lover.

By the time the date was done, it was like a religion, and it was impossible for you not to capitalize the word in your head. The girl was divinity, because she had lived inside your mind, growing alongside you. The perfect partner, fine-tuned to your desires. Build a Lover bought your data, made the girl, and even though you knew you could never afford the subscription money, you went out with her, because they offered a free trial. Nice of them to do so, huh? Well, they did use your data after all.

But the trial was over with the Date, so you lost sleep, and the weed plunged you into a loop of intrusive thoughts. Because now you’d never see her again.

#

You tried bargaining with the tech lead, the project manager, but found no leeway. It made sense that such things were expensive. They had people to train the model of your perfect partner, but after the software was ready it had to sustain itself. 

Adaptive AI to process the immensity of information that clouds the real world, which needed stacks of graphic processing units that spanned a room larger than your apartment. Rent and electricity bills beyond your pay grade.

Instead they sold you on something more affordable, and that was when it hit you. They never meant for this corporeal robo-wife to be the product. The Date was the advertisement. They meant to sell you on a virtual version, a controlled environment where her personality would interact with you without having to filter the overwhelming noise of your analog world. 

Your life savings, for this VR version of a perfect waifu. But it was okay. They had an installment plan.

#

The joint, used up, drops into the ashtray. Surrounded by twelve screens, you lean back on the VR chair as electrodes from the armrest and back press against your skin. As the headset settles on your scalp, cold metal presses your temples and electric warmth hugs your brain—isolating thoughts, readying neurons for isekai download.

“Want me to massage your brain, master?” the anime girl says from the twelfth panel of your visor. Anime is simpler than 3D, less resources, lower cost. But that’s convenient, isn’t it? You prefer the anime, and more money was an excuse to buy extra girlfriends. Enough spare to get your own master class at coding romantic partners to perfection.

A massage would be more than welcome, sweetheart, you think (no need to speak, your waifus read your mind).

The rest of the panels are still loading, blinking spirals, then pixelated outlines, their contrast sharpening every moment, just as the real world fades away. Partners trained on your own data, nourished by neural networks fine-tuned to your soul.

Why communicate with humans, deal with rejection, heartbreak, disappointment, when digital surrogates fool your circuits to drug-like depths of divine delight?

Your awkward approach attempts are buried in the past. No more drinks spilled on your face, no giggles judging you for daring to punch up. You’ll never need to understand women, now that fem-algorithms have been refined to understand you. Harem-blessed, society isn’t relevant, only carnal desire.

Cannabis smoke licks out your palate, and then the sensation vanishes, your tongue neurons already synced and isekai’d. The warmth of vapors stolen with a wet kiss from your twelfth waifu.

In the VR setting of your visor, your keyboard appears at your command, replicating the world your body still resides in. You crack your knuckles, snap a nail you haven’t clipped in over four months. You hear the snap, but you don’t feel it—sex-digitized, implanted with circuits, your senses know no mortal pain.

As your fingers dance on the keyboard, programming your next wife, the pins digging your scalp tingle, sending pleasure down your spine.

It’s not just the twelfth, the others join her, but download isn’t enough. This world still clings to you, the life of struggle, disappointment. Of being unwanted by everyone. You’ve convinced yourself it is a lie, that the digital is all there is—but still it hurts. You want to let go.

In near-synchrony your waifus whisper: “Pressure will leave your shoulders, master. We’ll upload you entirely, when this massage is done.”

#

Have an erotic speculative fiction tale to tell?  If so, here’s what we’re looking for and how to send it our way: Call for Future of Sex Short Story Submissions

Image Sources: Depositphotos

The post “As You Log Into Isekai Heaven”—an Erotic Speculative Fiction Story appeared first on Future of Sex.

Love and desire are limitless-—and timeless

According to quantum entanglement, two particles can be connected even if they’re lightyears away from one another. Changing the state of one causes a predictable shift in the state of the other. This phenomenon is also known as “spooky action at a distance.”

#

It’s a year between 1990 and 2020, when two people meet online. One’s name is Alice, a trans woman, the other is Bob, a cis man. Alice lives on one side of the planet, and Bob on the exact opposite one.

“Hey Alice, does Tinder treat you well? Meeting fun people?” Bob asks after they match.

“It’s dreadful,” she replies with a smiley face.

And Bob agrees, it really is dreadful. Thus forms a first thread of connection between them, a shared hatred for the platform that allowed them to meet.

They go away from this dreadful app, to a slightly less dreadful one. And then agree again that all social media is dreadful. They exchange more smiley faces. The bond strengthens. 

“I wish I could cuddle with you,” Bob tells her one day. She wishes that, too, but because of the long distance they cannot embrace one another. They’re both financially limited. Bob works at a factory struggling to make do in the richest country of the world. Alice works in fashion, she’s in a developing country. The trip is too much for her own finances as well.

Time passes, and he doesn’t want to tell her that he loves her because he hasn’t met her in person, but he implies it frequently. They gather money to meet each other, but Alice’s laptop malfunctions, and she has to spend it on a replacement. It has to be a posh laptop, otherwise her job will kick her out. She spends all her money on it, and eats rice with salt for weeks.

They are both sad about this. They share their sadness.

Bob tells her he loves her.

They are limited to sharing their love verbally, through a screen interface. This action at a distance is limited, but for the first time in humanity’s history, people who never stepped on the same country form the beginnings of entanglement. The emotions of one directly shift those of the other.

#

In the future, there is a metaverse. It has brighter colors than reality and landscapes so refined by artistic eyes they amplify beauty. The year is between 2040 and 2100 when two people meet in this digital world. Alice is genderfluid, Bob is enby. They both like chocolates.

They view each other in all of the three dimensions. They take a stroll, then fly together among the clouds as they talk about the abhorrent ethics of the chocolate industry and how they both managed to find slave-free alternatives that are even more delicious. They start loving chocolate even more because it brings them closer.

They float down a coffee shop that nests on the branch of a sycamore. They pause to serve themselves coffee in the physical world, then enter the metaverse world again, still holding the cups that now look different: made of wood. A clothed bird nods at them, pretends to serve them, and they start sipping. Their minds register the taste differently. It’s not the same than the coffee each of them had on their own in their apartments.

They talk for hours. They meet again every day. They fall in love, sharing their affection verbally without restraint.

They touch but don’t feel each other. It’s a mirage.

But they pick on the mannerisms of one another. They understand each other’s body language. They reenact sex roleplay with vivid visions. Small gestures influence the emotional state of each other. Compared to the limitation of a screen interface, those two people are a whole dimension closer to entangled.

#

Two people meet. Alice and Bob, two shapeshifters with an affinity for human form, shifting their genders across a spectrum as they feel. The year is undefined. They spend time together in a vibrant world, a never-ending garden. They talk for hours. They fall in love.

Their hands touch. By machinations of biology, a sensation triggers the neurons of the palm and sends a message to each other’s brain that makes the touch real. By laws of physics their atoms never truly touch.

Lips enwrap lips, brush the skin, tongues trailing each other’s bodies from thigh to neck. They become two bodies so entangled they’re almost one. By law of physics their atoms never touch.

The two lovers no longer remember if this garden world is real. It’s full of lovers like them, and no one here is alone. People sometimes leave the garden and return. They are not allowed to share what happens beyond the garden. Their words turn to butterflies if they try.

Some say this world was designed so those sharing a powerful bond could be together. Some say it was a world meant to forget what happens beyond. Most agree it’s all a simulation.

According to the holographic principle, the world they come from is encoded in a two dimensional surface, projecting information on three dimensions. According to the holographic principle, that world is a simulation as well. People in the garden call it the “nested simulation theory.” They are a simulation within a simulation. Perhaps within another simulation, ever onward in a vast omniverse onion-shaped.

It makes no difference. The lovers know one thing, which is all that matters:

“If our souls are connected, and all our senses tell us our lover is really there, what makes it any less real?”

Image Sources: Depositphotos

The post “Sexy Action at a Distance”—an Erotic Speculative Fiction Story appeared first on Future of Sex.

Love—and desire—will always find a way

After we fell in love in the metaverse, we built a moving castle, inspired from an anime Pafur loved. Only our castle was white, and it nested on the back of a titan from Greek mythology. We had to make some compromises of conflicting tastes, but we were happy with the result.

“It’s symbolic, you know,” I told her (she was a her that day, blonde hair that reached down her waist, blue gown with sparkling stars and galaxies at the hem, and sapphire eyes deeper than the sea).

“What is?”

“The titan. They called him Kronos, from the Greek word of time, punished by Zeus to an eternity of counting down seconds until the end of time.”

She chuckled. “That’s grim.”

“I like to think we’ll be here until the end of time.”

Her features hardened—a face she makes at my wonderful-but-impossible  propositions.“We have to emerge at some point. Our physical bodies deteriorate.”

“This is the only body I need.” I beamed, trying to outshine her doubts with my smile. “I’ll apply for complete organ donation, have my mind entirely uploaded.”

“You don’t mean that, Axel.”

“Of course I do. Can you imagine how bad the world would be if we didn’t have this? Stumbling randomly from person to person, struggling to find a mate that remotely matches our unusual minds, our dirty needs. I can’t imagine living in any other point of human history. Nature has messed up, made us in a way that doesn’t fit that black wasteland of stars and void.”

“There’s magic in the real world, too. And people are coming to change, slowly but surely.”

Magic soiled at the hands of greed. I could no longer pretend to care about that. “It’s not more real than this. And I’d never have found you there, not in a million years.”

She flicked a strand from my hair, and tossed it away where it grew into a butterfly. “Is it real though? This I mean.”

“You and I are. So we experience it together, what’s the difference?”

“How can you be sure I’m real? I could just as well be some tool tuned to your data to please you.”

I laid a hand on her shoulder. “Why does this sound like you’re projecting your own worries on me?”

Pafur averted her gaze. On the horizon seagulls fluttered over a sea that slowly swallowed sand and made pink rivers through a cracked land, around villages and towns.

““I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s my brother. He keeps saying these things. Sending them as text in my dreams when I’m asleep in this world. That you’re not real. That I should not let this destroy my true life like it has so many people. That my real body is deteriorating and they’ll soon put me up for charity if I don’t return.”

I thought of my own wrinkled body, back in that rotten civilization built on exploitation of the young and broken nonsensical rules. I thought of the many times I awoke in that world craving escape.

“Great then,” I said. “Zero carbon footprint, and maybe someone who craves material reality gets saved. What’s wrong with that?”

Her mouth worked but produced no words. I could tell she wanted to say something that would offend me and was struggling to put it into non-triggering words. She didn’t have to say anything though, I had to figure it out.

How could I prove to her I was real and not an AI tuned to please her? What would an AI never do?

“Your brother can suck it.”

For a moment she masked her mouth with anime hands, then broke down laughing.

“Now tell me,” I said. “What commercial AI would ever say a thing like that?”

“You know,” she said, then shifted her features to masculine, and covered his scalp in ashen hair. “I always wondered what percentage of conservatives like your father secretly watch gay porn.”

“Ugh, that was an image I did not need in my head. But good verification. Better than captchas.”

“It really is.”

“So you believe me now?”

He nodded, took my hand and ushered me in the tower. “I’m sorry I doubted.”

A warm feeling nests within my chest. “Truth is, Pafur, before I met you, I was unable to see life as anything but a sick comedy, and myself as an observer.” It’s not something I shared with Pafur before. It’s not the kind of thing you want to put on someone. But if anything, it’s added assurance—a commercial AI never talks about problematic feelings, just points you to suicide hotlines.

Pafur caressed my cheek, his hands warm as starlight. “Seems like a big scam, doesn’t it? They bring you into that world and tell you to follow rules that almost demand you never existed at all.”

I turned into a tidal wave, cradling him to bed in waves and speaking like a sea-goddess to his ear. “In the metaverse there are no rules shaped by chaos, only rules shaped by imagination.”

My shape changed again, grew smaller, and I tossed him into bed, slowly crawling over him. “Turns out a reality shaped by intelligence is far better than the black desert of cold space and random errors. Isn’t it?”

Liquid tendrils intertwining with his fingers, I gave myself the shape of a nymph, as he remained silent, submissive—as he liked to be in male form. “We make our own rules here, we are what we are. And we fuck whatever our minds desire. Whatever shapes our minds may choose.”

“In this virtual heavens of our fantasies, unbound by musts and what-you-should’s, our fluidity finally found home.”

Image Sources: Depositphots

The post “Whatever Shapes Our Minds Desire”—an Erotic Speculative Fiction Story appeared first on Future of Sex.