Remote control units

Tom looked down at the K200’s metallic fist-like claw. It held his nuts in firm hostage. It released its pressure slightly as it adjusted grip, it made little difference, he was still terrified. He felt a second alloy hand caress his spine top to bottom.

“Work your cock, you dumb fuck!” came the synthetic voiced instruction. The guy reached to his already firm meat, knowing the drill. He started to pump. The hand on his back moved away, he immediately heard his co-worker whine.

“You too Blondie,” the voice directed as the near naked guy at Tom’s side found himself held in place. The timid youngster began working his thin seven inches as the robotic arm held a handful of his blond locks captive.

Tom started to grunt, and rut his hips. He was hornier than he’d wished. This ‘zero –pussy’ bullshit left him on permanent edge since he’d arrived eighteen months ago. He blew with instant relief, how many days had it been? Holy fuck, it felt like a bucket. For the hundredth time, he questioned if he secretly enjoyed being bullied by Jim? No, no, he fucking hated it.

A green icon flashed in the upper left of Jim’s vision. Ted was arriving. Without a word he simply released the hand grips of the K200 Unit and reversed it back into its recharge point. Tom relaxed and looked down at his cum and dirt smeared abs, there had to be something nearby with which he could wipe himself.

* * *

The office was modern and comfortable with aims to lure and hold the skilled staff needed. The building and its contents weren’t secret, but few outside the employ of Turner Minerals knew the Operations Division occupied level thirteen and fourteen. To the uninformed, it was a bizarre location for the department but as one of the country’s biggest mining companies, the investment in ‘remote controlling’ technology was unrivaled.

Level thirteen housed the enormous computing power needed. The dozen tech-heads who worked here, spent their days slaving to the needs of three Half Cray Supercomputers. Two of the units ran full time, a third, sat in reserve. At the opposite end of the floor plate, the equally impressive satellite transmission links dominated the space.

The ultra-secure level fourteen was quiet and devoid of the sometimes-chaotic scenes downstairs. The floor plan was arranged to accommodate thirty sound proofed, bio-metrically sealed transmission offices. If you worked in these, you entered, logged in at shift start and departed twelve hours later.

Just inside the door of each office sat an almost retro locker and wooden change bench. It was the only standard furniture in the room and held the operator’s gear as they stripped for their shifts. Central to the windowless room was the freely rotating, egg-shaped remote-control pod. It was the size of a family saloon. The immersion units in each room were state of the art and at the simplest level, allowed the company to dig dirt by the ship load.

For the ‘drivers’, it took comprehensive psychological clearance and two years of training just to get in a room. Another twelve months of joint controls were required before anyone went solo. The persona of the Operators tended to be alpha in their determination, calculation and natural expectation that others would always yield.

* * *

Training and security clearance to get into Turner’s sister site, was the polar opposite. The enormous bauxite mine had no fences and no guards. The twenty-five permanent staff could leave anytime they wanted. None had ever tried. The reality of an on foot, seven-hundred-kilometer desert trek through some of the planet’s hottest and most harsh terrain, extinguished the idea. The nearest known water to the open cut mine was two hundred and ninety kilometers south.

The ‘desert twenty-five’ as they were known were uniformly men, aged between nineteen and twenty-six. Generally unskilled, their function was to supplement the few tasks which could not be achieved by the fully autonomous machines which freely roamed the site. In truth, if required, the machines could do it all but it was cheaper to have humans fill the gaps.

* * *

As Ted finished stripping to begin his day long shift, he stepped onto the pod’s entrance pad. Immediately he was blasted with a mist which came at him from every direction. His skin was instantly sterilised.

At twenty-eight he had been fully pod qualified for three years, one of the longest serving drivers. He glanced at his reflection in the machine’s gleaming black surface and saw his naked, hairless form. Pod operators were allowed eyebrows and lashes but that was the limit. Personally, he chose to chemically hair-remove each week. Many of his compatriots had taken a more permanent route with their hair laser removed. He crossed the threshold.

The knee deep hydro static liquid he stepped into was his exact body temp. The sensation was like touching dry water. Weird, but it was the best description he could come up with, even after all this time. He lowered himself into the contoured seat as the top third of the egg-shaped pod began to seal itself closed. Immediately the level of the liquid began to rise.

He carefully adjusted his VR goggles and breathing rig. The liquid touched his chin as he reclined to stretch his urine discharge sheath along the length of his cock. Once in place he removed his hands and instantly felt it activate to mould itself to a perfect fit around his meat. It remained latched on, all the way down to his root. A ‘C’ shaped open ring near its end rotated behind his balls and returned to the top of his member. He could feel the sheath rinsing away the gel which had made its way inside.  

As he settled in the operator’s chair, he detected the seat shift below him. He felt what started as a rise in the surface, extend the length of his arse crack. He then felt the AI controlled ‘living’ metal come to life and form a short knob pressed to his hole. He took a breath as the knob pressed into his internals, expand and come to rest the thickness of a man’s thumb. He’d never found the insertion process comfortable but once in place, it sealed his hole to prevent any gel contamination.

As the egg’s liquid gel reached capacity, the system gave an all green. Locked and loaded, he initiated the mental link and within seconds found himself visually standing beside his co-pilot who was in fact physically, four doors north of where he was in Downtown City.

The virtual reality construct in which they appeared resembled a standard mining Operations Control room.

“Hey Jim” he said, “any dramas?”

“Morning Ted,” replied the similar uniform clad avatar “I had to put it in for a service. It will be there for another two hours”

“Servo motor three finally packed it in?” asked Ted.

“Yeah, you got it. Auto has installed the new unit and are testing as we speak. If it’s clear, they’ll put it back together.” Informed his work partner. “When they hand it back for sign off, just check the motion before you leave the workshop. We don’t want to have to come back.”

“No problem, all standard stuff.” Replied Ted, nodding. “So, what have you been doing? It looks like the unit has been in Auto since three?”

“Been stirring one or two of the Rags.” Answered Jim, smiling broadly.

“Nice” grinned Ted, looking around, “which ones?”

“Blondie and Tom.” Said Jim, “They’re still here somewhere if you want to play”

“Might just do that,” assured Ted as Jim logged off and vanished.

* * *

Ted and Jim were the assigned drivers of Dumper Forty-Seven, a three hundred and twenty tonne yellow monster. Every day they remotely logged into the machine’s control module and completed their day-long shifts. The fact they were more than one thousand kilometers away was irrelevant, their satellite link into the truck’s mechanical systems was one of complete body immersion.

When the truck was loaded, they felt the pressure bear down on their backs. If any part of the machine ran hot, they instantly detected it on their skin. The control pods at head-quarters allowed them to truly become the physical embodiment of the vehicle. Floating in their gel filled eggs their movements, feelings and thoughts were electrically converted into actions at the mine site. They ‘felt’ their truck.

The truth was the eggs gave them the capacity to remote into, and control almost any machine on site. They spent most of their shift as a truck, but from time to time they were called upon to integrate into forklifts, graders, even the building elevators. Every piece of equipment at the mine was grid connected.    

As Jim stood by when Ted departed his shift, two other guys, less than fifty physical metres away from him, were logged in as Auto Repair units. These also egg enclosed remote mechanics were completing the repair Dumper Forty-seven needed.

With two hours to kill, Ted decided to see what Jim had been up to. He sat his avatar down in the ‘Operations Room’ so the Master System could record his non-malevolent presence. He then covertly logged into Delta Net and split his online profile. His undetectable ‘dark’ avatar entered the mine’s parallel shadow network.

* * *

Ted and Jim were two members of a clandestine intra-company clan. Of the thirty licenced and fifteen training operators, six cock loving men who also happened to be some of the longest serving, had formed a secretive gay click. Management had no idea.

What most of the original computer programmers failed to grasp, was the degree of integration drivers experienced with their machines. As ‘logged in’ hours climbed beyond ten thousand, the cognitive alignment between man and machine became something hard to explain. The full immersion pods allowed every ‘machine time event’ to be translated into a physical sensation somewhere on the body. The eggs enabled the perfect transmission system, almost every skin nerve ending was in contact with the conductive gel.

At the desert mine end of the system, the sensor rich, network connected machines were close to Artificial Intelligence in their build. Machines like the dump trucks could only ever be trucks, but even these had attached robotic arms scattered externally and in the cabin. Other units, like the Auto Mechanic appliances, Building Service units and General Hand machines had almost unlimited mobility and multi limb dexterity.

David Telford had been the first member of what was now loosely called ‘the Dark Crew’. He was a super skilled software programmer who started as a 19-year-old when Turner Minerals purchased the mine. Thirteen months after he started, he was partnered with 17-year-old Isaac, a programming prodigy who blitzed his computer science degree without blinking. The pair wrote much of the original code, creating industry leading software competitors couldn’t match. A year after an increasingly unsettled Isaac moved on, David transitioned to become a ‘simple’ pod operator. He quickly found it more rewarding to use the mine’s machines, compared to designing and programming them.

David’s intimate knowledge of the computer system, provided him with a unique and skilled perspective. Over time he took note of his body’s ability to experience mental and physical sensations from the machinery, it was far beyond anything detailed in the specifications. Curious, he went exploring.

Knowing Management would be uncomfortable with anything less than 100% control, he put his programming skills to work and created Delta Net. A ‘dark’ parallel network beyond the monitoring capacity of the Master System control modules.

The deception method was to leave your operational avatar set to ‘auto’ in a known location. With it completing a normal everyday task, the Dark Crew member could secretly log into Delta and roam the site network with undetected freedom. Machine logs, surveillance programs and even security cameras could be overridden at will, the illusion of perfect site harmony proved easy to maintain.

At the mine itself, a computer took all its satellite instructions from Downtown City. As a ‘slave system’ it couldn’t detect anomalies. In an unremarkable storeroom on site sat the original activation and boot-up terminal, but system maintenance visits from computer techs were rare, only happening every few years.     

Ted double checked his avatar looked ‘busy’ in operations. With his online profile occupied, he logged into Dark Net Personnel Tracker and went looking for Blondie and Tom.