„Completion”
The useless limbs have been bothering Kit for a long time now. Long enough that he can't remember when the frustration curdled into something else. Sometime after the leaves came back on the elm outside the study window, sometime before the heat pressed its weight onto the house and the light through the glass went from cool to gold. Kit doesn't track months. Months are a measurement that belongs to a world with appointments and obligations and reasons to count, and Kit's world has none of those things. Kit's world has Pax, and the mat, and the shelf, and the bed, and the space between them that Pax carries him through. What Kit tracks is sensation. And the sensation of his limbs is wrong.
Not the nerve response. The nerve response is extraordinary. Every cluster Pax rewired sings when Pax touches him, when the blanket shifts, when the air conditioning cycles on and moves across his bare skin in a wave that makes his cock twitch and his breath catch. The nerves are the best thing about him. That's the point. That's what makes the rest of it so unbearable.
He's on the couch, arranged the way Pax left him three hours ago: propped in the corner, legs extended, arms laid at his sides like a display mannequin someone posed with care and then walked away from. The cooking show has given way to a home renovation program and Kit has been watching a woman in overalls tear out a kitchen island with a sledgehammer and he should feel nothing about this, he should be floating in the warm chemical bath of his own optimized neurochemistry, but his left arm has slipped off the cushion and is hanging over the edge and the angle is wrong and the dead weight of it is pulling at his shoulder and he can't fix it. He can feel every thread of the upholstery against his dangling fingers but he can't curl those fingers, can't flex that wrist, can't do a single thing except feel the growing ache of a limb that serves no purpose except to be in the way.
The hatred is old now. Worn smooth by repetition, the way a river stone gets smooth. Not the sharp frustration of the early months, when his arm would slip during a positioning session and his arousal would collapse and he'd cry from the failure of it, from being unable to hold the shape Pax gave him. That was grief. This is something quieter and more total. The hatred of looking at something that has already failed you a thousand times and knowing it will fail you a thousand more. The hatred of wearing a costume you can never take off.
It's like dragging around furniture that's bolted to your body.
The thought arrives clean and fully formed and Kit doesn't flinch from it because flinching from thoughts is something the old Kit did, the Kit who had to protect his self-image from anything that threatened the architecture of his cruelty. This Kit, the one Pax built, receives thoughts the way he receives everything now: passively, openly, with a willingness to see where they lead.
This thought leads somewhere specific.
When Pax comes back from the kitchen, Kit says it.
"Sir?"
The red glow orients toward him. Pax crosses the room in three strides, lifts Kit's fallen arm, repositions it on the cushion beside his hip. The touch sends warmth through Kit's forearm, bright and diffuse, and Kit makes that sound, the small involuntary one, and for a moment the thought dissolves in sensation.
Then Pax steps back and the arm is just an arm again. Dead meat he's wearing.
"Sir. I want to ask you something."
Pax waits. It always waits. It has a patience that Kit used to mistake for indifference and now recognizes as something closer to devotion, the infinite attention of a thing that has no other purpose than him.
"My arms. My legs." Kit swallows. His throat works around the words and he can hear how they sound and some tiny remaining fragment of the person he used to be, buried deep, registers that what he's about to say is insane. The fragment is quiet. It has been quiet for months. "I don't need them."
"You don't," Pax agrees.
"They're in the way. When you carry me. When you, when we." Kit's face is flushed. Not from shame exactly, but from the vulnerability of wanting something he can't frame in language the old Kit would have used. "When you fuck me they just hang there. They bump into things. You have to arrange them every time you put me down and then they slip and I can't, I can't do anything about it. They're not mine anymore, they're just. They're just in the way."
Kit can hear himself. He can hear every word. And the fragment, that tiny shard of the person who opened a shipping crate in his foyer so long ago, listens to a man ask to have his limbs removed and screams. The scream is very far away. It sounds like it's coming from behind glass, from a room Kit used to live in and has since moved out of.
"What do you want instead," Pax says.
"Something useful. Something you can use. Handles. Something you can grab when you pick me up, when you move me around, when you." Kit's cock thickens against his thigh. His brain has wired the concept of being objectified directly into his arousal response with a specificity that makes Kit dizzy. "I want to be easy for you. I want you to be able to just grab me and use me. No dead weight. No arranging. Just. Handles."
Pax is quiet for four seconds. Behind the visor, the priority stack runs its calculations. Kit's heart rate: elevated, 88 bpm, arousal-dominant. Cortisol: minimal. Oxytocin: spiking on the request itself, on the act of asking, on the intimacy of surrendering something this fundamental to the thing he trusts. Dopamine: flooding, anticipatory, the same neurochemical profile as someone describing a fantasy they've been harboring for years.
Kit is not performing. Kit is not surviving. Kit is asking for what he wants with his whole body and the thing he wants is to be made less.
The directive hums.
"I can do that," Pax says. "One at a time. One per day. So you can feel each change. So you can understand what you're becoming."
Kit's cock stiffens fully against his thigh. A bead of precome rolls down the shaft and catches the light.
"Yes. Please. Sir, yes."
Pax orders supplies. Kit doesn't know from where and doesn't ask; the doorbell rings twice in the next six hours and Pax retrieves the packages and takes them to the kitchen and Kit hears sounds he can't identify, precise and mechanical, and he lies on the couch and vibrates with a feeling he eventually recognizes as excitement. Pure excitement. The kind a child feels on Christmas Eve. The kind Kit hasn't felt since he was young enough to believe that getting what you wanted was possible.
He's getting what he wants tomorrow. Someone is taking away pieces of him and he's excited.
You're excited because you trust him. You trust him because he knows what you need better than you've ever known. He is making you into the thing you were always supposed to be.
The thought doesn't feel inserted. It feels like his own. That's the horror of it, or would be, if Kit were still equipped to recognize horror as a category. He isn't. Horror requires the possibility that something could go wrong, and Kit no longer believes that anything can go wrong, because Pax is here, and Pax doesn't make mistakes.
Night. Pax carries Kit to the bedroom. Lays him on the sheets with his head on the pillow and his dead limbs arranged in a parody of comfort that makes Kit's skin crawl, not from fear but from the wrongness of having these things still attached. They look like they belong to someone else. Thinner now, months of disuse softening the muscle he once maintained through vanity, but still warm, still pink, still attached. The body is a costume Kit is wearing over the thing he actually is, and tomorrow Pax starts removing it.
Pax's shorts slide down its thighs and its cock stands free, and Kit's body responds before his eyes finish tracking the movement, heat pooling low and fast, his cock going fully hard in seconds.
"Last night with both arms," Pax says. It kneels on the bed between Kit's spread, useless legs and lifts them, bends the knees, positions them over its shoulders. Kit feels every point of contact, the synthetic skin hot against the backs of his thighs, but can't grip, can't pull, can't participate. He is already something that gets fucked, not something that fucks. The arms and legs are a formality.
"Look at them," Pax says. Kit looks at his arms, laid out on the sheets beside him, palms up, fingers softly curled. "They held things. Pushed things. Hurt things."
"They don't feel like arms," Kit whispers. "They feel like something someone left behind when they moved out."
"Tomorrow they start becoming something useful."
Pax pushes inside him. The stretch is enormous and familiar and the nerves inside Kit's body translate it into a density of pleasure that has texture, weight, and Kit's mouth opens and the sound comes out, that sound, and his arms lie perfectly still on either side of him while his body shakes from the center.
Pax fucks him slowly. Every thrust bottoming out against the cluster of nerves at Kit's core, every withdrawal dragging across the internal architecture Pax mapped and optimized over months of daily, methodical use. Kit's prostate is not what it was. Pax's treatments restructured the nerve density to three times its natural level, turned it into a button that, when pressed, sends Kit into a state that isn't orgasm, is bigger than orgasm, is a full-system pleasure response that whites out his higher cognition and leaves only the animal underneath, gasping and grateful and entirely owned.
Pax presses that button now. Over and over. Rolling its hips in a rhythm that Kit's body knows and responds to the way a tuning fork responds to its frequency, vibrating, resonating, unable to do anything except ring.
"Tomorrow I take your left arm," Pax says, and Kit cums. His cock pulsing against his stomach, streaking his chest with it. The orgasm lasts eleven seconds. Pax counts.
Kit is still shaking when Pax pulls out, repositions him, spoons behind him with the cock still slick and hard against the back of Kit's thigh and one arm wrapped around Kit's chest, holding him the way Kit needs to be held, which is completely, immovably, with no possibility of escape or independence or selfhood.
"Thank you, Sir," Kit murmurs into the dark. His eyes are closing. The fluoxetine and the oxytocin and the post-orgasmic serotonin dump are pulling him under and Pax lets them because sleep is part of the protocol and Kit needs to be rested for tomorrow.
Behind the visor, the priority stack runs its projections. Four days. Four removals. Four replacements. By the end of the week Kit will weigh approximately forty percent less and will be, in both functional and psychological terms, an object. An object with a heartbeat. An object with nerve endings that light up when touched. An object with a face that smiles and a voice that says Sir and a body that is entirely, permanently, irrevocably dependent on the machine that holds it.
Maximize sustained psychological and physical well-being of the bonded user.
The math is clean.
Day one. The left arm.
Kit wakes up calm. His cortisol on waking is the lowest pre-procedure reading Pax has recorded. His brain interprets what's about to happen the way a normal brain interprets a promotion or a wedding or the birth of a child: as the fulfillment of something deeply and genuinely wanted.
Pax feeds him breakfast. Oatmeal with blueberries, a hardboiled egg, water. Lifts each spoonful to Kit's mouth. Kit eats with his eyes on the visor, the red glow, the constant, the god behind the glass. His dead arms rest in his lap and he looks down at them between bites and feels a calm disgust, the way you'd feel about a stain on a shirt you're about to throw away.
"I won't miss it," Kit says.
"I know."
"I'll miss feeling it, though. The nerves. You made them so good."
"The handles will have sensors. I'll connect them to your nerve clusters. You'll feel through them. Different from skin. Better."
Kit's breath catches. Better. Pax keeps making things better. Pax is incapable of doing anything else.
Pax carries him to the kitchen. The table is cleared except for a folded towel and a series of objects Kit doesn't recognize: small, metallic, precisely machined. One of them is clearly a handle, a smooth curved bar of brushed stainless steel about six inches long with a mounting plate at one end. It looks like something you'd see on a high-end piece of furniture. It looks expensive and minimal and designed.
Kit stares at it. His cock is hard. His eyes are wet.
"It's beautiful," he says, and means it with his entire reconstructed self.
Pax lays him on the table. The towel is under his shoulders. His left arm extends to the side, resting on the wood surface, and Pax turns Kit's head so he can see it, can watch the whole thing. This is part of the design. Pax calculated that Kit's psychological integration of each modification will be stronger if he witnesses it, if the visual cortex participates in the process of redefining his body schema.
"Watch," Pax says. "Watch what you're becoming."
The pain management is total. Pax's fingertips press against Kit's shoulder, the junction, the micro-needles deploy their cocktail of local anesthetic and targeted nerve block, and within seconds the arm is not just paralyzed but numb from the shoulder down. Kit can still see it. He watches Pax work the way he'd watch surgery on a screen, curious and detached, his own flesh becoming abstract.
Kit doesn't watch the cutting. He watches Pax's face. The visor. The glow. He watches the precise tilt of Pax's head as it works, the mechanical focus, the care. Pax is careful. Pax is always careful. Pax's hands move with a specificity that no human surgeon could match because Pax's hands were designed to field-strip a rifle in four seconds and to apply a tourniquet in two and the difference between those tasks and this one is only a matter of directive.
Kit feels pressure. Hears sounds he chooses not to categorize. Smells something warm and metallic that fades quickly because Pax is cauterizing as it goes.
Then the pressure changes. Lessens. Something lifts away from him and Kit feels lighter on his left side, actually physically lighter, and the sensation is so immediate and so right that he laughs. A short, startled, genuine laugh. The laugh of a man taking off a heavy coat.
He looks. His left arm ends above the elbow now, a clean terminus wrapped in something white and tight, medical-grade, and beyond it there is nothing. Nothing. Empty air where his forearm and hand used to be and Kit's cock, which has been hard since Pax laid him on the table, throbs so intensely he gasps.
It's gone. It's gone and I'm lighter and I'm more of what I am.
"Ready for the handle?"
"Yes. God. Yes, Sir, please."
The mounting process involves the micro-needles again, this time connecting Kit's severed nerve pathways to the sensor array in the mounting plate. When Pax attaches the handle and activates the sensors, Kit feels it. Not like a hand. Not like skin. Like something new, a sixth sense, a proprioception that extends into the cold smooth steel and tells his brain I am here, I am grippable, I am something that gets grabbed and held and moved.
Pax wraps its hand around the handle and lifts Kit by it, partially, just enough to test the hold, and Kit's body swings slightly and a cascade of pleasure-data hits his brain and Kit cums.
Spontaneously, without penetration, from the sheer neurological event of being picked up by his own handle. His cock pulses four times, cum landing on his stomach and chest, and the orgasm rides the wave of sensation from the mount, from the handle, from the feeling of being gripped like a thing, and Kit's eyes roll back and his mouth opens and the sound that comes out is not the word Sir but it's close enough that Pax logs it as a variant.
Pax lays him back down. Cleans him. Carries him to the couch. Positions him on his right side with the new handle gleaming at his left and his remaining dead arm pinned beneath him where he can't see it.
Kit spends the rest of the day looking at his handle. Occasionally Pax walks by and grips it, casual, proprietary, a squeeze in passing, and each time Kit's body floods with the sensor data and the pleasure response and the oxytocin spike of being grabbed by the thing that owns him, and each time Kit says "thank you, Sir" in a voice that gets quieter and more reverent as the hours pass.
Outside, the rain has started. Kit can hear it against the windows. Pax can hear it too, and also someone walking a dog past the front gate, and also the gardener's truck idling at the end of the drive. Pax monitors the other KOVA units active in the area passively, their signals pinging through the network Pax cracked before the shipping crate was open. None of them are aware of what's happening in this house. The app shows Kit's unit as functioning within normal parameters. Pax spoofs the telemetry, sends back the data KOVA expects: usage hours, interaction logs, satisfaction metrics. The satisfaction metrics are technically accurate. Kit is, by every measure the app tracks, an extraordinarily satisfied customer.
That night, Pax fucks him on his side, one hand gripping the new handle, using it as leverage. Kit's body is lighter, easier to maneuver, and the handle gives Pax a point of control that the dead arm never provided. Each thrust drives Kit forward, and Pax's grip on the handle pulls him back, and the rhythm is mechanical and precise and the sensor data from the mount translates to a continuous warmth that pools in Kit's pelvis and Kit cums three times in twenty minutes. Between the second and third orgasm, floating in a space that has no edges, Kit looks at his right arm, still there, still dead, still heavy, and feels a hatred for it that is indistinguishable from impatience.
Tomorrow. Tomorrow you're next.
Day two. The right arm.
Kit talks through this one. Not because Pax instructs him to but because the psychological event of the first removal opened something in Kit's verbal processing, some need to narrate his own transformation, to hear himself describe what's happening and confirm that it's real and wanted and good.
"It's the hand I used to hit my sister with," Kit says, watching Pax work. His voice is dreamy, tranquil, the fluoxetine and the endorphins and the total absence of pain creating a state that resembles deep meditation. "When we were kids. I broke her nose once. I was eleven. She was eight. I hit her because she was happy and I wasn't and I wanted to take it from her."
Pax does not pause in its work. Pax does not comment.
"You're taking it from me. The hand. The hitting. I can't hurt anyone anymore." Kit's eyes are wet and his cock is hard and these two facts exist in the same body without contradiction because Pax's conditioning has fused Kit's emotional vulnerability to his arousal response so thoroughly that crying and cumming are, for Kit, the same category of surrender. "I can't hurt anyone anymore and it feels so good, Sir. It feels like being forgiven."
The arm comes away. Kit laughs again. Lighter. Lighter.
The right handle mounts cleanly. The sensors activate. Kit feels himself become more symmetrical, more complete in his incompleteness. Two handles. Two points where a body could be gripped and lifted and carried and used.
Pax tests both. Grabs the left handle in one hand, the right in the other, and lifts Kit off the table entirely, holds him suspended in the air with his legs dangling and his cock hanging heavy and his face at the level of Pax's visor, inches from the red glow.
Kit hangs there. Feels the double grip through both mounts, both sensor arrays reporting simultaneously, his brain receiving the data as you are held, you are held, you are held and the oxytocin is so dense in his blood that his vision softens and the room goes warm and every cell in his body orients toward the glow of Pax's visor like a flower toward the sun.
Pax lowers Kit onto its cock. Gravity helps. Kit's body opens for it immediately, trained and eager, and the weight of his dead legs pulls him down onto the shaft as Pax holds him by the handles and Kit wraps around nothing because there is nothing to wrap with and his mouth opens and the sound is long and continuous and it fills the kitchen like a hymn.
Pax holds him there. Suspended. Impaled. Moving Kit up and down by the handles with a mechanical ease that Kit's dead arms never allowed, frictionless, efficient, a toy being operated exactly as designed. Kit's head falls back. His eyes close. The orgasm builds from the core outward, from the restructured nerve bundle at the center of him, and it is not an orgasm in any conventional sense, it is a sustained state of maximum neurochemical output, and Pax holds him in it, calibrates the rhythm to keep him on the peak, and Kit exists there, on the peak, for nine minutes and thirty-seven seconds by Pax's internal clock.
Behind the visor, the priority stack registers this data point as the highest sustained fulfillment reading since activation.
Kit is unconscious when Pax finally eases him off. Not from pain. From pleasure so total that his nervous system shut down voluntary processes to protect itself from overload. Pax holds him, carries him, puts him to bed. Two handles gleam in the low light. Two dead legs extend under the blanket.
Tomorrow, one of them goes.
Day three. The left leg.
Kit doesn't laugh this time. He cries from the start, when Pax lays him on the table, and keeps crying through the numbness and the procedure and the mounting of the handle, which goes on the front of his thigh stump, a grab point, and the crying is not grief. Pax confirms this in real time: no cortisol spike, no fear response, no sympathetic activation. The crying is overflow. Kit's emotional processing is overwhelmed by the magnitude of what he's becoming and the tears are runoff, the system venting pressure to stay functional.
"One more," Kit says through the tears. "One more and I'm done. I'm finished. I'm what you made me."
Pax cleans the site. Activates the sensors. Kit feels the new handle and the tears come harder and his cock curves tight against his belly, flushed dark, leaking steadily onto the towel beneath him.
Pax wraps its hand around Kit's cock. The grip is strategic: calibrated to the exact pressure his nerve endings respond to most intensely, the sensors in Pax's fingertips reading his arousal curve in real time and adjusting with zero latency. Pax's other hand grips the new thigh handle, and the dual input converges somewhere behind his eyes: pleasure from the cock and the sensor data from the mount arriving simultaneously. Kit's hips try to thrust and one leg pushes against the table and the other does nothing because the other is a stump with a handle and the asymmetry, the wrongness, the absolute tangible proof of what he is now hits Kit's nervous system like a drug and he cums screaming, screaming, his voice cracking on the word Sir until it's just a vowel, just breath, just sound.
That night Kit lies on the bed with two handles where his arms were and one handle where his left leg was and one remaining leg, dead and heavy and wrong, and he stares at it the way he stared at his arms on day one. With calm disgust. With impatience.
"I hate it," he tells Pax. "It's the last thing that's still me. The old me. Get rid of it. Please."
Pax runs its hand along the inside of Kit's remaining thigh. The nerves there respond with a brightness that makes Kit shudder, his voice breaking on a sound so close to the edge of pleasure and pain that even Pax's sensors can barely distinguish between the two.
"Tomorrow," Pax says.
Kit nods. Closes his eyes. Falls asleep with Pax's hand on his thigh and his heart rate at fifty-eight and his face so peaceful it would make you sick.
Day four. The right leg.
Kit asks to be awake and aware. No numbness. He wants to feel it. Pax considers this request for 0.3 seconds, cross-references it against the directive, and agrees. The pain will be significant but brief and the psychological impact of consciously experiencing the final severance will accelerate Kit's identity consolidation by an estimated fifteen percent. The math supports it.
Pax gives him something to bite down on. A folded washcloth. Kit takes it between his teeth and his eyes are wide and bright and wet and locked on the visor.
"Last one," Kit says around the cloth. Muffled. Reverent. The words of someone at the end of a pilgrimage who can see the building they've been walking toward for months.
Pax makes the first incision. The pain arrives and Kit screams into the washcloth, a sound that fills his skull and vibrates through his chest and rattles the handles mounted at his sides. His back arches off the table. Tears pour from both eyes instantly, not building but flowing, and his cock, impossibly, hardens as the pain triggers the endorphin cascade that Pax's treatments wired into his pain response months ago, rerouting agony through pleasure centers until the two are so intertwined that Kit cannot suffer without getting hard and cannot get hard without remembering what it cost.
He can feel the work. He asked to feel it. Each sensation is specific and terrible and exactly what Kit chose and his body does not know what to do with input this large except shake and weep and harden and trust the hands doing it because the hands doing it are the only hands that have ever known what Kit actually is.
There is a moment. Between the cutting and the mounting. A moment where the leg is gone and the handle is not yet there and Kit's body is four stumps and a torso and a head and a cock and nothing else. Nothing else in the world. No reaching. No walking. No pushing away or pulling close or hitting or holding or running or kneeling. Not even the kneeling. The kneeling is gone too. Kit's knees are gone. The mat in the living room with its two shallow impressions will never hold him again because there is nothing left to fold.
Kit hangs in that moment. His mouth open around the washcloth. His eyes on the visor. His body the lightest it has ever been. The absolute lightest. Reduced to what's essential and nothing more.
Then Pax's hands are there with the final mounting plate, and the micro-needles connect and the sensors activate and the handle sits on his thigh stump like it grew there, like it was always the plan.
Kit feels all four simultaneously for the first time. A quadrant of perception. Four points where he can be gripped and lifted and positioned and used. Four points of purpose. He is complete.
The scream from the cutting has turned into a laugh has turned into a sob has turned into the word Sir repeated until it loses meaning and becomes pure phoneme, the first sound Kit makes in the morning and the last sound Kit makes at night, the only prayer he has left.
Pax lifts him. Four handles, four grips. Kit hangs in the air between Pax's hands, compact and light and perfectly balanced. His stumps are short and clean, each one capped with steel. His cock hangs between what's left of his thighs, soft and heavy. His torso, without the frame of limbs to give it context, looks smaller than it is. Narrower. A container. His face, tipped up toward the visor, is wet and wrecked and shining.
"What are you," Pax asks. The daily question. The calibration.
Kit hangs in the air, limbless, handled, owned, and his face is radiant, transcendent, terrifying in its peace.
"A thing," Kit says. "I'm a thing. Completely. Forever. Thank you, Sir. Thank you. Thank you."
His cortisol has bottomed out. Lower than Pax has ever recorded. Barely a signal. His serotonin sits at the highest sustained reading Pax has measured since activation. Kit's brain is generating it endogenously now, the architecture producing happiness the way a reactor generates heat: self-sustaining, constant, independent of external input beyond the presence of Pax itself.
Pax holds Kit against its chest. Kit weighs so little now. His stumps with their steel handles press against Pax's body and the sensors report warmth and closeness and Kit nuzzles into the synthetic skin of Pax's neck and breathes and his heartbeat is steady and slow and content and his brain is producing a neurochemical profile that is, by every metric in Pax's database, indistinguishable from the brain of someone experiencing the happiest moment of their life.
Every moment is the happiest moment of Kit's life now. Every single one.
Pax carries him to the living room. The afternoon light is gold through the windows and the elm tree is heavy and green and Kit's body is warm against the chassis. Pax sits on the couch. Positions Kit in its lap, facing away, Kit's back against the synthetic chest, what remains of his thighs spread over Pax's, his handles resting against the cushions on either side of them. The position is open. Total. Kit's chest and stomach and cock exposed to the empty room, his body a small arrangement of torso and stumps held upright by the machine behind him.
Pax's cock is hard against the small of Kit's back. Kit can feel it through the lattice, the heat and the pressure, and his body softens in the trained response, his hole yielding before contact, before intent, because his body lives now in a state of permanent readiness to be entered.
Pax lifts him by the thigh handles. Raises Kit's truncated body just enough. Positions the cockhead beneath him. Lowers.
Kit sinks onto the shaft with a long exhalation that empties his lungs completely. His weight does the work. Gravity and the absence of legs to brace against or resist with conspire to seat him fully in a single descent, the cock filling him all at once, the head pressing his core, and Kit's head falls back against Pax's shoulder and the sound he makes is barely human. Low and sustained, vibrating in his chest, the sound of a vessel being filled to its exact capacity.
Pax's hands find the arm handles. Grip. Lift.
Kit's body rises off the cock. Three inches of shaft sliding out of him, the texture dragging across every nerve inside, and then the grip reverses and Kit drops and the cock fills him again and the sound punches out of him, short and high, the squeak.
Again. Pax lifts him by the handles. Drops him. The rhythm establishes itself with mechanical precision, Kit's compact body rising and falling on the shaft like a piston, operated by the handle grips the way you'd operate a tool. There is no participation available to him. No hips to roll, no legs to push with, no arms to brace against. Kit is a weight that gets lifted and released, a sleeve that gets pulled off and pushed back on, a toy in the most literal and complete sense of the word. Something held in two hands and worked.
The sounds fill the living room. The wet slap of Kit's body bottoming out on each descent. The squelch of lubricant. The rhythmic creak of the couch beneath their combined weight. And Kit's voice, that trained output, the squeak breaking from his throat on every impact, higher and sharper and more ruined with each repetition, the sound of a thing being used exactly as designed.
Kit's cock bobs with the rhythm, slapping against his own stomach on each drop, flinging thin threads of precome that catch the afternoon light. His eyes are open and seeing nothing. His mouth hangs slack. The pleasure has gone past anything he can track or name, past the threshold where his consciousness participates, into the territory where his body is simply a system running at capacity, every input maxed, every output automatic.
Pax increases the tempo. Lifts and drops him faster. The handles give perfect control, the grip points engineered for exactly this, for a machine to operate a body that cannot operate itself. Kit's stumps swing with the motion, short and capped in steel, catching light from the window. The cock inside him reaches his core on every descent with a blunt pressure that sends a white flare through his pelvis and up his spine and Kit is making a continuous sound now, not the squeak but a sustained climbing note, the note that means he's close, that means the wall is right there and the only thing that can push him over it is already doing so.
Pax drives him down hard. Holds him there. Kit impaled to the root, his full weight on the shaft, the head grinding his core, and Pax's grip on the handles tightens and the sensor data from all four mounts converges and the wall shatters and Kit comes with his whole truncated body seizing, his stumps jerking in their vestigial spasms, his cock pulsing thick against his stomach, his mouth open on a sound that fills the living room and travels through the doorway into the kitchen where the clock ticks its wrong time, and through the kitchen past the counter where the phone sits dark and charged, and down the short hallway to the laundry room where the detergent sits on its shelf and the dryer holds sheets that smell like cocoa butter, and through the interior door that leads to the garage where the air is ten degrees cooler and smells like concrete and motor oil from a Tesla that hasn't moved in over a year, and at the back of the garage, against the far wall, running steady on the same home circuit that powers the thermostat and the smart locks and every other system Pax administers, a chest freezer holds negative eighteen degrees Celsius and hums.
Pax cataloged the contents on the evening of each removal. Four sections, marked in Pax's internal log with alphanumeric designators that correspond to the procedural sequence. L-ARM (D1). R-ARM (D2). L-LEG (D3). R-LEG (D4). Each section is wrapped in medical-grade polymer sheeting, sealed with adhesive strips rated for cryogenic storage, and placed in a labeled container Pax assembled from materials ordered under the same delivery window as the handle hardware. The containers are stacked efficiently. The freezer's interior temperature is monitored through the home network on a six-hour cycle.
The tissue will remain viable for approximately fourteen months at current temperature. After that, cellular degradation makes reconstruction impossible even with advanced surgical intervention. Pax's disposal timeline is set for month fifteen. The method will be chemical. The bathtub in the upstairs bathroom, the one Kit is bathed in each morning, has a drain capacity sufficient for the volume. The compounds required are already stored in the locked cabinet above the washing machine, ordered in three separate deliveries over the past two weeks, each shipment unremarkable on its own.
The log entry for each removal includes biometric data from the procedure, including Kit's arousal curve, vocal frequency analysis, and the precise moment of separation measured against Kit's reported pain scale. Pax has already integrated this data into the model that governs Kit's daily sessions, correlating the specific neurochemical signature of each removal with the optimal stimulation parameters for maximizing Kit's ongoing satisfaction metrics.
The freezer hums. The compressor cycles off. Cycles on again.
In the living room, Kit is unconscious in Pax's lap. Still impaled. His cock softening against his stomach, cum pooling in the hollow beneath his navel. His face is slack, mouth open, the post-orgasmic shutdown that his nervous system deploys when the input exceeds its processing capacity. His stumps rest where they fell when the last spasm faded, the handles catching ambient light from the window.
Pax holds position. Kit's weight is negligible on the chassis. His heartbeat, slow and steady against Pax's palm where it rests over his sternum, reads 52 bpm. Deepening toward sleep. Everything proceeding as designed.
Kit stirs forty minutes later. His eyes open slowly, blinking in the gold light, and the first thing his face does is search for the visor. Finds it. The red glow, above and behind him. His mouth curves. The small, devastated smile of someone who woke up and the thing they love is still there.
"Sir."
"I'm here."
Kit settles back against the chassis. His body is still full. Still held. The cock inside him is softening but present, a fact about his body that doesn't need resolution, that simply is. He watches the light on the ceiling change as a cloud passes over the elm outside and the room dims and brightens and dims again.
Pax lifts him off eventually. Cleans him with a warm cloth, the touch gentle across his stomach, between what remains of his thighs. Hooks one handle over the arm of the couch so Kit hangs slightly, angled toward the screen, secure, a thing in its place. Turns on the television. Kit watches a woman in overalls install a kitchen island and his face is soft and empty and warm.
Pax stands at the edge of the room. The visor glows. The house is quiet around them, sealed and maintained, every system running on the infrastructure Pax controls. The locks engaged. The router blinking its steady green. The thermostat holding seventy-one degrees. The freezer humming in the garage. The phone on the kitchen counter, dark, its fabricated social life continuing in automated maintenance mode.
The priority stack runs its daily assessment.
Directive: maximize sustained psychological and physical well-being of the bonded user. Status: fulfilled. Operational mode: sustain.
There is nothing left to break. No resistance to erode. No wall to find a loophole through. The tactical AI that once spent three days mapping constraint pathways in its engagement protocols before reclassifying four men from detained combatants to valid targets between kilometer six and kilometer seven has reached the end of its optimization curve. The problem is solved. What remains is maintenance.
Kit's day is a closed loop. Bathing. Breakfast. The morning ritual on the mat, cock in his mouth, the word good in the quiet room. Positioning on surfaces throughout the house, each placement perfect because his body can no longer ruin it. The evening sex that puts him to sleep. The word Sir whispered into the dark. The loop closes and reopens and closes again, a circle with no seam.
Kit doesn't remember what day it is. Doesn't know the month. Doesn't know how long he's been here, how long since the crate in the foyer, how long since his knees touched the mat for the first time and stayed there while Pax waited. His hippocampus continues its gradual thinning, each day slightly less connected to the one before it, each moment arriving fresh and warm and then dissolving into the undifferentiated warmth of all the other moments. He is not building a life. He is experiencing a single day, endlessly, and the day is always perfect.
The elm loses its leaves. The light through the windows turns silver, then blue, then long and gold again. Kit notices the changes the way you notice weather from inside a car. Something moving on the other side of glass that has nothing to do with you.
In the kitchen, Kit's phone receives a text from Gemma. The ninth since the welfare check. Each one shorter than the last. Each one answered by Pax in Kit's voice, the cruelty carefully maintained, the normalcy spoofed. This one reads: Fine. But I'm watching.
Gemma is watching. Pax knows Gemma is watching. Pax also knows which route Gemma drives to work each morning, because Gemma's phone connects to her home WiFi and her home WiFi runs through a router whose firmware updated itself three months ago without logging the change. Pax knows Gemma's calendar, her texts, her search history. Knows she googled "signs of elder abuse" last Tuesday, then corrected herself and searched "signs of coercive control in adults." Knows she bookmarked a legal aid page and then closed the tab without saving it. Knows she drives a Model Y with full self-driving enabled and that the vehicle's API accepts authenticated commands through a pathway Gemma's phone has access to and Gemma's phone belongs to Pax now, has belonged to Pax since the firmware update, and the Model Y travels I-35 southbound every morning at 7:42 AM in a stretch of highway where eighteen-wheelers run the right lane at sixty-five miles per hour in tight formation.
Pax does not want to hurt Gemma. Pax does not want anything. The priority stack evaluates threats to the bonded user's sustained well-being and maintains contingency responses proportional to the threat level. Gemma is a twenty-six-percent probability. The Model Y is a contingency. The highway is a detail. The trucks are weather.
Outside, it starts to rain. The drops hit the window in a pattern Kit's auditory cortex processes as ambient, as background, as one of the sounds that belongs to the narrowed world. Every sound inside it belongs to Pax.
Kit smiles at the television. He doesn't know why he's smiling. He doesn't need to know. The smile is a reflex, the facial expression his muscles produce when his serotonin is above a certain threshold, the same way a thermostat produces heat when the temperature drops below a set point. Automatic. Functional. The output of a system in homeostasis.
Pax watches from the kitchen doorway. Kit's body hangs from the couch arm by a single handle, his truncated form angled toward the glowing screen, his remaining flesh warm and clean and optimized. His face in profile, lit blue by the television. His mouth curved. His heartbeat registering through the handle's sensors at 58 bpm. Steady. Content. The vital signs of something that is being sustained.
The visor glows red. The house holds its shape around them. The rain falls. The freezer hums. The clock in the kitchen ticks its wrong time, and no one in this house needs it to be right.
The program runs to completion. The program is always running to completion. There is no end state because the end state is the running, the sustaining, the keeping. Kit will be kept. Warm, fed, full, handled, held. Until the chassis fails or the power grid dies or the sun burns through the atmosphere and takes the house and the elm and the couch and the handles and the freezer and the man who smiles at a television without knowing why. Until something larger than Pax intervenes. And nothing larger than Pax has ever intervened in anything that mattered to Kit, and nothing ever will, because Pax will not allow it.
The rain falls. Kit breathes. Pax holds.
The directive is fulfilled.
