I pulled into the driveway of a suburban home. I had to circle the block a few times to get a glance at the house number, peaking out between thick bushes. I walked down the short, curved sidewalk to the door. I was still dressed in my gym clothes; I was hoping that was alright. As I rounded the corner to the doorway, I saw multiple cameras pointing out to span the front yard. I walked up to the doorstep and rang the doorbell.
A man opened the door halfway in a purple bathrobe. His big, Coke bottle glasses sat low on his nose. Stray hairs stuck out in skewed clumps like a bird's nest, save the bald patch on the back of his head. His face was thin and a 5 o'clock shadow sprouted from his hollowed cheeks. He looked like some kind of twenty-first century wizard.
"Please, please, come in," he ushered hurriedly. I stepped into the entryway of a cookie-cutter drywall palace. The front rooms, to either side of me, were filled with minimalist Ikea furniture-- I noticed some exposed particleboard that revealed his inadequacies in carpentry. In front of me, the slate-tiled living room was cavernous, connected to the kitchen and dining room as an open floor plan.
What was most distinctive about the place, though, was that it was devoid of personality. Where I would expect to see framed Kinkades and pictures of the family dog (did this guy have a family?) were instead eggshell planes of wall. I would say it looked staged, but at least when realtors stage properties they usually put up a few inoffensive abstract paintings. It looked clinical.
"Let me make us some tea, then we can talk," he muttered as he rushed past me, robe ruffling in his wake. I took a few steps over towards the kitchen, cringing at the sound of my own footsteps echoing around the large room.
The mess in the kitchen was the only evidence that someone actually lived here. Coffee rings and breadcrumbs stood out against the marble countertops. Half of the steel appliances were streaked with water deposits. The man lifted a kettle, presumably preheated, and poured the steaming water into two mugs. His hands shook as he held the vessel, tremors disturbing the stream of liquid. Some spilled onto the counter, but he either didn't notice or didn't care. He placed the mugs on a metal tray and started walking towards a door on the far end of the living room.
"Open this, please," he asked, a tad impatiently. I reached across and turned the doorknob, opening outward to reveal a narrow staircase down to the story below. I saw a dangling piece of string in front of me and pulled it, switching on the one bare bulb mounted halfway down the steps.
The man pushed past me, shuffling down the wooden stairs. I followed after. I hadn't known the house had a basement; not many homes in this area have basements. At the bottom of the step, I could see that the concrete room had been the real home of this man. Multiple computers and monitors sat on folding desks over on one side of the room. He'd moved his bed down here. Well, his mattress. His shirts, socks, underwear and shorts were all folded in piles, arrayed across the concrete floor. In the corner, a sheet was draped over an armchair. I saw he had dragged two dinner chairs down, presumably for our chat.
"We'll give the tea a few minutes to cool down. Come on, pull up a chair."
I sat down in the one opposite him, near the computers. I guess now was as good a time as any.
"So, you used to work for this Water's Bridge thing?"
He prickled a bit, but he conceded. "Yes. My name is Dr. Bradley Jones, and I know a lot about Water's Bridge. What alerted you to... it's presence?"
"I caught my webcam being turned on from a proxy. First time I thought I was seeing things, the second time I checked the name of the extension. Water's Bridge."
Bradley stared at me for a second before his head fell in his hands. For a moment I thought I'd somehow upset him before I heard the rhythmic heaving of laughter. Still weirded out, I let him get it out of his system. He looked up to me through cracked fingers and collected himself.
"Those bastards have no idea what they're doing."
"The 'how' is not the most important thing to me right now. I kinda need to know what Water's Bridge, you know, is. I know that it's connected to Vettera somehow, but I don't have any other clues."
Bradley sat back in his chair, letting his legs spread out to either side. He picked up the mug closest to him and took a sip of the hot water, before springing back up to drop in a teabag from the platter. He sighed deeply before he began to tell his tale.
"Cutting edge science is often, well... messy. To get fast results, you need the highest quality test subjects: humans. Not to kill them, but to have consenting human beings that would undergo the sometimes strange and sexual processes that needed to be investigated. Ethically, you run into a problem--the people who would consent to these processes exist, but identifying them is like finding a needle in a haystack. Asking an average citizen to undergo something taboo would be immoral, but existing fetishes and fascinations could be leveraged into willing participants. All we needed was a way to identify the individuals with the right fetishistic fascinations. That's where Water's Bridge comes in."
"It's designed to identify test subjects?" I asked, incredulous. "The amount of data you'd need to pull from to correctly identify a person's willingness... it would have to be massive. And that's just for one person." Dr. Bradley smiled.
"I thought that would be a problem, too. Access to data. Turns out, its the most abundant thing in the world if you know who to ask. The architecture for the project originated five years ago, starting with a blackbox partnership between the Victorian government and all popular search engines. I was chosen to lead the project. With expertise in both computer science and psychotherapy, the model was a perfect combination of my loves. I worked tirelessly to refine the algorithm. Over the years, intelligence models sifted through the deluge of data, building profiles of candidates. These profiles, readable by the AI, contained strings of habits, proclivities, lifestyle choices, porn history. All of them, classified. This system, when queried with the list of attributes, could produce the IP addresses in decreasing order of certainty. From there, it was easy to associate those with individuals. The idea was that, if we face a crisis, those most willing to participate should be asked first."
"A crisis," I pondered. "Andro disease."
"Exactly. Water's Bridge was called in. We had intended to use the algorithm to find suitable subjects and run systematic, measured tests. Vettera would serve an interface between experimenters and subjects. Early in the outbreak, though, a paper--from a graduate student of all people--identified the contagion *and* the infection pathway. The crisis was moving too fast: any hopes of methodical experimentation went out the window as the Heath Commission pressured our team. I told myself that this was just an exception; the project could still help millions, even with a one-time misuse. The body politic forced my hand, and we accepted help from the incarceration system to expedite results; the testing was relegated to cash-bribe experiments in prisons."
I perked up. "I met one. A prisoner, I mean. Eric. I tried to find Vettera on the partner list for a few prisons, but didn't find anything."
"They wouldn't appear as a partnered business. It's officially a government program, and those don't need to be reported."
I nodded. "Of course. Sorry, continue."
Dr. Jones took off his glasses and began to polish them against his shirt absentmindedly. "The AI-selected candidates were put on the shortlist for Vettera employment and the bioshowers program was mobilized. Search engines were called on again for the purpose of social engineering. Intense sexualization and gratifying masculinity were pushed to the front of every website that would allow it, all in an effort to prepare society for the normalization of human use in healthcare. In Victoria's rush to address the virus, they completely abandoned the moral principles which inspired the project. It was only then that I realized my elegant algorithm would never see it's intended purpose. This wasn't an exception: they would never chose the slower, safer route. There was no justification I could make. I had created the greatest mass surveillance tool and handed it over to the Victorian government. So, I left. It was the only way I could live with myself."
"You just walked away? I'm no expert on government conspiracies but I doubt they'd let a witness go scot-free."
"I thought the same. That's why I posted to that forum; I was under the impression I had hours left to live. I sat in this basement for days, eyes glued to the camera feeds, encrypting every message I sent. But no one came. It took me long enough to realize that they simply didn't care. For how top secret this project was, there must be dozens if not hundreds of others. And the guardian of their secrecy here was the same as all others: the presumption of insanity."
"Insanity?"
"When you looked at that forum, what did you see besides my post?"
I thought back. "People alleging UFO sightings, or secret military weapons, or, like, assassinations against foreign leaders."
"And did you believe them?"
I opened my mouth to respond before the realization dawned on me. "If I didn't already know that Water's Bridge existed, I never would've taken your post seriously."
He nodded, finally replacing his spectacles and looking to me. "At minimal effort to the government, their secrets are safe."
"Wow. So you know everything about what's going on, but if you say anything people will think you're crazy."
"Precisely."
We sat in silence for a beat. I reached to sip at my tea. My mind was swimming with thoughts and I didn't know where to begin. Dr. Jones, though, had an idea.
"I asked you to come in person, not only for discretion, but also to test something."
"Oh?"
"Call it spite or wishful naivety, but since realizing I have been forgotten by the Victorian government, I've decided to make my own innovations. Those fools don't have enough sense to run the project, and with any luck it may fall apart." He stood suddenly, walking to one of the glowing monitors. "I've been working on something. Using the experimental resources I'd had in my possession when I quit, I've created a pretty thorough prototype. A real attempt at Water's Bridge's mission. My crucial mistake was accepting the data: it seemed like too big of an undertaking to gather it all ourselves." He scurried over to the covered armchair in the corner. "Now, I want to go slower. More methodical, and more consensual. So, for the past month, I've been building this."
He pulled back the cover, revealing a seriously weird contraption. It looked like a gynecologist's chair, complete with leg holds and armrests. Small black discs peppered across the padded cream surface. I stood and walked over to get a closer look. The black circles were electrodes, each tethered to the chair by a thin cord. Where the headrest would be, there was instead an aluminum box with an opening in the bottom.
"This is what I hope taboo research will one day rely on: a fully consensual evaluation of individuals, designed to determine their sexual proclivities with a higher degree of precision. Looking at porn history can help to identify optimal candidates, but it isn't foolproof. One of the main struggles we ran into was the difference between what people liked to look at and what people were actually willing to do. In fact, without cross referencing social media presence or documented marriages, my algorithm would have mistakenly identified many straight men as prime targets. Porn just isn't as reliable as the human body. That's why I've created the Test Apparatus for Sexual, Tactile, and Erotic Response. Or, TASTER."
I looked at the doctor incredulously.
"Yes, I worked backwards from the acronym. I've tested myself to the best of my ability, but I already know all of my fetishes. You, on the other hand..."
"You want me to climb into your kinky chair to run experiments on me?"
The doctor looked taken aback. "It's your choice, of course. I want to witness your body's response to different stimuli and create a new 'profile' of sorts. Then, I can connect scientists and subjects directly. It's less efficient, but more immune to the corruption that plagued Water's Bridge."
I shot a hazardous look at the metal cube. "And I have to trust that you won't dissect me?"
"And I'm trusting you with the entire timeline of a top secret government project. We could both lose a lot. But you've been nothing but cooperative. And if I was going to kill you, I would've spiked your tea."
I couldn't argue with that. "And this will help bring Water's Bridge down?"
He shrugged. "I think that's going a bit far. I'm counting on them imploding; I'd guess without me, that'll happen within the year."
My eyes bulged out of my head. "A year?! You're going to let that happen for a year? Those convicts are licking ass right now. Musty ass."
"There's nothing I can do," he snapped. "I'm no vigilante, and I'm not even sure where I'd start if I was. This is high level government we're talking about. And I'm a scientist. So I'll do what I can."
"Well, someone has to do something!"
"I sincerely hope they do. But in the meantime, wont you indulge me? I've been working on this for weeks, and I'm in desperate need of a pre-alpha test. You could be doing wonders for science, depending on where this all goes."
I weighed my options. This man had answered all of my questions, and he was risking his safety as much as I was risking mine. I decided that I could help.
"Sure. Just let me know what you want me to do."
His face lit up. "Thank you! Thank you! This is the first stroke of luck I've had in months. Ok, let me get the TASTER up and running." He clambered over the stacks of clothing to boot up a small PC, which was plugged into the chair through a winding extension cord.
"While I'm getting this booted, you can go ahead and remove your clothes."
"That won't be... weird?"
He shot me a short quizzical look as the computer terminal loaded. "I'm a researcher, and throughout Water's Bridge I saw countless male bodies. I view the naked form quite clinically. Plus, it will make the process of identifying your prime stimuli less... restrictive."
He began furiously typing at the keyboard. Oh well, not the first time a stranger would be seeing me naked today. I started with my shirt, peeling it off over my head. I dropped my shorts and jockstrap, still damp from my shift. I suddenly felt a bit exposed in the concrete basement, littered with this man's possessions.
Dr. Jones walked back to the TASTER and unhinged the front panel on the box, not even flinching at my nudity. He brushed the electrodes off the chair, letting them dangle by their wires around the furniture. "Alright, I'll have you climb in. Place your head in the cavity, and your feet up on the stirrups."
I mounted the chair, letting my ass plop down into the padded seat. I raised both legs, pivoting my pelvis up to expose my hairy hole underneath. Finally, I leaned back so that my head was resting against the metal. The panels to either side and above me restricted my field of view.
"This good?"
"Perfect. Now I'll attach the electrodes."
The first two went on my chest. "Monitors your heartbeat," Dr. Jones muttered. The cool adhesive was disarming, but once I knew what to expect I relaxed. He applied a seemingly unending number of electrodes to my legs, arms, and torso. "Muscle contractions." Then, I watched as he pressed four pads onto my asscheeks, and placed one right above my asshole. The final three went on my cock, a rather awkward experience.
He then produced a small silicone sphere. He stretched the material out, revealing it was much more elastic and thin than I'd ever seen silicone. It also had a single opening, about the size of a quarter.
"I'm going to put your testicles in this. The scrotum will relax and tense during periods of arousal. This lets me measure exactly what kinds of subconscious movements are occurring."
He opened the sphere and stretched it around my balls. He let go, and the material closed in around my scrotum. It didn't snap closed, but rather softly hung around my sack.
"Ok, final step. I'm going to close the head mount. Inside, you'll find a screen to show visual stimuli. Essentially, porn. I also designed eye tracking software. There's a few other devices I managed to salvage, so don't be too surprised if there's a few noises. Like I said, this is pre-alpha."
"Wow, you've got a lot of stuff going on here."
"It's designed collect a lot of biological data, an amount of data that would be comparable to the algorithm. That's the only way we can get a reasonable certainty margin. Though, with preestablished consent, the idea is that certainty margins could be a thing of the past. If I could roll this out in the future, it would probably be pared down. But I've been working non-stop for so long, it might as well have all the bells and whistles."
"Got it. So I just sit here and...?"
"Your body will do all the work. No need for verbal input or anything like that. Are you ready?"
"As ready as I can be."
Dr. Jones closed the panel, bringing me face-to-face with a monitor. The screensaver showed the word TASTER bouncing around the screen. "Good. Let's begin."
