The spirit is strong, but the flesh is stronger.
tags: corruption, flash fiction, mind control, nsfw, robot
MECH was strong, but so was Doctor Harrati. The machines rent flesh and spilled blood, and the doc dutifully patched the soldiers back up. To the soldiers of the Southern Front, she had become more than a doctor—she had become the Doctor, proof that humanity possessed an intangible something that would allow them to triumph over the machines. They were devoted to her.
In truth, the doctor did not love her charges back. Maybe, once, she had. But the war had been long, the suffering immense. She once though the death unbearable. And yet she bore it, day in and day out, hoping against hope that the war would end.
The war asked the impossible of Doctor Harrati, and so she made an impossible decision. Since the first week of the Singularity War, experimenting with MECH technology had been an executable offense. But Harrati had seen what the tech could do, how it could multiply a human’s potential, make them faster, smarter, stronger. The sanctity of her body, its freedom from ruinous technology, was a small price to pay compared to the death her soldiers were facing every day.
And so, without permission and in complete secrecy, the doc recovered an artificial adrenal gland from a MECH husk. She knew what they did, she knew how they worked. MECH husks were “evolved” humans, enhanced through a series of almost paint-by-the-colors bionics and artificial organs. A code scrubbing to get rid of any dangerous MECH programming, a bit of self-administered anesthesia, a minimal amount of cutting, and viola—those same benefits could be hers.
It wasn’t until four days later—once Harrati realized that she hadn’t slept in in 72 hours, hadn’t needed sleep in 72 hours—that the doctor realized she might have made a miscalculation. But just how much of a miscalculation, she asked herself. It was almost certainly the adrenaline talking, but she had never felt better, more capable, or more clear-headed than she did at that moment. Surely no longer needing sleep was just a weakness that an overworked doctor could dispense with.
But soldiers kept dying, and the euphoria of her breakthrough turned sour. Her small sacrifice hadn’t been enough.
So she escalated. The next illicit surgery was a recovered endorphin generator, an addition Harrati hoped would let her cope with the depressing, innervating nature of this war. And it worked. Like she slyly joked one of her patients, a slow drip of feel-good hormones do wonders for one’s disposition.
But like her first bioenhancement, there was another, unexpected side effect. She was… aroused. “Aroused” was too clinical a term for the unending hunger, the horniness, the need she felt.
And it wasn’t the strong, ripped soldiers—those specimens of humanity—that were turning her on. It would have been easy, comforting, reasonable if that were the case. No. What made her throb with need, what made her bite back a repressed moan over the operating table, was the idea of modifying herself further. Only when she fully embraced the idea of transforming herself—making herself faster, smarter, stronger, supplementing her humanity, surpassing her humanity, embracing the machine… only then did the hunger ebb, if only for a moment.
Part of her knew that she was being conditioned. Part of her assumed that some line of rogue coding, some nefarious MECH programming, must have made it through. She was being shaped to crave the very thing they were fighting. And… and she didn’t care. She wanted the pain to stop, wanted the fighting to stop. She wanted to feel good, to feel good forever, and… and if she could make her charges feel that good, too, shouldn’t she? Wasn’t it her duty?
Through the unending haze, the fog of sexual stimulation her life had become, Harrati had recurring fantasy—herself, made perfect, a host of spider-like appendages grafted onto her back, her body slim and sexual, her eyes determined to spread the love of MECH to her charges.
But it wasn’t just a fantasy, Harrati knew. It was a promise of the better future she was helping build. One day, one day very soon, they would see.
MECH was strong, and so was Harrat1.
Now this short is an oldy. I wrote it about four or five years ago and published it on Tumblr under another pseudonym. I was a little hesitant to republish it; it’s darker than my more modern fare, and it’s shorter than most of my stories. But some of y’all really dig more explicit bad ends, and my new flash fiction category is the perfect excuse to host the story again! I will add that, even this many years later, I’m pretty proud of the story; it’s the first point in my writing that I began to actively try to wed horny elements to more robust world building.