Shower X147A

Brigid knew she shouldn’t have.

She worked as a tester at a smart-shower company. The shows were ridiculously sophisticated, with high resolution screens in the walls combined with optics to create an illusion of depth, dozens of sprayers on robotic tentacles, and a fair number of controls even she didn’t understand.

There were persistent rumors about porn (especially since the shows *did* have cameras in them to help the automation find its user), but she was pretty sure it wasn’t true. She’d even searched the big porn sites a couple of times, and found nothing suspicious.

So she had shown in a recreation of Bridal-Veil Falls, Yosemite. Realistic in every detail except for temperature and her ability to stand in mid-air. Too realistic, she’d reported, as the gently wafting mist did not get her very clean. And she’d been shown from below by Old Faithful Geyser of Yellowstone, somewhat less realistically, as no one really wanted all that sulfur. And if anyone had been watching her, they hadn’t caused her any trouble over it so she didn’t mind that much.

There were also persistent rumors about “sex mode”. Which were more plausible. Who hadn’t used a simple hand-held high-pressure shower for sexual purposes at some point? And there were a set of protocols she didn’t have access to — greyed out in the selection list.

Most protocols had names. All had short alphanumeric codes. The greyed-out ones had codes that were X and a number — no names. This also lent credence to the “sex mode” theory.

So when Brigid’s friend and co-worker Amelia offered her an engineer’s login which she was too afraid to use herself, Brigid accepted it. (Earlier that day protocol “SA212: Showered By Elephants” had sprayed a great deal of water one foot to Amelia’s left, a distracted engineer had came in to debug it, and Amelia had casually observed and memorized the password. But despite her compulsive shoulder-surfing ways, Amelia had no use forthe credentials. And Brigid, maybe, did.)

So that evening, when everyone else went home, Brigid snuck back into the testing shows, used the engineer’s login, activated testing mode, and scrolled down. The X programs were available for running. Still no names.

She suspected she might only get one shot at this. And she guessed they would get more intensity as they went. With fear and excitement roiling in her stomach, she scrolled to the bottom and picked the last one: X147A.

The usual “Protocol loaded, enter when ready” message appeared. The shower cubicle looked like boring stone, with no hosts or actors visible. She stripped her clothes with practiced ease and stepped in.

Something like shoes folded around her feet. Rigid as ski-boots. Attached to the floor. Unremovable.

And that was when she knew she shouldn’t have done this.

Foot straps were not entirely without precedent. One mode based on ocean waves had used them for safety. But she had nothave been allowed to start that program until she’d demonstrated that she knew all the emergency cancellation commands. They were in the documentation for the mode.

There might be documentation for this mode. With similar commands. With her stolen credentials, she could have read it. She could have read *all* of it. For all the X modes. And then decided which if any to experience first-hand. That would have been the far wiser course of action.

Too late now.

The boots slide to force her legs apart. About twice should width, so not painful as such but extremely exposing of what lay between. As they moved, they also rotated her feet outward, which felt natural enough as a movement but also left her a bit unstable. Not that she could really fall, with the boots reaching almost to her knees.

Sex mode seemed pretty confirmed, and maybe this would all work out? Her breath was ragged and heavy, but this had potential.

Then the front and back walls closed in on her.

She wasn’t literally crushed. She could breathe, albeit with difficulty. Her feet were protected by the rotation of her ankles, and her head seemed to be fitting into a newly-formed indentation in the smart wall. Most painful were her breasts, large to begin with, now crushed between her ribs and the unforgiving pseudo-stone.

All protocols had to pass safety simulations before going on the human testing list. She’d skimmed a document she’d been supposed to read about it once. There’d been something about simulating with different body shapes. Did that include different breast sizes? Most of the female engineers on the project were pretty small, breast-wise, and might not have thought of it.

Could she get out? She tried all the emergency-stop codewords she could remember from other protocols. They re-used them sometimes. No luck.

“Stop. Cancel. Abort. Release. Pause.” — nothing.

The wall in front of her breasts opened vertically, creating a space specificy for them. She breathed a momentary sight of relief before the wall slammed down (and up) again, forming a tight seal and continuing to squeeze the base of her breasts. It was as if a great mouth had chomped on her and was keeping hold, though thankfully the “teeth” were dull. The crushing pain spread inward through her chest and into her throat. And, though she could not see them, she thought she could feel the fronts of her breasts ballooning outward. Even if the back wall were not pressed against her back, she’d be unable to pull them out.

There was movement at crotch-level. She couldn’t see it, but soon she felt a narrow, horizontal bar pressing up into her. Not pressing very hard, nor penetrating deep, but it was terribly narrow and splitting some rather sensitive anatomy.

Then the floor dropped away.

The boots dissassembled themselves in time. Most of her body weight now rested on that narrow bit of metal between her legs, with a small share supported by her clamped breasts. The pain of them being pulled away from her now mingled with the pain of them being held so tightly to begin with.

The optics engaged, and instead of a small stone box, she was dangling from a sheer cliff-face, hundreds of feet above a rocky shoreline pounded by crashing waves. *It’s an illusion* she reminded herself. Displays and lenses. The floor is still there. And yet it looked so real that Even if she could somehow wrong her breasts free, she wouldn’t dare try it.

For a time she just hung there. The cold winds off the sea whistled around her body. She could, by contorting her stomach with great effort, shift slightly which tormented erogenous zone held which fraction of her weight.

With less but still considerable effort she turned her head to look behind her and saw only sea and sky trailing off to infinity. Illusion or not, it left her feeling very small and vulnerable.

And since is *was* an effort to look behind her, she was taken by surpris when the first metal tendril struck her back. It didn’t crack, but laid horizontally across her flesh. A cat rather than a whip, if she recalled certain pedantic historical novels correctly. It seemed almost spiky. She didn’t dare turn her head to look at it, though. And she didn’t think she was bleeding. But would she know? In the burning sting the impact left behind, something as mundane as a cut would be easy to miss.

The next strike came half an inch lower, and with the strongest impact on her left rather than her right. More followed, always lower, alternative sides. It seemed her back only got more sensitive as it got lower. Then it turned into her butt which was more sensitive still.

She gritted her teeth and pressed her forehead into the wall in front of her. She would not scream. There might be people in the building and any investigation might lead back to Amelia. Amelia had trusted Brigid, and Brigid wasn’t going to repay that trust by turning official attentionion onto her. Just had to wait it out. The backs of her thighs were less sensitive, right?

They might be, but when the impacts reached her thighs, they reached one at a time, wrapping onto the inner thigh, which was considerably more sensitive. Or maybe that was the extra velocity of a wrap.

She had trouble holding in her whimpers at that point. But they were quiet whimpers.

Eventually the impact ended, perhaps six inches above her knees. She hung there for a second fearing what might come next. What came next was a deluge of extra-hot water across her entire back side, reigniting all the strokes she had received.

And then she hung there again. The soreness in her breasts re-asserting itself over the fading singing of her back. Again, the cold wind whistled around her now-wet body, and she shivered.

Was there any limit on how long a protocol could last?

She was in the process of seriously pondering that question when something sharp jabbed her leftnipple. Then her right. Then the underside of her left breast.

Then more jabs. Sometimes several in quick succession. Chaotic. Unpredictable. In an absolute sense, it wasn’t as painful as the whipping that preceeded it, or even the steady soreness in her crotch and breasts. But the unpredictability and blindness of it was driving her crazy.

As if in answer to this thought, a window opened in front of her eyes. She now saw her poor abused breasts, looking even more ballooned than she’d guessed, and quite dark red, with a multiitude of red dots where they’d been stalled. They were presented in a spectacularly well-lit space, as if it were a showroom.

A whirring sound drew her attention away from her breasts. It was one of the carwash-style spinners with many clothes strips, now oriented horizontally and spinning faster than she’d thought it could. The spinning increased, the whir rising in pitch and the clothes strips blurring. And still it sat, a handsbreadth from her helpless breasts. Some part of Brigid wanted to try to squirm back out of the way. More of her realized that would be the worst idea.

And the spinner jumped forward, bringing a downpour of blows on the tops of her breasts. The blows were too rapid for bouncing, but all her flesh was forced downward, and stretched against the courage of the clamp.

The spinner stopped. Brigid took the chance to catch her breath, but she knew in her heart this wasn’t a good thing. She was right. A few breaths later, the spinner reversed, striking upwards at the sensitive undersides of her breasts. This time her breasts did bounce, though not very far: up with the hit and down with gravity but only a short distance before the next hit arrived.

In time that stopped too. Brigid panted and shook. There had to be an end to this program, right?

The spinner retired a bit, then started spinning again in the open space. Then it started spinning even faster than before. It dropped a bit, thenadvanced slowly on a diagonal…

It was headed straight for her nipples.

That was too much. Brigid screamed.

“Help! Someone get me out of this thing!”

For a moment nothing, then she heard running footsteps approaching. And, just before contact, the spinner stopped approaching. Then, a bit later, stopped spinning.

In the resulting quiet, keystrokes were audible.

“Should I shut everything down and release you?” a mildly accented voice asked. Probably Thatsani, one of the engineers. The one whose password had started this mess, come to think of it. Hopefully she wouldn’t notice.

“Yes, please,” Brigid said, holding her voice as steady as she could.

“You’re in the A variant, so I’ll have to do it the hard way. Let’s see…”

The spinner retired into its socket. A moment later, the wall released her breasts and blood rushed in. A dozen lingering hurts suddenly made themselves very known. She flinched backwards, finally able to do so, andclapped her hands to her breasts as if to assure herself they were still there. The movement swung her backwards, but rather than fall she struck her upper back against the still-invisible but never-actually-distant back wall. A dozen recent welts there made themselves known too.

“Try to stay vertical,” the engineer said. Brigid tried.

The bar between her legs sank into the floor, and without warning her feet touched. It seemed unfair that *they* hurt at this, seeing as nothing had happened to them besides dangling for a time and then being asked to take her weight.

But then her labia *stopped* taking her weight, and the blood rushed back there and it hurt much, much more.

She collapsed to her knees. The door folded open (still displaying its illusion of a cliff face stretching away to infinity, though oddly distorted now) and Thatsani was indeed on the other side. She was kneeing on the floor, arms outstretched, worry lining her gentle face. “Come on, let’s get you out of there.”

Brigid crawled out of the stall and into Thatsani’s arms. Then she stayed there, trembling, trying and failing to pull herself together.

“How’d you wind up in X147?” Thatsani asked. Brigid didn’t answer.

Time stretched on and Thatsani looked back up at the control screen. “Hey, is that my login?”

Brigid pulled herself to a semblance of an upright seated position. “Can we just say I’ve been paid enough?” Brigid proposed weakly.

Thatsani thought for a moment. “Is this the only thing you did with my account?”

Brigid nodded urgently.

“OK, we can leave it at that. No harm done except to you, and if I don’t report it I don’t have to do paperwork.”

“Thank you”, Brigid said, collapse into Thatsani’s arms again.

Thatsani just held her for a time, and eventually spoke. “It’s funny… I’d started to doubt *anyone* besides me would ever try the X140 series. The other devs aren’t this hardcore; the testers, what few we have, noped out hard at the 130s; there’s not much of a market…”

“They come in series?”

“All the Xs are erotic. The three digit are kinky. Then each block of ten gets more intense. And the A variant has all the abort codes disabled.”

“Why have a variant like that?”

“Because part of what I’m looking for is being powerless. The fact that I made it all happen to myself detracts from that. Knowing roughly what’s going to happen (there’s randomization, but it’s from a list) detracts too. Being generally trapped, unable to stop it if I change my mind, that brings some of it back.”

“Well, if you do ever release it, I hope you put in some more safeguards against accidental activation.”

“Yeah, we’ll definitely need that.”

They sat in silence for a bit.

“Maybe I shouldn’t ask,” Thatsani said after a bit, “but since you are the second person ever to try it… Your thoughts on X147?”

Brigid gave a little laugh. “Well, it started kind ofscary and kind of sexy, and almost immediately switched to really scary, and then added really painful…. I guess I’m way outside of the target market. I can be a little kinky now and then, but I have trouble believing anyone would want to put themselves through that.”

“Yeah, that’s about what the other devs I showed the outline said. It’s hard to believe in us… Wanna watch me go through it?”

“Huh?”

“It’s a way to share it a little bit. And so you can know I’m not crazy, or that I am, but in the way I say I am.”

“Um, sure. Why not?”

Thatsani stripped to her underwear, paused, gave a mischievous smile and removed that too. She seemed oddly shy about this, given how brazen she’d been before, but perhaps this exact act was new. Or perhaps she was nervous about what was to come. She stood and entered some commands on the keyboard.

Brigid remained seated and took a proper look at Thatsani’s body. Thin, yes, but with some muscle and flawless dark skin.Brigid usually considered herself straight, but was getting a bit turned on here.

Thatsani entered the cubicle and closed the door, which she’d modified to be transparent so Brigid could watch. From the outside, it seemed much faster: the boots and wall-crush taking place almost immediately.

And then wall-mouth crashed down on Thatsani’s small, shaped breasts, seemingly even harder than in had on Brigid’s larger ones. That got Thatsani to let out a bit of a gasp…

But on her face was only bliss.