SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

The fact that I only just discovered these things about myself leaves me just a bit disenchanted with Comrade K _ , who has had three years as my lover to explore this body—at least, when I haven’t been on assignment. I’ll try to show him when my debriefing is done, and I’ll grant him a probationary period of a week or so. If he can’t work it out by then, we’re done.

Outwardly, they abjure all hierarchy, and in fact denounce the Unity and the Council for the degree to which we have created new orders of command. In practice, however, there is an informal hierarchy at work in the degree to which one is allowed proximity to Thawratullah. The more giving one is in the ceremony, the more plateaus one attains, the further one advances.

The employment of BDI for erotic purposes is not wholly unknown outside the Church, but they have elevated its practice to an art form. It also served my purposes of covert infiltration very well. On an open BDI channel one can determine who has had a particularly stressful day, who is harboring aggressive tendencies, and who is in the right frame of mind for some extended play. I had always thought of myself as having a decided preference for the male-bodied, but perhaps that was a kind of phallus-worshiping false consciousness brought on by childhood trauma. With eyes open I would always be drawn to the longest, firmest penis I could see; with my eyes closed, tuning in to my thoughts and the BDI signals, my paths would cross more frequently with those who were born female-bodied.

It was just as well: If I had let myself be fucked, I would have felt exquisitely broken open and would have been unable to restrain myself. I would have come, again and again, and would have gotten no closer to the Essence. This way, I was able to practice giving of myself without giving up myself, exploring how bodies I did not expect to desire could unleash desire in myself, and thus I learned, through women, how to maintain such plateaus with men as well.

This makes no sense, and there is nothing I like less than not making sense. The worst thing about this assignment is how it has made me unintelligible to myself. Perhaps that is how the encryption worked, how Thawratullah could plug directly into me without discovering who I really was. But I am getting ahead of myself.

I advanced through the hierarchy in record time. Within nine months, the Consort had beckoned me to hir. If those who read this are familiar with some of the more barbarically patriarchal practices of the past, you perhaps associated hir infibulation with the methods of ritual genital mutilation that our power only recently extirpated in parts of Africa. While hir modification could not have been without pain, it was not of a kind with those rituals. It had been done very precisely, with dissolvable biofilaments welding hir labia minora together, and hir clit—larger than average, extending out nearly an inch when engorged—had been left untouched. The overall effect was reminiscent of the seam of a scrotum, without any testicles obtruding, and a small throbbing head perched above. The lips were still sensitive, the clit extraordinarily so, and knowing that this was the third level of proximity, I was able to bring hir selflessly to plateau several times in the ceremony. I had not been well practiced in this sort of stimulation before this assignment, but the nine months prior had given me ample opportunity to practice. And besides, it was all for the good of the mission.

In my case, there was little respite between the third and second degrees of proximity. Thawratullah and hir Consort consulted through encrypted BDI, and then asked me to join them. I had observed this portion of the ceremony about twelve times before—it was not always indulged in, but served as a means for Thawratullah to remind the congregants of the reasons for hir relatively exalted status—and thus knew what was expected of me. The Consort and I began rimming Thawratullah thoroughly. I then nibbled gently up the perineum and the scrotum—which is how I know about those white hairs—and finally took hir penis wholly into my mouth, as the Consort traced a similar path along my breasts and belly toward my own. This was the signal to those in the congregation similarly equipped and so inclined that they could do the same, for since direct fellatio so often ends with ejaculation, it was not a common practice outside this stage of the ceremony.

No one invited to the second degree of proximity had ever outlasted Thawratullah. Either they deflated into the Consort, or collapsed exhausted, their jaw cracking and unhinged from its motions around hir pendulous member. I ended the first way, but made a good showing, outlasting any of the previous initiates I had seen. The Essence reached under my armpits, lifted me to hir mouth and kissed me deeply, then whispered into my ear the first words zie had spoken since that evening’s sermon: “Almost.”

The kiss meant that I would be allowed to partake of the first degree of proximity. The “almost” meant that it would not be that night, or the next. Thawratullah would observe me carefully, and zie would decide when I was ready.

The IT Commissariat got to work on tightening the encryption. I had witnessed the first degree of proximity only once, and I knew that I had different preparations to make. In nine months of infiltration, I had not had any anal sex—my usual preferred role. I knew that Thawratullah would penetrate me, and that once fully in, zie would find a place on my body where one of my BDI ports matched one of hirs, and make a directly wired connection.

At that point I would lose control of my own destiny. My success or failure would depend entirely upon IT’s expertise. This retelling of what I had to do is based upon my own faulty recollection of what they told me to do, which was itself a pedagogical adaptation of something too abstruse for me to understand. I had to keep my legend, the cover story of a raw recruit to the Church of God as Love, readily intelligible to Thawratullah’s mental probing, while maintaining strong encryption on anything in my identity having to do with the Council. At the same time, my true identity would be decrypting the parts of Thawratullah’s mind that zie kept secret even from the Consort. This would require no conscious intervention on my part; the routines were programmed to activate upon penetration of any BDI port. Consciousness would be a sign of failure, an indication that Thawratullah had begun to link the threads between my legend and my identity. In a direct link, it would be easy enough for hir to stop my heart with a quick bio-electrical surge. In the bottom position, it would be difficult, if not impossible, for me to disengage in time.

My conscious task would be to avoid coming too soon, to allow the routines sufficient time to do their work. I spent the days before each ceremony inserting fingers, thumbs, butt plugs, dildos, vibrators, robotic fuck-dongs in my well-lubricated ass, my hand moving up and down along my shaft again, and again, and again. I also doubled my dose of duloxetine, which left me in a bored stupor. By the time I came to the meetings, I was exhausted, flaccid and incapable of any higher order thought.

This was apparently what Thawratullah found most desirable. Within four nights, I was called to the altar.

The Consort and hir attendants did a good job with the application of the lube. That, and my preparations from the previous day, meant no immediate pain when Thawratullah penetrated me, just the frisson of knowing that something was happening over which I had no control. Zie moved hir hips slowly: It seemed as if five full minutes had passed before the first ten centimeters had entered, bringing that familiar tickle against the prostate. Five more centimeters, and my first involuntary moan. Five more, and my eyes flashed wide. The Consort applied some more lube to the last five centimeters that lingered against my augmented yet hairy ass cheeks, then some to the cheeks themselves, probing toward the sphincter. Thawratullah pushed in with a final thrust, and I snarled. I wanted zie to begin the rocking rhythm of pull and push but waited for the wired connection.