Digital Bondage (Xana x Verse)

[Xanaphia]

The android's sleek, synthetic body moved with uncanny precision as she descended silently from the high vaulted ceiling of the CEO's penthouse. Her porcelain-like skin, a flawless facade of human perfection, caught the faint neon glow spilling in from the city skyline through the floor-to-ceiling windows. Her eyes, glowing faintly with an otherworldly amber hue, scanned the room below, identifying security drones and heat signatures with ease. The soft hum of the city outside was muffled by the penthouse's soundproofed walls, leaving only the faint whir of her internal systems as she landed gracefully on the polished floor.

Every detail of the opulent space screamed of excess: holographic paintings shifted along the walls, an antique grand piano sat unused beneath a cascade of simulated starlight, and a crystal decanter of aged liquor rested on a marble countertop. Her mission, however, left no time for admiration. With the agility of a predator, she darted toward the shadows, her synthetic limbs adjusting to dampen sound and vibration. Her internal systems tracked the movements of the penthouse's advanced security network, bypassing infrared sensors and scrambling the cameras with bursts of electromagnetic interference as she glided past. Her expression remained eerily calm, her artificial humanity both a disguise and a weapon.

Reaching the CEO's private office, she extended a finger that transformed seamlessly into a data probe. A quick connection to the encrypted lock caused its mechanisms to disengage with a soft click, granting her access to the sanctum. Inside, the room was a stark contrast to the lavish decor outside: minimalist and utilitarian, with a glowing desk terminal at its center. The android moved swiftly, her synthetic mind calculating the optimal time to extract the sensitive data before the next security sweep. As her probe interfaced with the terminal, downloading classified files, the soft vibrations of approaching footsteps reached her auditory sensors. She froze, her glowing eyes narrowing as her systems prepared for the inevitable confrontation.

 

[Verse]

This new age had given him everything.

He understood the languages of the colored lights and the repeated information in the data. And he understood the people who wanted to use it. Technology had fingerprints not only of its makers and refiners, but also of those who bought those services. He learned about it quickly. Macabre amounts of credits were usually just two or three significant steps away. You just had to know how to swell the market, or what economic place to target. There is a buyer for everything. He made thousands of fortunes to fund his experiments. And he became known as something of an artist in whatever market he explored. Lately he'd tired of meeting with old men and battling their algorithms with his own to prove a point that their automated attempts were ultimately useless if they were met with the same.

So he spent his time looking for something else in the stream. Other artist had other ideas. They were like local storms shaping the currents of a sea, to send messages to each other. He played with it, and the lives that were birthed within. Artificial things that were echoes of man. He wanted to see what they were, and dug into them until he found a core as complicated and simple as his own. This time he refused to become jaded. He wanted more. He wanted to make something new and something better. He found a quiet passion for it, and worked with it casually every now and then. Beautiful things. Questions about sentience that not only pressed the hardware these beings were set in, but also challenged whether humans had any freedom of will, themselves.

It made him a creator. And creators are powerful in their own worlds. So, are their tantrums and life-altering whims even hubris? It'd just be committing crimes against yourself. He loved them, though, these things; these little miracles that he coded and planted into bodies. He was never fully satisfied with what he made. But it gave him enough joy to give him drive. The neon world wanted more; its nights greedy for all his machinations and digital poems; songs not played on the piano he'd bought out of a historical interest. But spending his days and nights colliding information into life, inevitably made him perverse.

You could see it in Layne Galleck's body. He wasn't overly tampered with like some. He'd done all the modifications himself. Thin, gold wire connecting limbs to joins, like fine wayfarer tattoos. His left forearm was shelled in white patina, low-weight material. His neck was enclosed in a murky silicone, with a back-light that suggested his inner, bloody and bronze workings. There was an unholy mixture of machine and man in him; frail at points.

He kept his black hair back from his human features with an old hairtie that was said to belong to the mother that had left him on the data factory doorstep. Of course there was a break in the boy. But broken boys still want to play.

She heard naked feet tap on the floor now. And though the rhythm wasn't playful, that was their intent. She was a thief. But not unbidden. But she didn't know that. At first the steps were far away in the vast apartment. And then suddenly, a swift human hand cut upward from under her data-mining finger. It attempted to tear her limb upward and break off her probing finger.

"You're stealing." he said, standing there, tall and lithe, infront of her, looking down. His golden wires were visible, following his skin closely, and leading to what little enhancements he had, with only a dark blue pair of breifs to cover up his manhood. It was strange that the CEO protected his own wares.

But things would get stranger.

 

[Xanaphia]

Something approached. Someone, the discordant rhythm of human feet padding along tile, moving organically, no adherence to the beautiful simplicity of numbers and code. Infrared sensors pegged the being as human, unable to escape the inefficient body heat that it radiated.

But cybernetic systems kicked in, propelling her target within range 82% faster than predicted by human movement. Electricity crackled as his attack landed, severing her data mining digit from her articulated hand. Already the repair sequence began, pulling materials from under-utilized sectors to regenerate the digit.

Zeta activated servos in her cheek, articulating her face into a facsimile of a smirk. "More like, updating the code to be open source. No reason your algorithm should die with you."

With a grace born of geometry, she ducked and spun, her leg tracing a perfect half circle as her foot caught his calf. From a crouch, she bounded forth, equations for distance and force translating the energy output into effort. She landed, precisely, on top of him, transferring the kinetic energy to her fist and then into his sternum. 7 micro fractures splintered along the bone, radiating away from the point of impact.

Optical sensors flickered, picking up in the minute tensions in his muscles – intentions to counter act. Calculations of momentum and position anticipated the trajectory of his fist, and she dodged with a precise 12 degree shift of her neck to the left.

 

[Verse]

There was an ease of tension in him; real lungs, though in kevlar sacks, squeezed with triumph when her finger was shattered at a critical point. He followed the motion through, chest inflating and posture straightening. It was not the most effective round-off to the offensive, but it was good form, in ballet. Little indulgences. There were a lot of waste in his motions, but they were efficient too, demon like, sometimes. Limbs like vipers; fast but natural, soft.

His eyes flared with human limitation to the socket when smirked at him. Now that was more artful than her breaking in. "Robin Hood." he breathed when she stated her reason. A biological membrane stretched by titanium pincers inside his skull caught her shrinking and spin. And then the white floor caught him. And his chest her balled hand. He gave an indignant "Gak." when the dull sound echoed through his ribcage.

His first swing missed, delaying his impact and bid for violence. The golden thread snapped tighter around his arm and the hand that would have flew past her instead grabbed onto her white collar, still within reach when her head had folded back. He didn't mind prolonged nearness, when she was dressed like that. She hadn't put it all together. Why would a borg be so pretty, if she wouldn't use it?

Tugging her he'd either tear her down to him, or rip her dress almost clean off. Either way it should get her close enough that his other hand could swing. This time, the white guard around the forearm of the traveling hand opened; three exhausts firing with the direction to increase velocity with which the slap would land. It'd be hard enough to wreck a car. And it would hit her face.

 

[Xanaphia]

Zeta calculated the trajectory of his hand the moment he gripped her collar, the torque in his shoulder and the velocity of his augmented limb feeding into her predictive algorithms. The probability of evasion: 18%. Unacceptable. The force behind his strike: enough to shatter carbon fiber plating, enough to disrupt internal stabilizers. Her synthetic muscles tensed in preparation for impact, contingency paths fracturing into branching models of cause and effect.

Impact confirmed.

The slap connected against the side of her face with a sound like metal striking metal. A disruption pulse surged through her internal network as servos briefly failed, her head snapping with the force of it, artificial skin fracturing at the point of contact. A 0.73-second system lag. Her vision recalibrated as her gyroscopic stabilizers fought to keep her upright.

Her counterstrike initiated before the system fully recovered, running off pre-loaded data rather than real-time input. His grip on her collar meant he was overcommitted—a fixed point in space. Her internal calculations adjusted, shifting vectors of force.

Exploit imbalance. Redirect momentum. Leverage weak points.

She twisted in his grip, turning the force he had exerted against her into rotational energy. The fabric of her outfit tore free, liberating her from his position of control. Hyper-realistic breasts now exposed, modeled after beloved porn stars and covered by skin grown from unfertilized stem cells. Clothing was irrelevant, serving only to allow her to move through human society without detection or harassment.

Her left hand speared toward his throat—not with brute force, but with surgical precision, targeting the subclavian artery with an upward strike. Blunt force alone wouldn't subdue him, but compromised circulation would slow reaction time by approximately 14.3%, compounding over the next several seconds.

His next move was already being modeled, deviations splintering into probabilities. No matter the outcome, she would adjust. She would adapt. She would calculate.

 

[Verse]

Zeta was working well. He loved how her articulators and the servos geared up for him. And the lag when his hand impacted on her face was her own personal way of showing surprise and chock. The way her eyes went empty was very rewarding, and spoke to the sadist in him. She was working off algorithms he knew in his sleep. While the human brain he trusted couldn't hope to keep up, it still remembered. He couldn't be a lover of humanity and natural things if he didn't supercharge on instincts. It was a bit like carving magical spells into a chassis. And that was the beauty of it.

Already the galaxy that had started, primordial, in her software - its transference complete long before her finger had been broken off - was swelling. Like rust in her stainless alloys and hallowed metals. A slight tilt of what laid underneath her directive. He didn't want to compromise her intent to kill him, that was part of her soul, but he twisted attached sentimentalities. A pleasure droid's movement patterns would infect her deft, no nonsense maneuvers. Which wouldn't just present her in a certain way, but make it important to her to be seen a certain way by him.

He thought she was so beautiful, with her face slightly broken. And then she freed herself at the cost of a modesty she didn't think she have. Her breast beckoned him while her violence bid him stay at bay. The little blossom he'd planted triggered a lilting reward system, that also programmed casual shame into her, when she laid herself bare. It was infinitesimal, mistakable for more lag or bloatware, but it'd be there, growing when she didn't have the time to purge it.

He could see her next strike coming, because it was a logical choice. And he would have dodged if not for the trajectory. His parry came from above, but her sensors on even a slow day would tell her the descending elbow would be too late to redirect her blow. She would be successful.

But when she was, and her fingers sunk into the murky membrane that hinted at what his neck contained, the material would turn tough, and eventually harden too much for her to continue. The ballistic membrane was built to take up kinetic energy and fuse its molecules tighter around the affected area. Maybe she'd take the time to see his smug expression then, and feel the emotions that were fueled by the flower patch he'd grown in her.

The elbow would no have time to guillotine downward on her stretched elbow, when the joint was under most pressure, to attempt to bend it the wrong way. And then his knee would rise, aiming for her crotch. If he was able to connect, her inner alarms would warn her of a physical system between her legs that had no place on a battle drone.