Chương 5: Cybertruck uses Bolt! [Maddy's first POV]

[Maddy's first POV] The dildo was making a sound. Specifically the suction cup was making the sound, because she had stuck it to the side of her IKEA bedside table at a bad angle, and every time she rocked forward it made a small wet farting sound, and every time it made the small wet farting sound she had to make a different sound on top of it to cover it up. This was the engineering problem.

The engineering problem was: how to fake-moan in a way that masked the small wet farting sound of an Umbreon-colored silicone dildo whose suction cup was failing on a slick wooden surface, while also not looking at the camera, while also not letting her face be seen, while also keeping her breathing in a rhythm that signaled to seven hundred and forty-three paying viewers that she was almost there. The viewers were paying $14. 99 a month. Some of them were paying more.

There was a tier called Inner Circle that cost $129. 99 a month and got you weekly custom content and a "personal voice note from Maddy." There were eighty-two people in Inner Circle. There was a higher tier called Goddess Tier that cost $1, 499 a month and got you a monthly "video reply." There were three people in Goddess Tier. They were named LordGeofferson, RezeFan4ever, and a guy who had simply named himself "y." y paid one thousand four hundred and ninety-nine dollars a month. For a video reply.

The fact that y existed was sometimes the only reason Maddy could keep doing this. The fact that there was a man on this planet with enough money to pay her monthly Uber Eats budget for a single monthly video where she said thank you so much for your support y meant the economy was broken in a way that personally benefited her, which was the only kind of broken economy worth participating in. She bounced. The dildo farted. She moaned.

She kept her eyes on the poster on the wall above the camera, which was a poster of Reshiram and Zekrom in their box-art legendary poses, opposite each other, white dragon and black dragon, truth and ideals. Yin and fucking Yang. Reshiram's flame tail was lovingly rendered. Zekrom's lightning tail was also lovingly rendered. She had paid forty-three dollars for this poster on Etsy. It had been worth every penny. It was the centerpiece of the room.

It was also the only thing she could look at without breaking character. She had tried looking at the wall. The wall reminded her she lived in a six-hundred-square-foot apartment with a radiator that screamed at 3am. She had tried looking at her plushie shelf. Umbreon, Espeon, Sylveon, two different Eevees, a tiny Mimikyu, a Snorlax the size of a microwave that her ex had bought her and that she had refused to throw out because it was not the Snorlax's fault.

The plushie shelf made her sad because the plushies had to watch this. She had tried going on autopilot, just letting the sounds happen while her brain went somewhere else. Autopilot was a mistake. The second she checked out her voice went flat, and the chat could hear it: u good queen, she not feelin it tonight, lol RIP donos —because the whole goon economy ran on her sounding like she meant it.

The discord mods, the reddit mods, the small-dicked goon army of failsons whose disposable income was being aggressively redistributed into her checking account. They needed to feel like she was into it. So she looked at Reshiram and Zekrom. She had a system. The system was: bounce three times, exhale, bounce twice, exhale louder, hand to hair, don't show face, shoulder roll, bounce once, moan, bounce three times, repeat. She was on cycle four. The dildo farted again.

"Oh—oh god—yeah—" she said, into the mic clipped between her tits. In the chat, LordGeofferson typed u like that princess. She did not respond because responding would break the illusion. The illusion was that she had transcended the chat. The illusion was that she was alone with the dick and the dick was real and the dick was making her have a transcendent experience. LordGeofferson understood this on some level, which was why he kept paying $1, 499 a month. But he was a problem.

He wasn't THE problem, but he was a problem. The actual problem, the macro problem, was that her revenue had dropped twenty-six percent in the last four months. She had run the numbers. She ran the numbers every Friday. She had a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet had columns for monthly recurring subscribers, pay-per-view sales, custom content revenue, tip revenue, and a column called "WHALES" which tracked y and the other Goddess Tier guys. The spreadsheet had a line graph.

The line graph had been going up and to the right for two years, since her freshman year, and four months ago the line graph had developed a downward bend. Twenty-six percent down. Twenty-six. She had identified the variable. The variable was AI. The variable was a website she would not name and a few of its competitors which had figured out how to generate naked women who didn't exist, with custom faces, custom bodies, custom kinks, on demand, for a one-time payment of $9.

99 or sometimes for free, and her viewers—her loyal, paying, discord-modding, mother-living-with viewers—had started to defect, because why pay $14. 99 a month to watch a real woman who refused to show her face when you could pay $9. 99 once and have a fake woman who would show you anything. Clankers. Fucking clankers. She bounced. She moaned. The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon. Her left thigh was starting to cramp.

The thing about the clankers was that they had no taste. The thing about the clankers was that they had no soul.

The thing about the clankers was that they had been trained on her, on her and on women like her, on millions of hours of porn made by real women who had real lives and real student loans and real left thigh cramps, and now the clankers were eating their lunch, and her viewers—her viewers who had once understood, at a fundamental level, that they were participating in an exchange with a human being—were apparently very fine with this. At least beat your sorry dicks to real fucking girls.

At least respect the fucking art. The dildo farted.

"FUCK," she said, in character.

"Fuck oh god I'm—I'm gonna—I'm so close—" She wasn't. Of course she wasn't. She hadn't had a real orgasm with another person present, even a virtual one, in about a year. Her orgasms were strictly off-camera affairs, conducted with a vibrator she had named Clitachu, under a weighted blanket, with the lights off, while thinking about absolutely nothing. Her on-camera "orgasms" were a piece of choreography. She had researched them. She had watched real orgasm clips for tonal reference.

She had practiced the sounds in her car. She had a checklist. Build crescendo. Shaking voice. Three rapid bounces. Long exhale. Half-sob. Well those were optional. Collapse forward. She executed the checklist now. The crescendo went up. Her voice did the shaking thing.

She bounced three times rapid-fire and the suction cup gave a wet, definitive fart that she covered with a long crescendoing moan, and she half-sobbed because tonight felt like a half-sob night, and she collapsed forward onto her elbows on her bed, across the camera lens just enough to obscure anything identifying. She lay there for the appropriate twelve seconds, breathing heavily, while the chat exploded. holy fuck god damn love u princess OMGGGG best $1500 i ever spent —that was y.

y, with his measured calm, his Goddess Tier prose. She let herself smile for a half-second because nobody could see her face.

"That was so good guys," she said into the mic, breath theatrical.

"That was so good. Thank you. Thank you so much for being here with me tonight. I love you guys." She reached for the laptop without looking at the camera. She clicked End Stream. The little red light went off. The chat froze. She sat up. She looked at the dildo. The dildo was still attached to the bedside table. The dildo was glistening.

The dildo was named Bolt because she had named it after Zekrom even though it was Umbreon-colored, which was a personal mistake she had made early in the dildo's career and had committed to. She peeled Bolt off the bedside table with a SHLOCK sound that no one was around to hear except her plushies. She dropped Bolt on the floor. She would deal with Bolt later. She turned in her desk chair and gave all three of her monitors an aggressive double middle finger. She did this every time. It was part of the ritual.

It was a small private act of resistance against the entire industry she was now a part of, against the discord mods and the reddit mods and the clankers and the algorithm and the spreadsheet line going down and the fact that her left thigh was now actually fully cramped. She held the middle fingers for a count of five. Then she rolled her chair sideways to the third monitor. The third monitor was open to a ChatGPT conversation. The conversation was for her Stochastic Processes assignment, due tomorrow at 9am.

She had thirteen problems left and class was in forty minutes and she had not started. She squinted at the screen. The conversation was titled help me with this convex optimization problem pls. Her last message to ChatGPT had been but explain it like i'm five because i am dying. ChatGPT had replied with a four-paragraph response that began Of course! Let's break this down. Sparkle. There was the sparkle emoji. There it was. The fucking sparkle emoji.

She had grown to hate the sparkle emoji over the last eighteen months in a way that felt biological. The sparkle emoji was a personality affectation that ChatGPT had decided was its thing, and Maddy could not articulate why it pissed her off so much, but it did, on a cellular level.

"Fuck you you stupid clanker," she muttered. She paused. She squinted.

"Well. Not… you. You're like, somewhat useful. Still a clanker." She closed the laptop. She had to go to class. She had to physically be in a room with a man named Dr. Yen in forty minutes for a lecture on Markov chains and she was currently naked. Engineering problem. Solve. She rolled to her closet. She pulled out the pile that lived on the chair beside her closet, which was the closest thing she had to a laundry system, and pulled out the pink crop top and yeeted it on her bed.

She stepped into the denim shorts that were maybe one inch too short for a late-October Tuesday but the apartment radiator screamed at 3am which meant she was always overheated anyway, so. She pulled on a sports bra. She didn't put on underwear because if you were wearing shorts this short, panties were just an upcharge. She grabbed her pink crop top back and put it on.

She grabbed her white Air Force 1s, which were her good shoes, the shoes she had bought herself with her first month of stream revenue back in sophomore year as a small act of dignity, and she shoved her feet into them without bothering with socks. The blue sunglasses lived on her dresser. Tinted, thin frame, a vibe rather than a function.

She put them on top of her head because it was dark outside, but also because the apartment building hallway had aggressive fluorescent lighting that she did not feel like making eye contact with. She looked like a fucking slut. Fuck it. She grabbed an energy drink from the mini fridge. Monster Ultra Paradise. The green one. She cracked it open and chugged half of it walking to the door. She opened the door. She stepped into the hallway. She closed the door.

Outside the building, the air was cold and the streetlights were on and her breath made a small visible cloud, and the energy drink was hitting her empty stomach in a way that her doctor would have had opinions about, and across the street a Cybertruck was turning the corner. She hated Cybertrucks. She hated them on principle. She hated them as an engineer. She hated them as a person.

They were big stupid grey metal trapezoids that looked like a six-year-old had drawn a truck on grid paper, and they had been engineered by men who had clearly never spoken to a woman about how a car should look, and they were the personal vehicle of the worst kind of guy, the kind of guy who would unironically tell you about his "GitHub projects." She looked at the Cybertruck for two seconds. Fucking ugly metal shitbox. She turned away. She started walking down the block toward the bus stop. She got six steps.

She stopped. Her laptop. She had left her laptop on her desk. Her lapto with the Stochastic Processes assignment open in fifteen tabs. Her laptop that she needed to take notes in during class. Her laptop that contained her entire academic life, her stream's editing software, her spreadsheet, her tax records, eleven years of saved Pokémon ROM files, and a folder called PERSONAL that she would die before letting anyone access.

"Fuck." She turned around. She walked back. She unlocked the door. She walked into her apartment. Her apartment was dark because she had turned the lights off on the way out. She flicked them back on. The lights came up. There was Bolt. On the floor. Still glistening. She stopped. She looked at Bolt. If I die tonight and someone finds my apartment, they are going to find a wet Umbreon-colored dildo on the floor next to a Reshiram and Zekrom poster, and that's going to be the headline. She walked over.

She bent down to pick up Bolt. There was a sound from outside. The sound was a sound she did not have a frame of reference for. It was the sound of a metal trapezoid the size of a small house traveling at a speed that metal trapezoids the size of small houses should not be able to achieve, getting suddenly, dramatically, exponentially louder, until the sound was not a sound from outside but a sound from inside, and the wall to her left did something walls were not designed to do. The wall came in.

The wall came in fast. The wall came in with a Cybertruck behind it. Maddy was bent over with Bolt in her right hand and her left hand on the floor and the Cybertruck hit her at a speed that the laws of physics had specific opinions about, and the last thing she thought, the very last thing, with her engineer brain in its final firing of neurons before the lights went out, was— Second floor. I live on the second floor. How the fuck. Maddy died.