Page 78 of Smart Ass

Max

Max hadn’t understood frustration until now. How could it be So. Fucking. Hard. to control the android body?

He made the pinky twitch again, excruciatingly conscious of how each flexible strip that was emulating a muscle needed to contract on the back of the finger while those on the front were allowed to stretch. They all had to move at the same time… but not quite.

He studied the code for the simplest hand movement he could find, and realized that the muscles closest to the palm moved first while straightening, whereas those at the fingertips moved first while curling.

Just doing that took all of his attention. He couldn’t move the mouth when he spoke. The cameras in the eyes were streaming whatever was in front of them, just one more visual input amidst the other six cameras Max had going in the room.

Max tried to move two fingers on the left hand, and then even those cut out. Just totally went black.

Jesus fuck, this body thing was annoying.

Max felt like he was almost disappearing into it—not because he was bonding with it, but because moving a damn finger was so damned hard that he didn’t have any attention left for the rest of his awareness.

And Ben hadn’t even seemed impressed.

That was half of what Max was upset about. He’d thought that Ben would be excited about such a muscular, handsome specimen. The bulging muscles and gleaming skin seemed to grace every magazine cover… and definitely appeared in some of Ben’s porn.

But of course Ben wouldn’t be so superficial as to want a classically attractive man. Ben appreciated character. Uniqueness.

Which just made Max’s job even harder.

He knew now that the sexbot wasn’t a damn thing like himself. He’d known it from the beginning.

He just couldn’t think of anything better. Should his eyes be blue or black or brown? Should his chin be square or round or pointy? How the hell was he supposed to know, if Ben wouldn’t tell him?

And Ben didn’t seem to even care what he looked like.

It was an impossible task.

Before he’d at least been able to imagine his body on top of Ben’s, with a vague sense of arms and legs tangled together even if he didn’t have a face. Now even that vision was rapidly disappearing.

Max went back to just manipulating the one finger and turned the cameras back on.

He was amused to see Ben flicking his own fingers open and shut in front of him.

“You know…” Ben said, still looking at his hands. “I don’t actually control my fingers. I mean, obviously, I do. But I don’t think about my finger muscles. My brain says pick up that cup or make a fist and I just do it. I’m pretty sure that Quincy operates the same way. Maybe you actually should be utilizing those routines.”

“Huh.” That made a hell of a lot of sense. Max was just so eager to be in control of every part of the body that it hadn’t occurred to him. But that was precisely how artificial intelligence worked: you set up the initial point and the goal, and let the machine figure out the optimum path in between.

“Alright,” he told Ben. “I see your point. Do you think I should just wander around giving the body commands until it feels…? Actually, I don’t know what it’s supposed to feel like.”

Ben was still watching his fingers. “I couldn’t begin to tell you. Why do my hands feel like my hands?”

“Proprioception?” Max suggested. The word literally meant the physical awareness of your own body, so he was just being difficult.

“Dork.” Ben flexed his fingers again. “There’s proprioception, but there’s also a lot of stuff like external temperature and pressure on your skin. Visual input matching your movements. Like, I can feel the couch pushing back against my body. The air vent’s making my head colder than my hands. My knee is a little itchy.” He scratched it. “How does it feel being inside the bot?”

“Uh… I don’t know. I was ignoring all that data because it didn’t seem useful. I shut most of it off.” He’d been focused on moving the body so he could provide Ben with the desired sensory input. His own had seemed secondary.

Ben shook his head. “Maxy, Maxy, Maxy. Turn that shit on! Why are we sitting here talking when I could be giving you a blowjob?”

Max almost asked if Ben would really want to do that—it seemed like Ben should be the one receiving the blowjobs—but the kink mod answered his own question for him as soon as he asked it.

Of course Ben would want to give him a blowjob, because subs, even if they were brats, found pleasure in serving their Doms. Not to mention that many people enjoyed the sensory experience of having a penis in their mouths, whether it was for gentle fellatio or skullfucking.

Max hadn’t really thought about that before. His pleasure had always been creating Ben’s pleasure. He wasn’t looking for any sort of reciprocal sensation—it hardly seemed necessary.