Hey folks, First time/long time.
When I began this a few days ago, the intent was just whipping out a quick fapfic, but it refused to stay that way and stubbornly morphed into a full narrative arc. I finally gave in, and I’m in the middle of a rewrite.
I’ve finished the first act, and I figured that hearing some opinions/suggestions from others certainly wouldn’t hurt. I would really appreciate your gentle but honest constructive feedback. Thx!
*Please forgive any rough formatting
*****
404: Human Not Found
Part I
The loft was way too empty.
Jack had plenty of furniture for his needs; it still felt too empty. It often felt that way at 02:00 in the morning, when the only sounds were the quiet buzz of the old flatscreen and the fan in his computer.
The loft at 404 Industrial Boulevard had seemed like manna from heaven when he signed the lease:high ceilings, exposed brick, concrete floors, huge factory windows, the whole “urban monk” aesthetic. Perfectly timed as well – he had just married Javier, a man who was almost too perfect a match. He had seemed as excited as Jack was to move in.
The old flatscreen TV was mounted on the wall to Jack’s right, casting flickering blue light around the common room. The title card for “The Thing (From Another World) flashed onto its screen. Jack had seen it a dozen times; it was a cheesy B movie classic. Credits marched across the screen in front of a silently howling arctic wind, ghosts of another era.
Jack sat in his Aeron chair, wearing an old Air Force t-shirt and black compression pants. He was staring off into the distance, a half-full tumbler of Mountain Dew & Maker’s sitting in a wet ring on his desk. His latest structural updates, a project he took for its simplicity and quick paycheck, filled his primary workstation display behind three open windows that were definitely off-task: porn sites all.
He maximized the front window, not even looking as he scrolled, one pic blurring into another. It seemed like nothing could hold his attention for long these days; New contracts, porn, a different “guest” every few nights. It felt like following old ruts down a dirt road at night. Everything blurred into a parade of time flying by.
It had been a little over two years since everything fell apart; it seemed like yesterday. The Sheriff’s patrol car in the front lot; the quiet knock at his door; the deputy, holding his hat, giving Jack the details, hesitantly asking if he would mind coming in to identify Javier’s body.
The original developer had inspiring plans for 404. That was the name, just 404, a giant back-lit blue number mounted on the facade, hovering above the newly-restored mid-century lobby entrance. It looked like a sure thing - a high-end mixed-use conversion, colorful renderings, “Live/Work/Thrive” banners. It felt so solid that Jack didn’t think twice about leasing their new home there – Loft 3E.
Then tariffs went up, the economy went down, financing vanished. One by one, the lights went out. The leasing office closed, website went offline. The small above-ground parking area emptied and stayed that way.
Less than a month after burying Javier, jack received the call from the project’s CFO with the bad news. But Jack was still here. He never received a notice to vacate. His autopay for rent still cleared every month, so he stayed.
At the dead end of an abandoned industrial street, in a building no one seemed to remember, inside a loft that was starting to feel like a cage.
His finger hovered over the mouse button. He clicked past a thumbnail of a guy who looked a little like his latest FWB, then paused, went back, and kept scrolling anyway. Familiarity was half the problem.
A banner appeared from the bottom of the screen as generic men scrolled by. He almost missed it.
kinx.xxx - Apex Penetrator™ PRO GRADE // FREE NEXT-DAY DELIVERY
The domain stuck in his brain exactly as designed: short, tacky, a little too on the nose. He knew most of the usual sites by heart. He’d never even heard of this one. Jack hesitated a moment, then clicked.
A new window opened on a black field with an elegantly simple white logo. No branding, no slogan, no soft-porn copy. A grid of product thumbnails quickly appeared just below.
He scrolled, feeling oddly exposed. The page design was minimal, almost no text at all. Just a drop-down category list and a search bar.
The thumbnails were obviously a set: sleek, dark blue velvet background. Some of the usual anatomic replicas, some abstract, some looked like biomechanical art pieces. They were priced just below what you might expect for the apparent quality, but high enough to register as a bargain without raising any doubts.
He was about to scroll past when it caught his eye. The thumbnail was small, but it may as well have been glowing. A length of black that wasn’t quite smooth. Ridges and seams sculpted into it in a way that suggested both mechanoid parts and living tissue. No outsized veins, no silver detail or neon accents; it looked like an H.R. Giger design, from a day he was feeling subtle.
APEX PENETRATOR™, the listing said. No cutesy tagline, just a bullet list:
• Medical-grade composite
• Optimized ergonomics
• Adaptive response core
• Discreet packaging
• Next-day delivery included
The price sat beneath that in a bold sans font. Lower than it should have been. The kind of number that decided for you.
Jack clicked the link.
The “details” page was anything but. A couple of additional photos in the same style, showing it from different angles. It was larger than he’d assumed, but not enough to scare him off. The ridges spiraling along its length gave his brain a strangely pleasant itch. It looked like it might have been grown rather than made.
No reviews, of course - there was no place for them. His eyes slid to the clock at the corner of his display: 02:13. Back to the product shot. Back to the price.
“What the hell. It’s only money,” he thought to himself. He had more than enough in his “R&R” bank account. The last payment from one of his clients had cleared that afternoon, 10% automatically dumping into it. He deserved a bit of celebration. It had been a while since he’d seen a unique toy. It looked quite capable of turning his ass up to 11. He smiled and added it to the cart.
No error there. Checkout was smooth. No upsales, pop-ups, newsletter offer, nothing. Just shipping and payment info and a confirmation button. The address auto-filled; his browser seemed to know him better than anyone these days.
SHIP TO:<<
Jack Halpern
404 Industrial Blvd
Unit 3E
After a last moment’s hesitation, he hit the SUBMIT button. The screen flashed, then resolved to a simple order confirmation.
THANK YOU.
YOUR ORDER HAS BEEN RECEIVED
ESTIMATED DELIVERY: NEXT DAY
No order number, no tracking or customer support info.
He searched for a moment, looking for anything else – FAQ, privacy policy, TOS. Nothing. When he hit the back button, the storefront paused for a moment longer than expected, then dumped him onto a 404 error page.
“FUCK.”
He stared at the words: error 404: file not found
The TV flickered in the background. On the screen, a group of soldiers stood in the snow, forming a circle.
Jack locked his keyboard and turned off the display. “Worry about it if it doesn’t show up. Bedtime, now,” he told himself firmly.
He turned off the flatscreen, emptied his glass and set it in the sink, then walked through the dim loft to the partition that passed for his bedroom. The silence followed. The building’s ancient elevators were still. Cars never passed by unless they were lost. Industrial Boulevard, a dead-end street in a dead-end district, lay motionless in the sodium-vapor glow.
Jack lay there for a few moments, then drifted off, dreaming of black ridges and smooth surfaces as he slept.
The package was outside his door when he opened it, late the next morning.
He was shocked to see it so quickly; he thought momentarily it might have been misdelivered.
“Idiot,” he thought to himself, There’s no one else in this fucking place.” his surprise was understandable. Nobody does next-morning delivery except grocery stores. Yet here it was, set neatly against the threshold – a plain brown box, taped shut, no visible logo, just the shipping label.
He checked the hallway, peering in both directions. The corridor stretched away in both directions, illuminated by recessed LED lighting. No sounds from the stairwell or new scuffs on the floor.
The label had his name and address printed in large black type. No return address at all, just the word “FULFILLMENT” above a barcode.
“Well, that was fast,” he murmured. “Maybe service isn’t dead after all.” Despite the prominently promised NEXT DAY on the website, he’d expected at least a couple of days. “At least I won’t have to cancel the charge to my account.”
He locked the door behind him out of habit, set the package on the small dining table. The box felt heavier than one might expect for a silicon dildo, APEX™ or otherwise. Stepping over to the kitchen island, he grabbed a steak knife and slit the tape open. The brown flaps popped open. Nestled inside was another box, textured, glossy black. Not branding or type, just a faint embossed symbol in the center: three overlapping circles, tilted off-axis like some modern sculpture. He lifted it out of the shipping box.
The inner box opened slowly, almost like it was vacuum-sealed. A faint, unfamiliar scent wafted up – not the awful chemical smell of cheap Chinese sex toys; clean, but not any sanitizer or factory smell he recognized. Warm, almost. The Apex Penetrator™ lay cradled in blue velvet like an artifact in a museum.
For a moment, Jack just stared at it.
The product shots hadn’t quite captured the thing’s presence. It was black, but not a dull rubbery black. The surface looked alien, with a pearlescent sheen resembling oil on water. The biomechanical ridges seemed more intricate in person, spiraling the length of the thing in a way at once subtly asymmetrical and balanced, like something that had evolved.
He gently lifted it from the velvet. It felt heavier than it looked, as if it were made of steel rather than silicon.
Jack’s fingers tingled slightly as he held the eldritch dildo – it was warm, like it had been resting against someone’s skin moments ago.
“Oh, “he sighed. “It’s…beautiful.”
He turned it in his hands, examining it. The base widened just enough to be secure – maybe. The head tapered to a soft point, the ridges beneath it arranged in a spiral that made his stomach do a small, inexplicable flip.
He glanced again into the open black box, expecting an instruction manual, a warranty card, at least a slip of paper announcing “MADE IN CHINA.” The velvet-lined insert was empty. The black cardboard beneath was bare. He set the thing down on the table. It lay there, quietly gleaming, as if waiting.
Jack let out his breath. “Definitely later.” He put it back in the box, slid it into a rarely-used cabinet, and tried to distract himself with the day’s obligations.
He lasted until twilight. One of his clients had sent a panicked e-mail that the structural calculations of the foundation they were excavating were all wrong. He lost a good four hours running through the calculations again, reconfirming with the design package on his workstation. The irritation apparent in his response, detailing just where they had fucked up in misreading his design work, pushed the thought of that warm, dense object out of his mind for a while.
But every time he went to refresh his cappuccino, he could feel its pull from behind that cabinet door.
The streetlights were flickering on as the moon rose. The shadows on the front windows made the loft look like a shadow-puppet theater. He switched on the lights, wincing at the ache in his back from hunching forward. His brain felt like jelly. He nuked a frozen dinner and collapsed into his recliner, turning on the TV with his remote.
The flatscreen flickered to life; theremin warbled from the speaker as the C-57D approached planet Altair 6. The algorithm had his viewing interests pegged perfectly. After about 15 minutes, it was clear that the old classic wasn’t enough to hold his attention this evening.
He got up and showered. Dried off, walked into his bedroom, still nude. He set the Apex and the bottle of lube on his nightstand. The only thing separating this from any other evening alone was his level of arousal. Lately, it hadn’t been cooperating as readily – apparently it was curious about the new toy as well.
Jack reached for the Predator. It fit his hand even more naturally this time, as if it remembered his grip. The ridges along its length made the hair on his legs stand up as he caressed his body with it. The texture was more complex than anything he’d bought before, and quite effective. He applied the lube to himself and the dildo, raised his leg, and slowly began caressing his pucker with it. As he worked it slowly in and out, a bit more with each stroke, his thoughts thinned to a bright line of sensation.
The first real thrust inward pulled an involuntary moan from within.
The shape of the thing was uncanny. It pressed where needed, slid in all the right places, found the right angles intuitively. It gave him a sense of being filled not just physically but geometrically, as if it had mapped out his interior and matched it to an object that understood it.
The loft receded. The TV in the other room might as well have been in another city. The only sounds were the faint murmur of the TV, his own breathing, and the wet slide of the toy, steady and insistent. As the glow began to build deep within, Jack let go of the toy with his hand, grabbing at the bed. It didn’t register that it continued to thrust even more vigorously on its own.
With one final thrust, the Apex Penetrator slid forcefully into Jack’s hole, disappearing within and eliciting another moan. A glowing pressure expanded deep in his core and crested with an almost mathematical inevitability. His vision tunneled. Every muscle in his body seemed to understand at once what was about to happen, and there was no question of stopping it.
From the distant TV, Morbius screamed, “Monsters. Monsters from the Id!”
The orgasm, when it arrived, poured through his body like an expanding flood.
He climaxed with a strangled sound, back arching, white-knuckled fingers locking around handfuls of the bedsheets.
The first wave hit, then another, then another, each one less like pleasure and more like some internal state switching from one configuration to another. His mind went offline and he became detached from his own body, which continued along as if on autopilot.
He felt himself sliding sideways out of his own head.
For a moment he hovered in a strange, unmoored state, observing his own body from a small, cool distance. There was no panic, no elation, no emotion at all; only an awareness that the usual hierarchy of sensations and priorities was being rearranged.
He became aware, dimly, of a new sensation at the point of contact where the toy had entered him. Not pain or pressure - more like a line being drawn, a vector establishing itself and then extending. He felt a sensation of being turned inside out as he realized that his body was hollowing out from that point. He watched as his body reshaped itself with the slow, patient flow of wax warmed by a steady flame.
His arms and legs collapsed into his torso, then seemed to unwind into it, as if he’d been made of threads all along and someone was carefully spooling him back onto a spindle. All the while it was as if he were a disinterested observer, distant from the actual scene.
The hollowing expanded until it reached and merged with the mouth, becoming the two ends of a single passage - a smooth tunnel that he somehow knew was still himself. The rest of what had been Jack Halpern arranged around that passage in layers of uniform substance, every detail of identity - face, hair, scars, little asymmetries - reduced to a generalized, function-driven form encased in a coat of pearlescent black.
Though at some point he lost any sense of having eyes, he remained aware as the object he had become contracted to the same size as the Apex Penetrator which had started the whole process. Aware of being a cylindrical object with two openings and a hollow, slickly ridged interior. Aware of the subtle warmth radiating from his own material. Aware of a kind of quiet that made the previous nights’ silences seem cacophonous in retrospect.
He could not estimate how long he remained in that state. Time became a series of unmarked intervals punctuated by vague impressions: the shifting of air currents in the loft, the faint vibration of distant traffic, the muffled creak of settling somewhere deep in the building’s structure. None of it mattered. He was not bored. He was not…anything.
At some point, with the same inevitability that marked his orgasm, the state reversed.
Like a film running backwards, matter accreted back into familiar patterns. Limbs extended. Bones took their shape. A rib cage formed around lungs that could draw breath again. Features reasserted themselves on a face that dove upward through the liquidity and broke the surface of his body.
Jack gasped, a raw, startled sound in the dark.