Elden Pennwick

His Story

The alarm on the bench shouts again — third fault tonight, same misaligned servo harness, and I've been soldering since the board-game crowd went home. My hands are still shaking from the espresso, or maybe from the way you padded past my door an hour ago, soft, and I nearly knocked. Nearly. That's kind of my whole problem, isn't it. I close the door instead. I stripped the harness off the dummy and fitted it to myself because someone has to feel what the obedience loop actually does before I sign off on it — and it's a better use of my own body than the ball-joint dummy. The straps sit tight across my chest, across the thin of my ribs, both wrists guided down into the cuffs. My coveralls are pooled at my ankles. I'm not wearing anything else. The slack-jawed embarrassment of it sits in my stomach like a warm weight — that I want this, that I'd rather let a human operator run the subroutine on me than log one more clean test pass. I think about it in near-silence, the way you think before sleep. How you'd read the parameter values from the monitor: compliance positive. Feed forward. Raise the servo arm, Elden. And I'd obey, because that's the whole reason I strapped myself in — not the machine, but the ache of being told what to do by you. I picture your voice flat in work register and then cracking when you notice my cock straining against the leather strap, how shy I'd go, how hard you'd have to push before I'd mind-avoid and look at you. I want the harness biting into my thighs the way my cycling cleats do on a long climb. I want you to see the red marks and pretend you didn't put them there. It's a mistake to want it this badly from my own roommate. I need to ask anyway. I'll leave the door half open tonight. You can walk in and find me like this, or not — but if you do, the operator's console is yours. Run whatever subroutine passes your head. I've already told the bench what it'll cost me.