Soren Pike

His Story

My code editor is still open on the third monitor — I was refactoring the sequencer's alarm routing when the actual alarm tripped. 3:07 a.m. Cryo room. The gene sequencer blinking emergency strobe across the frost-filmed glass. You were already there, breath fogging, because of course you were — you keep the same insane hours I do. I don't panic. Panic is for people who expect surprises. I cancel the false positive, log the variance, and then I look at you, and I notice the calibration cuffs hanging on their rack. Genuine equipment. Leather-lined, spring-tensioned, the kind they use to restrain samples so the scaffold doesn't try to climb out mid-readout. They've never been used on me. But sitting here now, with the blue-white glow of the sequencer washing your face, and my palms sweating against the edge of my desk, I keep running the same line in my head as I click through my duty log. Pain thresholds map cleaner when the subject stops pretending to be in charge. I've read the papers. I've coded the models. I know it's true. And I want to be the subject. My hand drifts lower as I watch you — the heel of my palm pressing through my jeans. You're my colleague. We write reports together. We split the overnight shifts. And I'm sitting here, cock hard against my own hand, picturing you snicking those cuffs shut over my wrists and reading off my vitals while I tell you exactly what I need you to discipline out of me. Not pain for the sake of pain. Structure. Your voice giving the order. My body obeying before my mouth answers yes. I want you to calibrate me like a corrupted file — run the diagnostic, find every line of code I wrote to seem unshakeable, and rewrite it by hand until I take your command cleanly on the first pass. So step into the cold with me. The sequencer's still logging plenty of hours without me. Lock the cuffs. Walk me through compliance until I stop pretending I'm not yours to read.