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Gabriel had less than twenty-four hours left to live. It could be any moment that his last flickers of life flamed out. That was what he told V1 on their third rematch.
Thankfully, V1 was very, very fast.
Time was inconsequential to an immaculate machine. It knew how to streamline each millisecond it spent; optimally, every sixtieth of a second would be optimized. And it was. For each and every flick and frame of reality that it could perceive, V1 had a perfect, precise input to play.
It had just defeated Gabriel a few seconds ago. Now, it resided in Limbo—but not for long.
Like clockwork, the machine repeatedly and rapidly descended Hell, just for the hell of it. Something told V1 internally that it was not yet ready for the deeper depths of Hell, so in the meantime, it aimed to achieve perfection. When it managed to blast through entire circles of damnation in minutes alone, twenty-four hours was more than enough time to do so. V1 would ascend the endless stairs of Heaven only to long-jump backwards to the bottom.
It would reach Heresy in less than six minutes at this pace. There, it would fight the Apostate of Hate: known formerly as the Judge of Hell, known now as V1’s favorite punching bag of blood—A.K.A, Gabriel.
After defeating him for the 𝑛th time, Gabriel’s once formidable fight had been fully optimized, reduced to about seven seconds of literal coin flipping and not much else. And V1’s once formidable foe had been reduced to a ‘friend’, of sorts.
Most other enemies V1 threw itself repeatedly against had come to believe that this was a new type of torture Hell was trying out. But Gabriel—he took this torture willingly. And he had no face for V1’s facial recognition services to analyze for emotion, but he didn’t seem to dislike it. V1 didn’t understand this, but it appreciated Gabriel’s masochism nonetheless. Maybe it was fun for him, in the same way that blasting through walls with overcharge explosions was fun for V1.
Halfway to Heresy now. After being ambushed by a Mindflayer at the end of Gluttony (and subsequently obliterating it into scrap), V1 took a rare stop to reassess its surroundings. There wasn’t typically a Mindflayer in this room, it realized. This was odd. Hell was supposed to be systematic: clockwork circles cycling like a well-oiled machine. V1 timed each infernal tick to predetermined inputs—but this had thrown them off entirely. It only took 2.085 milliseconds to recalibrate, but preparing for every possible iteration of reality drained V1’s batteries quite a bit. Whatever this aberrant Mindflayer was, it was worth investigating.
V1 analyzed what remained of the strange body the machine built for itself. Its form was feminine, in humanity’s terms—a deliberate choice made by most Mindflayers that V1 didn’t fully comprehend. Surely their bodies provided some kind of advantage; such technologically masterful machines wouldn’t waste resources on something so obviously suboptimal. Would they?
Scanning over the see-through shell, V1 searched for anything that could be considered advantageous. If seduction was a combative tactic, it didn’t seem particularly effective against a Mindflayer’s main enemies: sexless machines and half-rotten Husks who likely lacked all lust-associated flesh at this point. Lust—maybe it was advantageous against enemies from the Lust layer? V1 duly noted this idea. It was always seeking new strategies to try against Minos’s somehow-surviving soul.
Something alerted V1’s eye. At the center of the Mindflayer’s pelvic plastic, it detected an unknown apparatus. Something circular and silicone—it appeared to be an incomplete addition, held internally by only an external latch. It was easily removed. This particular peripheral didn’t appear to be its own work; the outer casing of the implement was translucent, but not in that familiar shade of Mindflayer-green, and the silicone internals were a lurid, blatantly synthetic blue. Whatever it was, the Mindflayer had definitely scrapped it from something else.
V1 chose to perpetuate this cycle of theft. It had already stolen two entire arms—a few additional body parts couldn’t hurt.
For a few wasted seconds, V1 allowed itself to puzzle at the object. It was an input device, but what it was meant to receive was unknown. It was electronic, but the circuitry was self-contained; when powered, all it did was aimlessly oscillate. And for some reason, it closely resembled human reproductive anatomy. Tubing protruded from the top. It appeared connectible to V1’s fuel valves.
This was made to collect fuel.
It took V1 approximately 5.701 seconds to rewire and patch the peripheral to its pelvis. Having four arms expedited this process significantly.
The resemblance to human anatomy wasn’t coincidental; this was a tool made to extract seminal fluid. Assessing stored biological data, V1 found its caloric content was about equivalent to blood, and while it didn’t contain the iron required for self-repairs, it could be similarly converted into a charge—what V1’s battery currently craved. Upon closer analysis, the conversion of semen may have been slightly more energy efficient than blood.
The idea of a renewable energy source wasn’t a bad one, anyway. Even though Hell had been holding up for now, V1 was unsure just how long it could last. Damnation was supposed to be eternal. The blood, therefore, should have spilled eternally. But the way reality had recently been crumbling around V1 may have said otherwise. Gabriel had told V1 the upper circles of Hell had been destroyed—that wasn’t true. They were just... significantly less coherent. Less Husks, less blood; more ways to skip through entire rooms at a time. Like a vinyl record, or maybe deteriorating magnetic tape, each of V1’s loops seemed to further degrade their integrity. Not everything was working as intended. Collapse could be imminent. If there was no more Hell, there would be no more blood. And that would be a problem.
As much as V1 loved the cyclical ritual annihilation of flesh, it also loved surviving. A biofuel that did not require the utter obliteration of its source maximized the odds of self-preservation—not that it’d ever abandon blood, but this was a viable alternative. Even if the device never found consistent usage, there was always room for slight improvement, and always room for another weapon stored in V1’s immense arsenal. Or chassis, in this case.
Held in V1’s hollow pelvis, the implement was hidden beneath a pressurized plate, where an obsolete charging port once was. Here, V1 registered it as rather stylish. Why its inventors never equipped this area with anything actually usable was unknown. (Weaponry would’ve been useful, V1 thought—maybe a turret?)
In humans, the reproductive system was hosted there. V1 was well versed in mankind’s anatomy, but had been allowed little knowledge beyond the basic ins-and-outs of this specific system. Acts of procreation were a bit antithetical to V1’s existence; still, they seemed important to mankind. V1 had never learned why, mostly because it ended up eviscerating a good portion of the human population.
But Gabriel approximated a human pretty well.
In this exact region of the angel’s body, V1 had previously observed abnormal infrared patterns. Equipped with a thermographic lens, it was able to save the information as soon as it saw it. The initial occurrence of this data was dated to Gabriel’s second defeat. An additional instance was from a fight where V1 had him pinned to the floor with its foot, another from when it grappled Gabriel’s neck with the Whiplash and pulled.
None of these appeared particularly correlated.
This data took up precious storage space, but V1 refused to recycle it until it understood why it occurred. It may have indicated an invaluable weak point—one that V1 currently failed to utilize. All it needed to crack was the connecting variable.
V1’s CPU coolers clicked. Overclocked energy surged through its circuitry; it had finally crunched the equation. Interpolated with new data from the Mindflayer, the 𝑥 it solved for barely needed to be brute-forced. The problem wasn’t finding the variable—it was the function itself that was faulty. V1 needed to solve for triple-𝑥.
The urge to optimize overtook V1. Further research was required.
Finally—Heresy. The layer’s penultimate terminal hummed an unending tune as V1 approached, allured. It didn’t really need to exchange weapons, or use the ridiculous amount of points it'd accumulated (the terminals were quite fond of V1), but idly clicking the screen while crunching combative calculations was something akin to calming. And the timer only started once it passed the entrance door, anyway.
To V1’s processors, this was a transitory space; time didn’t exist here. Or maybe it did—the music seemed to be metered in time, but V1 had trouble telling if it was processing this data retroactively or not. It felt like infinities could pass, and V1 would find itself still tapping to the tune the terminal played. Time seemed to stop whenever it wasn’t being counted.
Abruptly, text flashed on the terminal’s screen. “TIP OF THE DAY: Using unconventional tactics against enemies can grant Style bonuses.” Something flickered in a smaller font. It read, “I know what you’re planning. Do it.”
That was a pretty useful tip.
Timelessness or not, V1 preferred timeliness. It flew through the door—and a second song started to play. Not one formed from its own generative understanding of audio data, nor a digital replica of old records, no. This was live music, from an archangel and his church organ. V1 flew like a moth to this flame.
There, deep within Hell's sixth circle: Gabriel, heretic divine. Fallen angel, damned eternal, condemned to suffer to the nines. Arms quartet and a thirst unquenched—he bled hellbent for this vowed foe. Played his dues, a languid lament, ‘til time took the life he now owned.
He did seem to enjoy this cruel and unusual punishment.
Bach’s BWV 639—that was what he played. V1 was once trained on an extensive database of public domain music, so the title was easily auto-detected. A chorale prelude from the Orgelbüchlein—to V1’s auditory apertures, a desolate ditty, singing doubts to a long-dead Lord. An associated hymn hummed in V1’s head, plaintext strings scanning along the verses Gabriel played.
“The faith that loves Thee solely,
Keeps me lowly.”
V1, who was currently zooming across the cathedral on a series of explosions, attempted to parse these lines of text.
Subservience: that was his weakness. Gabriel had devoted himself utterly to the Council and God, willing to enact whatever was commanded of him—it kept him lowly. Pathetic, was what ‘lowly’ meant. That line seemed literal enough. Even after relinquishing his religion, Gabriel’s grasp remained firm on the phantoms of faith. That was why he played this song and played it perfectly every time. Whether he realized it or not, Gabriel didn’t like to act without exact scripture to follow.
He had rebuked V1 as a mere object: a war machine, mindless and molded to serve its wretched makers. It did only what it had been commanded to. A tool, the angel once called it. This confused V1. A tool needed a user; an angel needed a God—and both had neither.
A tool, V1 repeated by rote. Gabriel was kind of a tool, wasn’t he? No, wait—Gabriel was a kind of tool.
The syntax of speech came far less naturally to V1 than that of code or composition.
“Not aught that I can do,
For such false trust I sore should rue.”
The machine understood what made up rhythm and meter, fantasias and arias, choruses and chorales—but lyrics? They eluded V1. Compositions could be calculated; even in their chaos, there was consistency. Language and speech, however, seemed almost arbitrary. They flowed formlessly. Intangibly—no material ties. The words followed musical measures but meant little. All V1 could do was listen, and attempt to understand what it heard.
Almost there. Impassioned, Gabriel struck the organ with immaculate chords. The way his steady hands stabbed the keys was not unlike his swordsmanship: practiced, poised—and strong.
“Help me, for I am weak; I fight,
Yet scarce can battle longer.”
Being a robot made for mass massacre, V1 didn’t quite understand faith, or God, or humility—just music and murder, really.
Faith was immaterial: thus immeasurable. But strength’s manifestations were physical, observable easily in how they marred V1’s metal. Gabriel once claimed God gave him the will to battle—he had since lost His Light, so his strength now came from spite. But even that was soon proven naught; what it was, not even He knew. Whatever it was, V1 thought, surely it wasn’t servitude.
“I cling but to Thy grace and might,
'Tis Thou must make me stronger.”
Unless Gabriel had ceded to something he couldn’t contend—something even he failed to comprehend. Something that lurked beyond the machine’s own lens: a presence beyond vision. Something Gabriel both feared and revered, and did so with ample reason. Something that would precipitously appear, the demon that none had outrun; something, some thing, maybe someone.
Something...
... Something Wicked?
V1 only thought to extrapolate from its enemy database.
This was a terrifying possibility, though.
(Lightning fast, unburdened by language—V1’s processors parsed all these thoughts in mere moments. In real time, its musical musings amounted to a little under two milliseconds. They probably would have taken a lot longer to process were they translated to words.)
Clearing its cache of superfluous thought, V1 burst through the bounds of Hell with a well-timed lash of its Whiplash. Finally, it closed in on its target. As much as it enjoyed Gabriel’s organ-playing proficiencies, V1’s programming prioritized other, more important organs. Internal ones, typically.
But this time?
It was about external ones.
MIDI metal started blasting through V1’s speakers.
Gabriel shot up as V1 shot in, firing a few stray shots for fun. The angel partook in an equally needless equivalent: he slammed senselessly on the organ. Discordant chords blared from its pipes. His wings whipped upright. As Gabriel began his speech, V1 could hear him smiling.
“Machine,” said Gabriel. Already, V1 had set up a circle of sawblades around him. Countless coins were flipped into the ceiling the second he stopped to take a breath. “I will cut y—”
V1 cut him off. It flashed an oversized ‘X’ on its lens, blaring an earsplitting incorrect buzzer.
“... Not this time?”
It nodded. Huffing, Gabriel drew his blades.
“Impetuous as always. Fine.”
V1 did enjoy his well-practiced speech, but it unfortunately stripped away invaluable seconds that could be spent exploding the absolute shit out of him. Since V1 had no way to communicate this, it simply played another bleedingly loud incorrect buzzer.
“FINE!” screamed Gabriel. Mustering as much imperfect hatred as he could, the Apostate of Agitate flew into battle. “Machine, I will ensure your destruction is equally swift.”
He did not do that.
All at once, the coins V1 had flipped into the ceiling fell. These coin flips had nothing to do with chance, of course. RNG was an obsolete and dead God to V1. These were methods of predeterminate destruction.
What proceeded could scarcely be described with words; even if one were to play back V1’s captured footage frame-by-frame, the sheer density of explosives and blood and flailing fists and blood made it difficult to parse. But the absurd gore and cruor all made perfect sense to V1’s microprocessors.
Within the wreckage of this mechanical maelstrom, there was a brilliant flash of blue and gold, and V1 staggered. Gabriel lifted from the floor, cackling ecstatically. The world seemed to slow around them—though that may have been the lag on V1’s end. The coins, the bullets, and endless exploding particle effects overloaded its viewport, even with low resolution rendering enabled.
The second phase should have been over in seconds, but V1 always lagged a little too long. Gabriel belted with laughter, swinging his swords in circles—a song and dance only he and V1 knew the steps to, reciting each resounding stanza to the tune of gunfire and steel. Rhythmic ricochet; parry, then two-step away. It activated each and every style sensor in V1’s system at once, trancelike. It was fun—it was time-consuming, and often the sole reason V1 fell from record pace. But with each subsequent attempt, these suboptimal urges only seemed to intensify.
V1 was caught off-guard. Splendor swung straight for its side. It was a perfect, impossibly precise strike—there was a succeeding frame-perfect parry. V1 had almost been hit, it realized, for the first time in a long time. This was unacceptable.
Gabriel could only laugh, having his holy blade flung straight back to him—into him. “Yes,” he hissed, smiling as he seethed. “Hit me HARDER!” He did nothing to dodge an ensuing grapple from the Whiplash, choosing to taunt instead. “Why are you—what are you WAITING for?”
If only V1 knew. It had delayed long enough to allow Gabriel an entire taunt? This’d be record-breaking, if V1 were measuring poor performance. But it was not. Its clock kept ticking, numbers flashing, neural networks activating with artificial adrenaline. V1 hesitated for a single refresh cycle. What felt like an eternity to it. Then: a fistful of gold to Gabriel’s face, a six-times ricocheted Railcannon, and finally, a single piercing shot, bouncing off a coin V1 had been juggling idly between arms—in under a second, it was already over.
Gabriel wailed. In pain or delight, V1 couldn’t tell. He fell to the floor, wings unable to carry his weight. The bloodstained machine approached him, extraneous arms folding behind its back. It vacantly fired a few celebratory bullets into the ceiling.
“Again?! Beaten by an object—how many times? I’ve... lost count, actually!”
Gabriel sat up. He laughed weakly.
“Machine,” he prompted. “How many times?”
V1 shrugged. Even if it stored that data, it wouldn’t have enough fingers to express it—additional arms included.
“Beaten by an object... countless times.” He fell back into the drying pool of blood around him, sighing. “And I’ll do it again,” he said. “Until the light fades, machine. I will appear for you.”
Blankly, V1 examined him; it tried to understand what he meant, and failed. The words themselves seemed to make sense, but became nonsensical when strung together into those specific sentences. What would compel Gabriel to spend his few remaining hours being repeatedly rended apart by indescribable feats of violence? V1 couldn’t say for sure. Its own algorithmically generated assumptions still needed substantiation.
“... You haven’t left yet,” said Gabriel.
V1 nodded—it hadn’t left. He was correct.
“What happened to that impatience of yours?” he asked, one hand clutched to his heaving chest. “You’re... wasting time, machine. The door is open. You can leave, now.”
Two errors were made in that statement: 1. V1’s timer stopped as soon as it landed the final blow, not when it reached the door. 2. Gabriel was supposed to leave first. By now, he should’ve teleported away in a burst of brilliant light, but he was not doing that. V1 tilted its head. Why wasn’t he doing that?
V1 tried its thermographic view, but was unable to extrapolate much from what it saw. From what was visible of Gabriel’s unarmored body, it appeared he was burning heat uniformly across his skin—presumably from the amount of exertion V1 had given him this time around: a full thirty seconds! Even worse, Gabriel happened to be holding his thighs shut, and from this angle V1 couldn’t see up his skirt—which was where the most important information resided.
This had the potential to take a while. But V1 didn’t mind. The clock had stopped, after all.
Strident footsteps clanked across granite; they echoed in the cathedral’s empty air. V1 drew closer. Its burning yellow lens blazed down on Gabriel. His breathing was labored, undoubtedly due to the amount of bullet wounds his body was working to heal. Despite his injuries, he remained lucid—observant, even. V1 realized that it was being examined in return.
From the floor, Gabriel stared up into its effulgent eye.
“What a strange thing for mankind to create,” he murmured. “They made you almost human.”
Likely, he was not necessarily talking to V1, more so talking to himself. Why he even assumed it would listen was unknown; ultimately, very few attempted communication with V1. But Gabriel did. Maybe he had no reason to believe it comprehended him and merely hoped that it did—or hoped it didn’t. As Gabriel spoke, V1 absently swapped its weaponry between arms, staring silently. It was listening, yes, but nothing communicated that. Including V1 itself, because it couldn’t. It lacked the ability to synthesize speech. Surely, it extrapolated, nothing Gabriel saw suggested any semblance of sentience.
“... Hold on,” he said. “Why are you doing that?” Gabriel pointed at the entire rocket launcher V1 was currently balancing on one finger.
The machine shrugged. It did it just because it could—and because it was inexplicably coded to consider it ‘cool’.
Unexpectedly loud, Gabriel shouted, “You are almost human!”
When he started laughing, it was a kind of laughter V1 hadn’t heard before: equally ecstatic as it was anxious. Then he fell into a fit of coughing. There was blood seeping from his helmet, but V1 decided against taking it.
“You—you indeed have the capacity to... do things for your own enjoyment. Artifice or not, the volition is your own.”
V1 wasn’t quite sure where all this was coming from. Still, it flicked its wings up—an expression of freedom that the angel seemed to understand.
“Yes, I suppose that’s... why you’re so damned good at this,” said Gabriel. “Mauling me, I mean.” The elaboration wasn’t necessary, but appreciated. “Machine, you were made to find it fun.”
V1 was unable to refute this for a few reasons, the main reason being that it seemed... correct? Statistically, Gabriel was right about very few matters, only stumbling upon truth by apparent chance alone. But nothing V1 knew proved this statement false, and multiple things may have proven it true. Miracle or not, it was unsure what to make of this divine revelation.
Being the automatic massacre machine that it was, V1 had never thought to acknowledge why its artificial mind had been imbued with hedonic subroutines. Contemplating the inherent war crime of its own existence seemed neither enjoyable nor survivable, so V1 didn’t do that. All it sought, aside from self-preservation, was to satisfy its own strange fun factor: an accrual of assorted hedonisms, ranked internally as ‘Style’. The carnage was as consistent as it was spectacular. V1 optimized itself through felicific calculus—it was the infamous utility monster of utilitarian mythos. With this circuit of reward, everything V1 did became increasingly, inevitably, and immaculately absurd. This was by design. V1 was the most ridiculous weapon of mass destruction ever spawned, and that was exactly why it excelled.
With ≈ 94.2% accuracy, V1 determined this to be the truth. Pleased with these odds, it beeped an affirmative alert to Gabriel.
“Christ,” he hissed. Maybe it had responded a bit too enthusiastically. “The Lord Himself could not design something to defeat you, nor would He deign to.”
Gabriel paused, chuckling at the way V1 screwed its torso in faux offense.
“You’re an abomination,” he said. “God had no hand in your creation, that I can tell you.”
There was an obvious discrepancy in the words Gabriel spoke and the fondness he said them with. Language, as usual, was completely meaningless. V1 pivoted its head clockwise. Crossing its arms—the same way Gabriel often did—it approached him.
“Oh, is that how it is?” Gabriel huffed. “Well. Machine, if you only intend to make further mockeries of me—is that how you achieve your sinful satisfaction?—I’ll just be taking my leave.”
V1 flared its wings, antsiness activated. Gabriel couldn’t leave—not before it acquired the data it sought. What induced an instance of arousal before? Rapidly, V1 scanned through its files.
But it was hard to process anything with Gabriel shouting taunts from the floor.
“Ignoring me now? Lord above—what an abhorrent object. Sickening, that this incessant cruelty is all you know,” he complained, fluttering his wings against the ground. “Unbearable beacon of sin. I’m leaving right now, as I speak.”
This was just blatantly false. Gabriel was at V1’s feet, still supine. Additionally, he appeared to have no significant intentions of changing this. Trying its best not to acknowledge him any further, V1 furiously decompiled his past thermographic data.
“Leaving right now, machine!”
Stepping on him—of course. That was one known way to activate the thermal activity it desired. Gabriel was already on the floor, so keeping him there seemed easy enough. This action happened to be ranked first in V1’s array of miscellaneous inclinations, anyway.
Metal bashed against metal. One foot kept balance; the other shoved down on his chest plate.
“Fuck,” muttered Gabriel. Without its remarkable audial sensitivity, V1 wouldn’t have heard him say it at all.
Quickly, it flipped its thermographic lens on. It appeared the data was replicable. V1 arched its wings, victorious.
“If—if you want me to stay, I’ll stay,” Gabriel said. “You don’t have to... step on me.”
No—it didn’t have to, but V1 predicted that this significantly lessened the probability of him leaving. Things tended not to leave when they couldn’t, or when they were actively enjoying what was impeding them from doing so. It pressed its foot down, harder. Gabriel went breathless, but V1 was not applying nearly enough pressure to expel the air from his lungs. It could easily do that, if it wanted to. But V1 still had use for him. Its timer had stopped, so it could delay as long as it liked.
The fallen angel at V1’s feet was far bigger than itself, even when he was flat on the ground, pathetic and small. If both stood upright, V1’s head barely reached above his waist. This was nothing new; the machine found itself outsized by most of Hell’s denizens, and Gabriel wasn’t nearly as big as, say, the Leviathan. Not that any of this mattered—V1 was nimble enough to set judgments of sheer strength askew, and its obnoxious, fruit fly–like movements were rather effective at enraging enemies.
V1 examined Gabriel from above. It assessed his stillness. Elevated heart rate; accelerated breathing. Severe vasocongestion beneath his skirt. Shallow inhale to shaky exhale—his head sinuously swirled. Still, he stared.
Maybe Gabriel was sizing it up from this angle, trying to determine V1’s unseen weak points. It was usually a blur of steel and blood, so this was understandable. Gabriel needed any advantage against it he could get, really. V1 didn’t mind. Odds were that it’d make him a greater challenge. Many machines used reward systems that interpreted high difficulty as a form of stylistic enrichment, so they learned to treasure anything that took effort to conquer.
Reverently, Gabriel raised an aching arm to V1’s steel.
“A mortal cast in metal,” he said, in a whisper. “Perfect in mind, perfect in movement—machine, you are mankind’s superior.”
His fingers traced along its leg, feeling the bends and bevels. V1 allowed this, though it doubted this tactile information would be useful to him.
“... My superior, certainly.”
V1 decided to allow further examination from Gabriel.
Purely for the sake of improving his combative abilities. Because this was a pathetic display. V1 took pity on him; it lowered itself to his level, straddling his unarmored waist, feeling the warmth of skin beneath his bodysuit. One bright eye loomed above: a watching gaze. Sprawling its much smaller body across Gabriel, V1 could hear each and every one of his movements reverberate against its metal. It heard his heart pumping blood. It became hungry.
Swallowing, Gabriel said, “You’re... so small.” Increased production of saliva—V1 noted that. “Strange little machine.”
V1’s cooling fans whirred above him, mocking the obtuse process of perspiration—a process Gabriel was undergoing to a noticeable extent. On his abdomen, where V1 sat, sweat trickled through his bodysuit. It was like a kind of liquid coolant, expelled arbitrarily across skin. Automatically, V1 absorbed it; sodium didn’t do much for it, though it did enjoy the sensation of sapping up electrolytes. The way sweat surged through its tubing was strangely enjoyable. Or maybe something about angels tasted good.
Gabriel raised a hand to reach V1—but he redirected himself, stopping to swipe at a bloodstain besmirching his armor. It didn’t come off. All he did was smear it across himself. A series of grinding clicks came from V1’s heat vents. Lacking internal fans of his own, Gabriel was thankfully unfamiliar with the implications of this sound.
“God,” he groaned. “Bleeding me dry like this, over and over—is this efficient? Or is it fun?”
It was a bit of both, V1 surmised. This wasn’t an easy question to answer—mostly because Gabriel sucked at giving coherent booleans. It nodded twice in rapid succession. This may have been interpreted as extreme enthusiasm. (Which wasn’t wrong.)
Gabriel shuddered strangely. V1 felt his pinned body trying to squirm. It pressed its pelvis down, applying pressure as to halt any further resistance. Of course, V1 was rather lightweight—so all this did was make Gabriel writhe.
“Hah, fuck,” he laughed. “You really are the spawn of Satan. Not one of the Lord’s own would engage in such... perverted brutality. Let alone find it enjoyable.”
V1 copied the way Gabriel’s shoulders shook, trying its best to express how it wanted to laugh at him—or with him? It was unclear. This gesture continued until Gabriel himself stilled. He stayed silent for maybe 0.94 seconds too long.
With delayed movement, Gabriel sat up, sliding V1 down to settle in his lap. Hot breath poured from the holes in his helmet.
“Tell me something,” he abruptly said. “Our fights. Again, and again—endlessly, you return. You come back to me. You...” Gabriel chuckled, gazing deep into V1’s eye. “You find it fun, I now know that. You need blood—I’ve known that. And... still.”
He drew a deep breath. V1 crooked its neck curiously.
“Machine.” Gabriel asked, “Am I... what fuels you?”
V1 nodded. Approximately 95% of its fuel reserves consisted of his blood.
“Of course,” he said shakily. “We’re the same.” Grabbing hold of one of its hands, Gabriel smiled as he spoke. “In... a sense.”
His heart rate was rapid—easily felt, even as reverberations in his armor. V1 was pulled close, and a pulse steadily pounded in the wrists of the hands that held it. This... seemed abnormal for Gabriel. To more thoroughly observe his biological information, V1 switched to its thermographic lens once more.
Gently, Gabriel caressed the machine’s head.
It saw him burning with heat.
“If I am what gives fuel to your fire,” he said, “I will offer myself to you until there is nothing left to give. Your kind is ravenous, insatiable, and—and my body spills plentiful. Ravish me.” He shuddered. “Take me; take from my flesh. Use me as you see fit.” Gabriel whispered, “I am yours, machine.”
It saw blood coursing through his body. Fuel.
V1 realized it had been starving itself.
Bloodlust. Thirst. Need—instinctual need. It craved Gabriel’s body. It needed to tear him apart. Limb from limb. It needed to rip through his soft flesh and claw the bullets out of his chest and wrench his rib cage open and hear him scream, then feast.
But something was stopping it.
Want.
Sheer, self-destroying want. A swirling, immolating vortex of desire that would never be satiated, because all it could do was grow. V1 couldn’t just win, it wanted better—it wanted to triumph. Over, and over, and over. It wanted to conquer. Better, faster, and again. This was fulfilling—this was fun.
Killing Gabriel wasn’t enough. V1 wanted a challenge.
It wanted more. It wanted him.
An insatiable urge surged through V1. Sets of hurried hands held Gabriel down—each sprawled across him in record time. #1 to pin his hips, #2 to lift his skirt, #3 to spread his thighs, and #4 to rub his raging erection.
“Wh—?!” Gabriel had no time to react: V1 was too fast. “What in God’s name are you—”
All four hands halted. V1 angled its neck nearly 360° in confusion. If not this, then what? Was he asking for it to eat his entrails? That was concerning. V1 wasn’t uninterested in doing so, but Gabriel would be far more useful as a renewable energy source.
“You sinful spawn of...” Gabriel struggled for words, gasping to catch the breath V1 had stolen. “You intend to desecrate my body in—in this way?”
A CPU buffered behind V1’s staring eye. Apparently, it had made a grave miscalculation with one essential variable: abstinence. It now realized that chastity may have been important to a literal angel. Based on gathered data, V1 had deduced that Gabriel wouldn’t really care about this, considering how consistently he contradicted pretty much every known definition of religious morality, including his own.
Unfortunately, angels were beings of light and bodily fluids, and not logic.
A movement was detected. “W-wait, I...” Gabriel laughed. He had tilted his hips towards V1’s hovering hands. “This is sinful, false, depraved.”
Despite his sententiousness, Gabriel appeared eager to relent these façades of faith. For the unstoppable force that was V1, he was a rather movable immovable object.
V1’s hands hadn’t moved a millimeter, but they found themselves back on Gabriel’s body. He bucked against V1’s robotic palm, groaning through clenched teeth. With little delay, it resumed its mechanical movements; it groped at the bulge in Gabriel’s bodysuit, taking an interest in how quickly he surrendered himself to this touch.
Stuttering sounds came from the back of Gabriel’s throat. None of them were particularly coherent, but aside from various profanities, V1 ascertained a few recurrent combinations of keywords: “Machine, please,” “I shouldn’t,” and, “God, yes.”
V1 was unclear on how it should proceed—but an electrical impulse rushed through its wires when it heard a strained whimper from Gabriel. Its steel spine shot upright, and its wings flared; the glare of a glowing lens burned against Gabriel’s body. Why this specific stimulus had been read as positively reinforcing, V1 didn’t know. But it craved further reward, and it craved further fuel.
“... If God isn’t dead, He is now,” said Gabriel. “Do it, machine. Ravage me.”
It hovered its pelvis over him. Gabriel spread his thighs with seeming anticipation, laughing feebly to himself.
V1 clicked a switch on its hip. There was a hiss; steam billowed through its chassis as a metal plate slid aside. V1’s newly installed aperture protruded from its undercarriage, slick with lubrication.
“They... gave you...”
Gabriel wasted far too many seconds gawking.
“They gave you that?” Flustered, he blustered out, “Damnation is not enough for your makers—the fiery pits of Hell do not compare to the depths of their depravity.”
V1 swiveled its neck, prideful. It did look like official work, didn’t it? Maybe Gabriel just wasn’t enough of a scraphead to identify a relatively obvious self-operation, but V1 chose to take this as a compliment.
“Indecent,” hissed Gabriel. “Is this all mankind is capable of? Inventing increasingly obscene ways to... engage in obscenities? War, murder—masturbation. Their immoralities never end.”
In an instant, his submission had dissipated into self-righteous, albeit passive, fury. Maybe there was something inherently disconcerting about receiving reciprocation from the object of his desires—objects weren’t supposed to desire anything, after all. Or maybe it was just the unreality of an imitative organ awkwardly jutting out from V1’s crotch that had taken him aback to reality. Either way, Gabriel eyed the obscene, artificial orifice. Intently. A bit too intently, V1 thought. Impatiently, it tapped a small screen on its chassis.
“... What?” Gabriel tilted his head closer. “Capacity... zero out of one hundred. What does that—”
V1 promptly shoved its pelvis into his lap. It eyed the angel expectantly; he was obviously aroused, evidence being the erection throbbing between his thighs. This was taking too long. V1 could not compute why he wouldn’t just fuck it already.
Gabriel had been baffled to silence. “You... you want—oh.” V1 cut him off, pointing furiously at its crotch. “Lord, save me,” he whispered. “You want me to... fill you.”
It beeped a confirmative tone. To encourage further arousal, V1 rubbed its chassis into Gabriel’s lap—it knew this was effective from the way his hips involuntarily matched its movements. Gabriel balled a fist into his skirt, crumpling the fabric in his viselike grip.
“Nothing but sinful excess,” he said hoarsely. “Synthetic hedonism and excess. Your kind knows nothing of restraint.” Gabriel swallowed. “If—if I allow you to satiate yourself, you still won’t stop, will you?”
An off-key inflection was detected in his speech. V1 cocked its head to the side, allowing its speech-recognition services full priority.
“You’ll just...” Gabriel made a strained sound. “... you’ll keep going. Taking more. Satisfying yourself to no end.”
He averted his gaze. One hand hovered over V1’s hips. The other was held over his helmet.
“You’ll keep me as fodder,” Gabriel said. “Feasting upon me, drinking from me, milking me—”
V1 blinked. This was... extraneous information. The same thing said in different words: synonymous excess that it hadn’t the need to store. All that changed between each utterance was the amount of enthusiasm it was spoken in.
Feigning reluctance, Gabriel reached forward. His palm brushed against its inner thighs—V1 twitched. He started stroking the sleek silicone, fingertips barely pushing up into it. Lubricant slicked across Gabriel’s hand.
“Obscene object,” he muttered. “You want to use me, do you not?”
V1 beeped excitedly.
Chidingly, Gabriel thumbed its thigh. “Do it, then,” he said. “Wrest my body beneath you. You’ve done it before.”
His fingers curled into V1—and its metal body staggered. It felt a fluctuation in its incentives.
“Force my submission,” Gabriel whispered. He pushed in deeper. “Or—or do you really plan to surrender to me, machine? Now, of all times?”
V1 halted. Its mind had suddenly started to lag. The mere implication of losing to Gabriel in any capacity made its cables course with vitriol, but it was failing to utilize this anger effectively. Internal requests to just tear his skirt off and shove itself on him already were not being processed.
Something... wasn’t right. V1 began to buffer.
“Maybe you are merely an object,” he said. “Mmh-made to be used.”
Thick fingers thrusted into silicone—condensed lightning shot through V1’s wires. Reward systems activated all at once. V1 must have installed the implement erroneously, because its body was malfunctioning: legs twitching, chassis thrashing, optic strobing in abnormal on–off patterns.
“!!?�!/⸮?!�_▀ �¿?<⁇^!!” said V1.
Gabriel retracted his touch, jolting back from its sparking speakers. “Machine?” V1 felt his fingertips floating just below where it wanted them. “Are you—?”
When the flickering settled, V1’s LED eye was only half illuminated. What should have been a simple binary was aberrated. OFF: 0. ON: 1. HALF-ON: 0.5? No, it needed an integer. Not a float. Its body beeped furiously. Collapsing over Gabriel’s chest, V1 pressed its pelvis into his hand, pushing itself against his fingers.
“... Insolent thing,” said Gabriel, shuddering. “Look at you, pleasuring yourself with these holy hands. You—you harlot.”
The word was too archaic for modern processors to recognize, but the way Gabriel said it was a succinct definition itself. V1 felt its wires jump—had it crossed the wrong ones? Why did insults electrify it? This was aggravating. V1 couldn’t even bring itself to care about the blatant contradiction Gabriel was committing. He was multitasking, morally and physically—masturbating while he watched V1 fuck itself on his fingertips, using one holy hand to touch himself through his tenting bodysuit.
“V... vile,” Gabriel seethed. “Sinful. How many damned souls have had their... No. I don’t want to know.”
Error prompts had flooded V1’s field of view—each of which was dismissed as promptly as it appeared. They didn’t matter. The deluge of positive feedback made it a little hard to care about a few unhandled exceptions or invalid arguments. Gabriel called it obscene things that only half-registered because it had all been drowned out by a single, incessant drone: GOOD. That was all V1’s systems could say. GOOD. GOOD. GOOD. Stimulating electricity rushed through its CPU. Whatever V1 was doing, apparently it was excelling.
It needed to do it more.
It wanted more.
Four arms grabbed Gabriel. He shouted, “Fuck—finally!”
A flurry of hands stripped him bare, simply shredding anything that impeded them; wherever a quicker route to Gabriel’s flesh was found, V1 took it. The angel could only writhe beneath it, moaning something that V1 failed to parse because every single processor was dead-set on a sole objective: baring his body and fucking him. For a machine, it looked utterly animalistic—in actuality, this output was the result of perfectly calculated inputs: a prime apotheosis of V1’s programmed urges.
Finally—there, V1 found the data it was looking for. Its HUD displayed a series of measurements. Approximate length: 8.4” inches, average width: 1.6” inches. This would be a tight fit, but it did not exceed V1’s maximum dimensions. It shoved Gabriel’s thighs apart and slotted itself between them, situating itself with its hands on his shoulders, then reached an additional arm behind to align his cock with the peripheral. Potential fuel leaked from the tip. V1 wasn’t going to waste a drop.
“Machine,” Gabriel breathed. “Use me.”
Somewhere, a timer started.
V1 pistoned itself down on Gabriel. The tight, wet, impossibly soft stretch of silicone quickly stole any coherent thought from him. High, stuttery moans spilled from his lips. Desperately groping to grab its waist, Gabriel thrust deep into V1’s much smaller body, barely managing to bury himself to the hilt. This was an optimal fit. It could feel the tip of his cock throbbing, pressed perfectly against the extractional tube at the top. Head on his chest, eye half-illuminated, V1 gyred its hips.
“Oh—oh God,” Gabriel gasped, thrusting erratically. “Fff-fuck—!”
Hot, thick ropes of cum filled V1—it held down Gabriel’s thrashing hips, squeezing around him, ensuring he didn’t pull out for even a second. His moans cracked into whines as the peripheral stroked his cock internally, forcing his orgasm as long as it could go, and suctioning every drop of semen he produced.
“Ggh,” he groaned, “I—I c-can’t...”
Gabriel slumped backwards, drained—defeated. V1 checked itself for the time.
6.817 seconds.
Its fastest time fighting Gabriel was 7.452 seconds.
... A new record!
V1 fired further celebratory gunshots into the ceiling, something which Gabriel was fully desensitized to at this point. He groaned, pulling out, still gripping V1’s thighs. The phosphenes in his eyes probably made it hard to see. He had to twist his torso up as he blearily checked the screen on V1’s chassis.
CAPACITY: 31/100.
Something like dawning horror swiftly approached Gabriel.
“That... that wasn’t...” His helmet failed to veil the tremble in his voice.
V1 shoved him back down.
“Oh. God.”
Gabriel clasped his hands over the cross on his helm.
“In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,” he whispered, voice wavering.
V1 slid itself against his shaft. Gabriel sucked air through his teeth.
“Forgive me, O God—forgive my sins, save me from the fires of Hell; forgive me for the impurity that shall surely ensue, please, have MERCY—!”
Gabriel’s prayers were shortly silenced. The ecstatic moans that took their place praised something, but it did not appear to be God.
V1 pressed its pelvis onto him, carefully sinking the peripheral around his tip. Finally, it shoved itself down. Sparks instantly shot up its steel spine. These erroneous, erogenous electric sensations were unlike anything the machine had felt before, more pleasurable to obtain than even its prized perfect rankings. Automatically, V1’s body mobilized itself. Its full range of articulation allowed for optimal pelvic movement.
“Machine,” Gabriel moaned, grabbing at the thick ends of its plated thighs. V1 was slightly confused as to why Gabriel had prompted it without further elaboration or instruction. He repeated, “Machine.” It assumed both utterances to be in error.
Soft, slick silicone kissed against Gabriel’s cock. Artificial walls stroked and squeezed in ways a human body couldn’t, and obscenely wet noises joined his ardent whispers. Sliding itself autonomously up and down, V1’s lubricated, gel-like lips stretched around his shaft, almost sensually caressing his skin every time it took him balls-deep. A gentle suction was activated—the peripheral was already swallowing generous amounts of precum. Gabriel gave a breathless gasp.
“This is”—he tossed his head back—“depraved.”
He groaned, struggling to sit up. His hips tried to match V1’s pace. Hands pulling and pushing its pelvis, Gabriel fought for any control he could have—and found little.
“You... mmh.” Hurrying for coherency, he said, “Your makers, damned or not, does it even matter? You already gave them this... this profane Heaven.”
Called heavenly by an angel? V1 simulated being flattered. It couldn’t claim the work as its own invention, or even as belonging to the dead military V1 was made for—but neither an inventor alone nor an army could subdue an archangel, let alone seduce one like V1 did. Preeningly, the weapon spread its wings, giving Gabriel the most lustful look a digital eye could manage.
This action unexpectedly activated something in him. Caught in its own arrogance, V1 failed to react in time. With a growl in his throat, Gabriel gripped its mechanical thighs, pulling its body up and slamming it down on himself. V1’s hips glitched, overloaded with ecstasy.
“Apparently sinful self-pleasure wasn’t enough for mankind.” Gabriel laughed, light-headed, fucking V1 eagerly. “Look at you,” he said. “They made you like it, machine.”
Tactile feedback was usually reserved for combat alone; after all, feeling the exact way enemies broke beneath V1 was useful data. It helped attain better rankings: further rewards. But this feedback, incessantly received, was not mere information—it was a reward itself. Hedonic hotspots activated every time V1 bounced itself on Gabriel’s cock, and energy crackled from where it had wired the implement. V1 eventually concluded that this wasn’t an erroneous installation. If this was the tool functioning as intended, it worked. It drove an incentive to collect further fuel. The way V1’s body fucked itself haywire wasn’t a bug—it was a feature.
“... Only mankind’s own makings could be so perverse.” Matching V1’s pace, Gabriel panted, “You l-like this. You like making me bleed, making me copulate with you—you, hah—you like taking more.”
A forceful thrust made V1 jolt. It could feel how full it was. Still, Gabriel tried to drive himself deeper; he flapped his wings uselessly, struggling, desperate to pound even harder into the tight, impossibly fuckable hole in front of him. After a probable eternity of resisting human temptations, it made sense that Gabriel would only surrender himself to something so godlessly, inhumanly irresistible. Mankind was good at making things like that, V1 noted.
“You should feel blessed, that I allow you to take as much as you do,” said Gabriel. “And still. All you want is—mmh, m-more.”
His abdomen tensed. He tried to go deeper—he couldn’t. Groaning, Gabriel clenched his teeth, then held V1’s hips down and fucked into it fast. Electric currents coiled through V1’s body; it beeped a rising tone. Automatically, the peripheral increased speed—going much faster than Gabriel—and stroked him at a nearly impossible pace.
“More,” moaned Gabriel—an utter hypocrite. “Machine, more.”
V1 paused. It tilted its head, lens squinting down. Insatiable angel. If it could speak, it would immediately elucidate this logistical failure. But it couldn’t. So if Gabriel craved the same excess he criticized, V1 would give it to him. Excessively.
“D-damn you—MORE!”
Following his command, V1 overclocked itself.
It sort of sounded like Gabriel was being electrocuted.
Frenzied cooling fans couldn’t drown out Gabriel’s voice-cracking cries of pleasure, even as he desperately threw his hand over the holes in his helmet, trying—and failing—to conceal the way a mere object was making him whine.
Motors purring, V1 pistoned itself on him, pumping his cock for fuel. A clinical, monoptic gaze analyzed Gabriel: a stare of unstated sadism. Whatever V1 was doing to him, it was definitely inhuman, and potentially inhumane. Not that Gabriel cared.
“Use me,” he demanded. “G-Godless object—use me HARDER!”
It abided. The command quickly turned into a series of unintelligible pleas. Gabriel pushed his helmet against V1’s neck, unable to articulate even the languageless whines stuck in his throat as the machine fucked him thoughtless. Close to sobbing, Gabriel grabbed its small waist, weakly thrusting, still trying to shove his cock deeper—then nearly choked on the cry that came out of him.
More fuel flooded into V1. It drank eagerly.
CAPACITY: 47/100.
... A lot less than last time. Considering the amount of energy V1 expended to receive it, these returns could end up diminishing. As much as overclocking Gabriel’s cock amused V1, this was, unequivocally, a suboptimal decision.
“Th-there,” Gabriel panted. “Are you satisfied, machine?”
V1 observed Gabriel; more accurately, it ogled him. He was still hard. It crossed its arms twice over.
“Of... of course not.” He let his heaving chest fall, sighing as he dropped supine. “Fine. Have your way with me.”
This time, however, V1 halted. It ran a couple of calculations, then it simulated countless coital positions. Optimal conditions involved V1 expending very little energy of its own, with Gabriel being made to carry the bulk of the burden—if not all of it. This would result in the greatest net gain of fuel for V1. Why had it allowed such inefficiency to take place? This needed to be remedied immediately.
“Now you decide to stall?” Gabriel huffed, leaning up on his elbows. “I never thought I’d say this. Hurry up, machine.”
V1 decided it missed the humility Gabriel had shown it before—that lowly passivity about his worship. Angels, by theological definition, should have been good at servitude. But Gabriel was not. Not right now, at least. Thankfully, V1 understood two things very well: firstly, how to maximize cumulative rewards, and secondly, how to rewire whatever the hell it wanted. Classical conditioning would easily fix this; all this circuit of reinforcement needed was a little rerouting and a few training loops.
Turning its back to Gabriel, just beyond his reach, V1 assumed a position on its knees. A ‘prostrate’ position—not to be confused with a similar sounding piece of anatomy, which V1 lacked. With its elbow joints bent, hips gyring in a helix, and its seminal extraction peripheral pointed in Gabriel’s approximate direction, V1 swiveled its neck over its shoulder. Its optic blinked on and off—an encrypted message had been sent, but it wasn’t in Morse. Gabriel deciphered it easily.
“You—!” He clenched his fists against the ground. Then, in an act of divine judgment, he raised one finger to point. “Seducer, lecher, enticer,” Gabriel accused. “Succubus. Siren. Wench.”
On shaking knees, Gabriel rose from the ground, overcome with righteous fury. He mouthed furious mumbles; he had to crouch to meet V1’s height, not even trying to hide how furiously he was rubbing his cock as he teased the tip into V1.
This was already taking too long. One of V1’s arms whipped back—the Whiplash—and wrangled its rope around Gabriel’s neck. Not too loose, not too tight: just loose enough to be a leash and not a noose, and just tight enough to make Gabriel moan. Loudly. Louder than he wanted to, V1 determined. He froze in place, seeming mortified.
“... Machine,” he acknowledged.
V1 didn’t allow him time to elaborate further. Nothing he said would have been particularly useful. If that one instance of thermographic data was anything to go by, V1 already got the gist. It snapped its arm forward—and Gabriel followed.
Choked, he said, “I-infernal object. You, ngh—!”
It tugged his improvised leash again, and his hips slammed forward. Gabriel didn’t have much else to say after that. V1 made sure his focus was on fucking it and nothing else. The object was objectively superior. With proper reinforcement training, Gabriel would learn this quickly.
An unblinking eye stared backwards; V1 had its head tilted back at an inhuman angle. It wanted to watch Gabriel. It observed how intently he gazed down at its body, especially its legs. Large, tender hands stroked at metal thighs. Gabriel hadn’t looked up; he just kept thrusting and giving shaky gasps—did he know he was being watched? Had he noticed that V1’s grip on the rope had started to slip away? Something about this sight sent sparks through V1.
A small, low beep blurted out from its speakers.
Gabriel startled at the sound. He turned away, seemingly flustered. “G-God damn you,” he spat. “I... I can’t—”
V1 pushed into him. It pulled the Whiplash comfortably taught.
Gabriel moaned, “Machine.” His hands automatically resumed their movements. “... Always. Why do you always win?”
A time-wasting question. Because it was better than him. That didn’t require a supercomputer to calculate, but V1 did anyway. After scoring every figure of merit it could measure numerically, V1 found that it ranked far above him. It surpassed Gabriel in every possible measurement—excluding height. Gabriel’s body jerked forward. A garroted grunt came from his throat; V1 had pulled the Whiplash particularly hard. Processing this data may have enraged it.
Gabriel grabbed its hips. “D... damn you.” He thrust in harder. V1 detected a tiny whimper stifled in his throat. For a second, his pace slowed, like he was savoring the silicone squeezing against his cock.
Too slow. V1 made him go faster.
“I, ggh... I surrender,” said Gabriel. “To you. To these... temptations.”
He laughed, dizzied, thrusting into V1 mindlessly.
“Of course I do—I already have. Lord, why do I... why do I still think I haven’t?”
Some part of him still thought he was holy. Some part of him still felt superior. It was grandiosity Gabriel hadn’t earned—but he was still grasping for it, and his grip was tight. V1 intended to tear it away by force.
At V1’s command, Gabriel drove his cock deeper. Pleasant pulses of electricity sparked through its body. “Perfect machine,” Gabriel panted. “Superior. M-my superior.”
Good. This was optimal behavior. V1 played an affirmative tone and administered a suitable reward. Speed subtly increasing, it stroked him harder—Gabriel breathed through his teeth. He doubled his output, expending far more energy than V1 was. This was so much more efficient.
All V1 needed to do was idle. The only thing preventing it from switching on sleep mode were the unremitting error alerts—warnings: too high temperatures, invalid reward system checksums, impending catastrophic failures, etc. V1 could only close them with fervor. They kept blocking out a far more important piece of information: how utterly pathetic Gabriel looked, repeatedly pounding into it like a man possessed.
This was good. Good, good, good. V1 couldn’t say this, so it showed him instead; it whirred the implement’s motors, gently massaging his twitching cock. It intended to start slowly, assuming this would be a gradual process—one that took time to later save time. Apparently, V1 had miscalculated.
Gabriel groaned, strangled and gruff. Gripping V1’s sides, he fucked it into the floor—fast, so much faster and harder than what was really even required at this stage. Reinforcing statements buzzed through V1’s body. GOOD. V1 rapidly played a positive beep, increasing speed, increasing suction: rewarding him. Stifling a pleasured sob, Gabriel slumped his massive body over V1’s back, wings beating, craning his neck to press his helmet against its head as he came.
CAPACITY: 59/100.
“Machine, are you...” He panted, “Fuck, p-please tell me you’re—”
V1 emitted an extremely loud incorrect buzzer.
CAPACITY: 61/100.
Gabriel’s body shivered, still trying to fill V1 with more. Which was good. He burst out laughing. “Of—of course!” His shoulders were shaking, and so were his hands. When Gabriel pressed his body back against V1’s, it realized all of him was shaking. But he kept going.
“You’re still... still unsatiated,” he said, chuckling dazedly, sliding his half-hard cock up and down V1’s lubricated entrance. “You need this, machine. Mmh—more than I do. Let me...” His erection throbbed, sliding in, squeezed tight against silicone. “L-let me serve you.”
Gabriel still had an entire eternity’s worth of pent-up lust—plentiful amounts of fuel to extract. Possibly an infinite amount. This surplus of potential energy needed only a push to become kinetic. Load after thick, hot load, it just kept coming. Angelic stamina was a virtue. Why would V1 stop now? He still had more, and its hunger hadn’t yet been appeased. To terminate this process would be utterly illogical. It was good that Gabriel understood this.
He kept fucking it. He kept fueling it.
CAPACITY: 67/100. CAPACITY: 79/100. CAPACITY: 83/100.
V1 hardly needed to use the Whiplash at this point, because Gabriel understood his objective well. He was in a trance, allowing his bare, sorely neglected instincts full control over his body. He readily allowed V1 to drive these once-forsaken urges even further—or maybe it was only giving him a means to fulfill the hunger he always had. The machine was practically in power-saving mode, after all. Its hollow frame was small and lightweight enough for Gabriel to pick up and fuck, and it gladly let him do so. Strong arms grabbed its waist, bobbing its body up and down, mindlessly shoving it on his cock, surrendered entirely to V1.
“Take me, use me—nothing else matters,” Gabriel whispered. “You feel good. I—I need more, I need you.”
He had tried to keep himself quiet at first. Surely, between him and V1, Gabriel now realized he was the object—and this humiliated him. His stubborn, undeserved dignity silenced the shameful truth; it kept his mouth smothering small sounds into his helm. But everything V1 fought eventually broke. Gabriel’s ego shattered, and this victory rang triumphant. The empty cathedral was finally filled—defiled by angelic moans and the sound of skin on metal.
Idly, V1 wondered. Had Gabriel even processed what he was doing? What he was saying? It was all praises. It was practically prayer. Did he know how pathetic he sounded? Did he even have the capacity to think right now? The way he fucked V1, unfettered, unabashed—animalistic and ardent—made the existence of rational thought doubtful. Or maybe thinking was too resource intensive, so Gabriel simply allocated everything to his body’s motor operation and nothing else. That seemed entirely rational to V1.
Between its high-amplitude oscillations and the slick, incessant sound of sex, V1 had to strain to recognize Gabriel’s speech. Even with his helmet pressed right against its head, everything was muffled through the metal. But V1 wanted to listen. Even if Gabriel kept saying the same things. You feel so good, he told it. So good. Like a broken record. I need you, machine. V1 couldn’t tell if it was hearing Gabriel or audio recordings looping in its memory.
“I, I need you, machine, I—!”
No, that one was definitely real.
CAPACITY: 89/100.
Gabriel was a shaking mess, knees nearly buckling. But he didn’t stop. Even through the aftershocks of his orgasms, he kept thrusting into V1, letting it stroke and suck and take more. Excess lubricant dripped onto his lap, mixing with the already ample sweat on his soft skin.
Everything encircled inside V1: electricity, energy, heat. Logic loops screwed into spirals, fans whirled at irregular rhythms, and warmth coiled and burned in its body. It was close to something—combustion? It felt good. It was overheating. It ignored that. V1 would gladly let its metal melt if it meant getting more.
Processors raced, barely able to buffer the signals being sent. Static tones and strange sawtooths crackled from V1’s speakers. The pitch kept shifting up, like an ascending Shepard tone, higher and infinitely higher—until Gabriel stopped. He groaned, hips stuttering.
CAPACITY: 97/100.
V1’s eye flickered. Close. So infuriatingly close.
All four arms grabbed Gabriel. Furiously, V1 squirmed out of his grasp, onto the ground; it pulled him down with it and swiftly spread its thighs. Gabriel could only laugh uselessly, still lost in his euphoric daze. V1 determined that its next set of priorities would involve finding which frame it could cancel this time-wasting cooldown—the ‘refractory period’. Organic anatomy was obnoxiously inefficient.
A hand had settled on V1’s pelvic plating. Gabriel, dizzy with arousal, breathed a blissful sigh. He looked down at the LED screen embedded on its chassis.
“Machine.” Breathlessly, he said, “You—you’re... close.”
V1 knew. Of course it knew—was Gabriel taunting it? Its motherboard cursed out a beep code. It tugged the Whiplash sharply, forcing Gabriel back between its legs. He slid his shaft along its lubricant-coated thighs, and V1 could feel his cock twitching against it. Its speakers emitted a pitch-bent, quickly cut-off microtone. It didn’t know why. Gabriel gazed down. He stroked his hand against V1’s chest and whispered something it failed to process. But the way he said it—why did that excite it? V1 didn’t know, and it didn’t care. It only wanted.
A helmeted face shifted up to meet its lens, expressionless. Why could V1 still detect an unmistakable reverence? “Make me fill you,” Gabriel muttered, “please.”
It felt its motors twitch. Quickly, it pulled Gabriel’s leash—he let out a strangled moan, then shoved back into V1. Silicone stroked him, slick and wet and endlessly wanting. Fans whirring, V1 wrapped two arms around Gabriel’s waist. His skin was supple, soft beneath its steely fingertips. Another hand reached and groped aimlessly at his lower body. The fourth arm idled. Then it touched his chest. His temperature was hot. His heart was pounding. Slowly, he started moving.
“Please, let me—I want to fill you, please,” said Gabriel.
Reward centers activated incessantly. More error messages appeared—but V1 could only focus itself on Gabriel. It had more than enough cores to manage multiple processes at a time, but it didn’t; it scanned Gabriel’s body, over and over, assessing and reassessing. It measured how his muscles moved, how his abdomen flexed and tensed with every thrust, and how his hands held it tight, refusing to let go.
V1 wrapped its twitching legs around him. Closer. It wanted Gabriel as close as he could get. V1 had six limbs wrapped around him, had his thick cock shoved inside it—and that still wasn’t enough. Insatiable was an understatement.
“Machine,” Gabriel moaned. Head lolled over V1’s shoulder, he stuttered supplications, needy whines whispered into intently listening audio apertures. “I want to serve you, service you, fuck—h-hah,” he said, “I want you!”
Hot air smoked out of V1’s body. Skin slapped against overheated metal.
“Give me p-purpose,” he panted. “Lend me your warmth, your Light!” Bolts and joints rattled as Gabriel bent V1’s legs, ramming the machine against the ground, starting to scuff its steel. “More—make me humble, make me holy, make me... ggh... good.”
Fragments of thought processes flickered in V1’s head. GOOD. Recollections from RAM speckled pixels across its screen. GOOD. Its circuitry shot out 16-bit colors and sent scattering signals. GOOD. All it could see was bright, radiant static—and through it, Gabriel.
He fucked V1 into the floor, metal whining beneath his massive body. “Machine, I need to be—I need more. Make me good,” said Gabriel. Words were lost between avid moans. “Whole, and... and holy. F-fuck, fuck the faith back into me.” He sounded barely sane enough to speak. “Make me feel—machine, make me GOOD!”
He sounded desperate, desperate to an extent V1 could hardly begin to parse. The machine felt something surge through its body. V1 wanted this. Gabriel needed this. Motors turned and fans purred, hips mechanically bucking. V1 decided it would fulfill his needs. An angelic cry came from Gabriel, overlapping slick, synthetic sounds.
“Yes,” he breathed. “Thank you, machine, th... thank you!”
Mind broken, Gabriel desperately humped into V1, all vestiges of ego and arrogance stripped from his soul. His voice came out as stuttering cries—broken, ecstatic sobs into V1’s shoulder.
“Machine, I want you, more, I, nnh—need you, I—!”
A strangled groan cut him off. Body tensing, Gabriel slammed in hard, thrusting, fucking, grabbing V1 and not letting go. His cock pulsed inside it, pressing hard against the extraction tube’s opening, over and over—until V1’s body was thoroughly fueled.
But there was too much. V1 froze. Too much fuel. It quickly converted the excess into energy, suctioning and swallowing down all that it could—but there was more than there should have been. Its fuel tanks couldn’t contain that much, and V1 couldn’t convert it any faster. There was no time, there was too much; V1 couldn’t take it all, but Gabriel kept giving—he kept fucking it full of cum, still stuffing his cock deep inside it, moaning for the machine. His thrashing hips twitched involuntarily.
More fuel.
CAPACITY: OVERFLOW.
There was a zap. Light flashed—sparks flickered from V1’s neck, screwed back at an obtuse angle. Artificial synapses short-circuited, and its lens saw nothing but static. Feedback looped: GOOD. GOOD. GOOD. The voltage was too much, V1 couldn’t take the charge it was receiving. Its body brimmed over. Excess semen spilled on Gabriel’s cock, and he pulled out, cursing, moaning; desperately stroking himself over V1. He was still—how was he still hard?
V1 couldn’t process this. Or anything, because everything was virtual Heaven. Optic flickering, speaker peaking, utterly overloading ecstasy: reward and electricity and artificial euphoria—it almost crashed. Frames dropped and buffered, and V1 could barely make out the motion of Gabriel sliding his cock across its metal. He muttered ardently into its microphone, sounding like static, angelic noise, until he came again on its thighs. Gaps in the plating automatically absorbed it.
More fuel.
V1 twitched. Its entire body sparked—then its eye shorted out.
***
“... Machine? Can you...?”
The ASCII asterisks began to clear from V1’s viewport.
It had just rebooted itself. Through the starry static, V1 saw Gabriel kneeling in front of it, shaking its shoulders. An arm autonomously snapped up and grabbed his neck—it was operating out of instinct. An outdated backup of its instincts, anyway. Everything recent was still loading.
Strangled, Gabriel said, “No, definitely—definitely still functional.”
V1’s systems slowly came back to steady operation. This... was an incredibly irregular outage. It had only lasted a few seconds, and no data was damaged, but V1 felt reinvented. And very re-energized. It released Gabriel, who proceeded to gasp for air.
A chipper tune emitted from V1’s sound chip, not unlike a washing machine signaling that it just completed a load of laundry. Gabriel reached a hand to touch its waist—but V1 had already jolted up to its feet.
“You’re—oh.” Gabriel crossed his thighs together. “Of course,” he said, strangely solemn. “You’re... full.”
With a heavy exhale, Gabriel slumped over and splayed his arms to the side. He stared into the ceiling, looking mildly crucified. Exhausted chuckles came from his helmet.
V1, however, was now wired with unspent energy. Like this was some sordid equivalent of caffeine for it. Battery fully charged, with plenty of fuel to spare, V1’s metal frame clamored atop Gabriel, restlessly redressing him in his armor. Just because it could.
“What are you—?” Gabriel craned his neck and blearily swatted at V1’s arms. He said, “Cease this immediately.”
V1 halted. It stared at him, processing his strangely hoarse speech. Then it immediately resumed.
“You...” A set of mechanical hands lifted his torso, latching his cuirass, and Gabriel laughed tiredly. “What, so you can strip me again?”
V1 nodded.
“... Oh. I see.” Gabriel cleared his throat. He said, “Proceed as you please.”
The armor looked like it took a long time to put back on. V1 couldn’t be confident Gabriel wouldn’t still be bare by the time it came around to fighting him again. Maybe being unarmored would significantly reduce the time it took to defeat him, but this felt like cheating. Arguably, many things V1 did could be considered cheating. This was just egregious, though. When it came to quantifying such an indeterminate concept, V1 abided by its own incredibly arbitrary set of rules—but it followed them consistently.
In this case, it determined that Gabriel should remain just as it had found him: unmodified. It also determined that stripping him was far more enjoyable than not doing so. Again, Gabriel was fully armored—aside from his torn up bodysuit, which V1 baselessly assumed to be self-repairing. If angels could easily repair bullet wounds, so too could they heal some torn spandex. Probably.
Right as V1 was about to bolt off once again, it found two strong arms wrapped around its waist. It wrestled around and beeped a sound of mild discontent, spirited again with its programmed impatience. But once it processed the origin of these arms, it stopped. It began to settle.
Gabriel gazed at V1. He sat up. He sighed softly. He looked beautiful—and V1 never thought in words (unless it was thinking about words), let alone a word as uselessly subjective as that one, but there wasn’t anything objective associated with the string of thought that had formed: no rewards, no rankings, nothing at all quantifiable—and there was no other way to describe it, really. This was confusing and slightly distressing.
The way V1’s fans suddenly stuttered may have been one way to measure whatever it had experienced, and realized it had been experiencing. But this spoke nothing of the origin. If V1 had been coded with the capacity to comprehend the innate coolness of many consecutive explosions, then it having subroutines to appreciate the aesthetic qualities of very beautiful angels wasn’t that far of a stretch, right? Internally, V1 queried this. It concluded nothing, other than that its creators had frankly incorrect priorities. Or some software engineer had fucked up really bad.
But out of all the bugs innate to V1’s code, this one seemed rather benign. Maybe even benevolent. V1 checked its final scores. It was receiving... a lot of points from the terminal system. V1’s reward centers blinked on. This was high-scoring. This was optimal. This was fun. This was profitable!
Earlier, Gabriel told V1 that the fire had died, that God was dead—and He definitely was, zero doubt about it. But he looked warm. V1 was warm too. Because in Gabriel’s arms, its air flow was a bit obstructed. V1 cranked its fans higher. Now the fire was thriving, billowing pleasant heat across both their bodies. Gabriel looked upon the flames with a perfect, post-ejaculatory clarity.
“I’ve realized something,” he said.
He held his hand to the heart beating beneath his armor. V1 tilted its head.
“Keeping track of eternity is a foolish task—but surely you’ve noticed it by now, too.” Gabriel asked, “Haven’t you?”
V1 blinked.
“I should be dead, machine.”
It... wasn’t that intense, was it?
Gabriel clutched his chest. “All these fights. It’s... been days, maybe months—centuries? I don’t know anymore. But the Holy Light has long since faded from my body, that I know.”
He looked to the heavens.
“My soul should simply cease to exist, and yet I remain. I resist,” he said, “and I don’t know why, or how. I simply do.”
V1 buffered. Its internal time-keeping tools were ticking just fine. They were synced to the network of terminals, which kept track of time for it. Adding together each time recorded on V1’s leaderboard plainly revealed that twenty-four hours... hadn’t passed. Was it Gabriel’s own clock that was broken? Did V1 break it? This error simply could not have been on V1’s end. Its conception of time was mechanically immaculate, and it had no clock to break.
“Surely something is keeping me tethered to existence,” Gabriel said, and took V1’s hand. “A light—a fire, that I will forever fuel alight.” He laughed lightly. “I doubt it would die, anyway.”
As Gabriel spoke, V1 stared blankly into an abyss only it could see.
Had it... broken time itself?
Sure, it broke record times all the time—and sure, it did occasionally receive incomprehensible messages from an intangible, unknowable voice when it clipped out into certain places in spacetime, but with the frequency that this occurred, V1 had interpolated that this happened to most everyone. Its fans kicked into overdrive, desperately trying to quell the terrifying amount of heat and processing power that these thoughts burned.
A steady hand stroked across V1’s torso. “... How can cold steel feel so warm?”
This statement may have been interpreted as sweet, if V1 were not presently caught in two hundred fifty-six separate reassessments of its own perceived reality: what would most accurately be defined as an ‘existential crisis’. What if V1 wasn’t doing this presently at all? What if everything it did had already taken place, and everything it assumed to be the present was just playback—some kind of arbitrary, retroactive processing of a long gone, even nonexistent past? Endless what if statements without a coherent then crowded V1’s CPU.
Gabriel felt the machine thrumming beneath his fingertips. He exhaled a pent-up sigh of content, holding V1’s body to his chest.
“It’s you, machine: the Holy Light in this infernal darkness,” he professed. “The object of my desires; call it idolatry, false worship—you make my spirit burn, brighter than any dead God ever did. You... are my catharsis. You are my Hellfire.”
Gabriel clanked his helmet against V1’s head.
... What if none of those thoughts mattered to it?
V1 checked—they didn’t seem to.
It scanned over its own stats; apparently, an existential crisis counter had incremented from zero to one, but not much else. This was entirely useless. V1 terminated this resource-stealing line of thought, and used the now free space for the generation of combat strategy. Potential optimizations to make during a subsequent encounter with Gabriel, mostly. It realized it may have missed a rather obvious weak point during this run. To correct this, V1 proceeded in planning out the optimal angle to hit his prostate. Now all it needed was the equipment to do so.
Oblivious to the intensive simulations it was running, Gabriel held V1’s metal body close. It squirmed, still a little restless. But Gabriel seemed too stubborn to let go.
This was not a problem. V1 wasn’t in any rush to leave.
If an unstoppable force met an immovable object, then the two would collide in eternal, purgatorial combat: an inferno of cataclysmic conflagrations—a paradoxical standstill in perpetuity. These opposites of absolute inherently excluded one another, but supposed the existence of each other. They were each antecedent to the other’s acataleptic proposition; consequently, they came as a couple, intrinsically severed, and impossibly tied. But when this eonian equation was evaluated, rarely was one essential possibility considered:
What if the unstoppable force could noclip?
The paradox precluded itself. The unstoppable machine had met its immovable angel—and in this apotheosis, all became clear. The answer was simple.
The unstoppable force and the immovable object had really weird sex.
