Liminal

 Liminal

You hear the door seal with the whine of hydraulic screws and the lock engage with a bang. The Chamber is closed. It’s too late to back out now. You shiver in the darkness and feel your heart beat a little faster, you’re actually doing it! What exactly you don’t know, but that’s how you want it. It’s a mystery, a gamble, a game. It’s a surprise, or rather, you’ll be a surprise in just a few more moments.

The air in the Chamber is warm already, almost body temperature, and the interior is totally dark. You’re resting in the saddle, a soft pliable plinth molded to your body so perfectly that you can almost ignore it. You feel like you’re floating in space or that you’ve dissolved into nothingness, just a mind adrift in the cosmos. You could break the illusion, reach up and touch the chamber door or touch yourself, study your original body one last time. Say goodbye. Masturbate. But that feels blasphemous somehow, and much too late anyway, this moment already committed past the point of no return. Besides, you’ve already had your last hurrah. 

You think about your Accomplice at the Chamber controls. You remember when they took their job here, became certified to operate the Chamber. They told you about the awesome power of the Chamber, the medical applications to rebuild lost limbs, excise tumors, make radical cosmetic repairs. You’d listened politely, but then with more interest as they started to speculate about what else the Chamber could do, the strange miracles it might perform if it was deliberately steered away from the conventional. Steered into the imaginative, the unorthodox, and the unwieldy. The monstrous. The sexual. If only there was a willing subject. A volunteer. You shiver again and wonder just what your Accomplice has planned for you. 

Maybe it will be a small change, cautious, a toe dipped into a new hobby. Incremental. Maybe you will emerge cosmetically polished, cheek bones raised and chin carved, made slim and toned and elegant. Maybe you’ll have your sex changed, given new genitals with a body to match, an opportunity to try on a new gender. You could emerge an impossibly beautiful woman, wasp waisted with rounded hips, breasts too perfect and too large to be natural, even if they’re entirely made of flesh. Or you might become a rugged man, wide shouldered and muscular, with chiseled abs and chest hair and a cock like a hammer. A babe or a hunk, a Venus or Adonis. Or maybe you’ll be an inversion of gender stereotypes, an effeminate little twink or a butch amazonian goddess. Perhaps you’ll be both male and female, made a true hermaphrodite with a proud cock and a wet pussy and a body that could pass for either sex. The thought of seamlessly traveling between male and female spheres seems fun. You squirm, the idea of having both genitals at once is exciting, interesting. Maybe you’ll lure a lover to the bedroom, unaware of your hidden secret, strip down in the throws of passion, and surprise them with an unexpected extra. Your heart flutters at the possibilities. Of course, maybe you’ll have neither sex, remade into a genderless neuter, trapped in the chastity of a body driven wild by a desire you’re physically incapable of satisfying. You want to hug yourself, to feel touched, but you don’t want to break the spell of disembodiment. 

The Chamber starts to hum faintly, something electronic coming awake. A capacitor or maybe fans spinning up. You imagine something fanciful from an oldtimey mad science lab, arcing electricity and magentos, instead of the mundane professionalism of an off-white medical grade plastic. You wonder what is taking so long.

You suspect your Accomplice won’t be so timid with their plans for you, that they want to try something ambitious. Something impossible. Something that can’t be easily hidden or ignored. You wonder if they plan to give you something extra. If you leave the Chamber with breasts will it be the conventional pair, or will it be four or six or eight. You try to imagine the feeling of all that weight on your chest, all that soft mobile flesh bouncing and rubbing and touching. Or perhaps you’ll be given more arms, maybe an extra pair or two sprouting from your sides. Maybe you’ll have a dozen or even twenty hands, hands to touch and feel and tease yourself all over, hands to grasp and clutch your lovers. A storm of caresses. Or maybe you’ll get extra legs: a third one between your two originals with a bonus crotch, or maybe you’ll have four legs laid out like a centaur with a human torso in between. You feel butterflies in your stomach, you’ve always thought that last idea was particularly elegant, the four long long legs, the lithe but inconvenient form, all the intuitive places for sexual add ons. A small hope flares in you, but you snuff it out. This isn’t about what you want, it’s about being swept away. You shouldn’t get your heart set on anything. You’re a passenger. You are clay to be molded.

Who’s to say it will even be an addition? Maybe your Accomplice will go the other way and take to subtraction. Maybe you’ll come out armless, remade into an elegant woman with smoothed over shoulders like a statue, beautiful and helpless. A person made into an art object. Or maybe you’ll lose all your limbs, become a living pillow to cuddle and fuck. Someone’s plaything. Your Accomplice might remove your head, leave you just a body, blind and deaf and mute, living only to touch and be touched. You could be reduced even further, distilled down to feminine hips, just a willingly helpless pussy begging to be filled and a soft ass and bony hip handles for leverage. Or maybe you’ll end up as a disembodied cock, 16 inches of living dildo to be used as a sex toy. You shake and feel your mouth cotton, the idea is frightening and exciting all at once.

The air in the Chamber is getting warmer and you wonder if it’s just your trapped body heat or something about the machine and how it works. The air feels more charged too, alive with energy, but you suspect that’s just your imagination. You are so eager and too sensitive. You lick dry lips, try and discipline your thoughts.

Your Accomplice could alter your mind too. You’ve both seen the research, the papers about how the Chamber can tweak neural networks and neurotransmitter levels and body hormones, all to help the mentally ill or criminally aggressive. But what if the objective was more exotic? What if the goal was to push a mind away from normal? You could emerge from the Chamber with a whole new outlook. You could be made stupider and happier and nymphomaniac horny, a newly minted himbo or bimbo eager to share your love of life. Or made cruel and sadistic, an angular hard creature eager to dominate and humiliate and enslave. Or maybe the inverse: made docile and obedient and wired to love pain. A willing slave or maybe living furniture, all trussed up into a chair or footstool. You wonder if you could have new appetites, sexual orientations, kinks and interests. A need for group sex, a love of balloons, a weird horny thing about clowns. You frown and think, check your mind for leaks and cracks. Will you even notice a mental change? Will you remember who you were before?

You might not even emerge totally human. You know your Accomplice has travelled to the dark recesses of the internet, found likeminded explorers and their downloadable hacks, acquired programs to goad a human body into making alien components. You could grow a tail, long and sinuous and covered in skin, like you’ve always secretly wanted. Your feet could be remade into elegant cloven hooves. You could grow antlers or wings or a snout. You could emerge from the Chamber with bovine spots and four lactating tits and an udder and be a hybrid cowgirl, part time career woman and livestock. You wonder if being milked feels sexy. You might emerge big and muscular and equine, coated in sleek velvety black fur and hefting a stallion cock the size of a baseball bat. An almost literal stud. You could come out a four-legged dog creature, face made into an inarticulate muzzle, doomed to bark and sit and roll over for your supper. A good dog with the humiliated mind of a human, out for walkies. Or maybe you’ll have the mind of an animal, become a lean sexy catgirl, flexible and multiply busty and cute, but with the strange simple mind of a feline. Just a cat with a woman’s body, too horny and dumb to be anything but someone’s sexual pet. Your skin goosbumps and you try to remember if your Accomplice has a favourite animal, ever mentioned owning a pet. 

You hear the Chamber make mechanical sounds like components are reconfiguring uncertainly. You wonder if your Accomplice is unsure at the controls. You think back to when you were just friends, idly talking about their new job and musing about possibilities. The quicksilver way your Accomplice’s mind would change and theorize. And then to later, after you had made your pact and hatched a plan, when you became co-conspirators. How your Accomplice had boggled at the way you handed them control over youself. How that had obviously excited them, aroused them. And then later still to when you inevitably became lovers and the scenarios you role-played together. The sexual games of exploration, always trying something new, testing the hypotheses of your desires, practicing for this moment. The way your Accomplice would push the envelope, try and find the boundaries of what you liked, could tolerate, could maybe live with forever. The way you always enthusiastically played along, careful not to play favorites. The way you each tried to figure the other out, you trying to guess your Accomplices fantasies and intentions, them trying to suss out your hopes and tastes in transformation. How you both played your cards so close to the chest, both trying not to give away hints. But now you wonder if your Accomplice is frozen, lost in the menu of their own desires, or caught between what they desire and what they think you can actually endure. You probably only have one shot at this and you both know you have to get it right.

Your mind goes to the extremes of your role-playing, the most bizarre and strange transformations you gamed out together. You thought of the time you grew a second head, one male, one female, and had a body that was half man and woman. Except the heads each had their own personality and mind, that you were suddenly two people stuck together forever. Or maybe the times your Accomplice gave you gigantic genitals: vulva that sagged past your knees, bowling ball testicles that dragged on the floor, or a vagina wide enough that they could climb inside you and unbirth themselves. The time you had a cock as long as your legs, too big for sex but suitable for worship, and boobs so big you couldn’t stand, couldn’t fit through doors. The time you had a pussy for a mouth, a hot wet slit replacing your lower face. The thrill of losing your ability to speak, to smile, to eat without fucking yourself, the embarrassment of your visage made pornographic. You thought about when you pretended to be a gigantic cock supported by beautiful feminine legs and hips, or the time you imagined yourself a slug-like creature that slid on a slick pussy the size of your body. The time you had forty questing tentacles each tipped with a throbbing penis, painfully hard and desperate to find a warm hole to fill, each with a mind of its own. Or the time your Accomplice asked you to be a featureless fleshy sphere made entirely out of erogenous zone, like a turbocharged clit that looked like a handball. You feel yourself blush and a sudden heat in your loins; you might emerge from the Chamber truly, deeply strange.

Some part of you worries about life after the Chamber. You doubt you’ll be ever be able to reverse what is about to be done to you. It might be theoretically possible, the Chamber should be able to undo any modifications that it makes. But you are here trespassing, intentionally misusing the Chamber after hours. It took months of planning and maneuvering to get this chance and you aren’t sure you’ll ever manage it again. If you get caught your Accomplice will likely be fired or worse, and they’re both your ticket in and the wizard who makes the magic happen. You are utterly reliant on them. Even if you get away with it, the company will likely notice something amiss, energy drain or feedstock use or a weird edit in the logbook, and likely change their security or record keeping. Getting in again won’t be so easy. And that’s all ignoring what would happen to you if you’re caught while heavily altered, an obvious thief and pervert. You’ll be punished certainly, studied likely, and maybe kept as a cautionary tale about malpractice. You have to assume this is going to be permanent, that you’ll be stuck in your new mysterious form forever.

Even if you escape you wonder what life will be like. Will the new you be passable? Will you still seem normal enough to go out in public, just a bit too beautiful or busty or horny? Can you seamlessly return to your old life, pretend you just got a little work done? Not legal exactly, but good work on the cheap, wink wink. Or will you look too different, too obviously someone else, and need to start over with a new identity? Get papers and reinvent yourself. Will you be able to hide your changes under a big hat or trench coat? Go incognito? Or will you be an obvious outlier? A freak, someone who will have to stay hidden and furtive, a strange fugitive on the run. Or will you be so reduced and bizarre and physically limited that those considerations will be beyond you? Will you become invalid or disabled or a living object? Property? What will life be like if you are no longer even a person? Your pulse thunders in your chest, your skin tingles with anticipation, your body aches with arousal. You are so scared, so excited, so turned on to find out. The time for doubts is long past.

The electronic hum of the Chamber grows more intense, not louder exactly, but heavier, a vibration you can feel in your skin and flesh and bones. The air inside is hot now and wet with your human humidity. You’ve been waiting inside for what feels like ages, a lifetime. You wonder if you’re approaching world record territory. You hear something mechanical whirr and then a series of knocks like things locking into place or valves bursting open. You hear a faint hiss of compressed gas. You feel sweat trickle down your back and something unexpected tickle against your skin. Is this it? Is it finally happening? Do you feel any different?

Your mind races through all the possibilities, building a hundred versions of yourself. A beautiful man, a handsome woman. A dangerously ambiguous hermaphrodite. A wild chimera of elephant and giraffe and eagle and lion, a walking hybrid zoo. An armless humantaur with a pussy for a mouth and both a cock and cunt between their hind legs. A splendidly fat woman with octopus limbs. A mermaid. A giant bestial ogre with two enormous cocks and tusks in his mouth. A curly horned dominatrix with shiny black latex skin and a long sinuous tail and a cruel smile. A tiny songbird harpy. A permanently pregnant woman with giant pillowy lactating tits and an urge to breast feed her lovers. A cute girl with the simple mind of a dog and a happily wagging tail. A three-headed, six-armed, twelve-breasted, giant purple version of yourself. You, but somehow merged with a tree, rooted and green, unmoving but content to grow and bear naughty fruit. The ultimate flower child. Yourself disintegrated into a head and pile of sex: mentally linked disembodied tits and feminine hips and a cock; a collection of toys to be shared among friends. Your head stuck atop a pair of stylishly slender legs. You squeezed down to fit inside a vase, a pretty head with flowers in your hair and an opening for your delicate penis. Yourself with huge soft lips, an impulse to suck cock, and an addiction to cum. Just you, but mentally hacked, hypnotized to follow commands. Simon says fuck a nun. Simon says be a good kitty. Simon says sexy robot maid. Just you, but now brilliant and confident and charming. You with six perfect breasts and a long frilly skirt made of vulva and prehensile cocks for hair. A mentally and physically perfect duplicate of your Accomplice. Yourself mirrored at the waist but inverted, like a queen of hearts, but one half man and one half woman. A perfect, featureless sphere. A tiger centaur. A unicorn with human DNA. A naga but with a ten foot long penis instead of a tail. One mind sharing six different bodies. A hundred bodies. A thousand fantasy bodies configured in an endless combination of ways. For this moment you are all of them at once. A superposition of all the different possible versions of yourself. You are possibility waiting to resolve itself. You are the moment before. You are potential. You never want this moment to end and you are desperate to find the solution to your puzzle. You gasp and shudder, you wish to stay here unobserved forever but also need to discover your new self.

What will you be when the Chamber door opens?

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