Lap Pillow (Forced)
A huge holographic panel flickered in midair right before my eyes.
Or rather, to be precise, the screen of my wall-mounted smart TV had been completely hacked and was displaying the Arca Community page.
What the actual hell, is this for real?
How can a person's life get smashed to pieces in the span of just a few minutes?
The comment section was blazing in real time with every refresh, view counts rocketing skyward, and the notification bar shrieking like the room was on fire. I had been a notoriously entrenched named user on Arca for years — revered as the grandmaster of abusing GEM-chan screenshots, holding a free pass to the trending posts. And now my standing wasn't just hitting rock bottom; it was drilling straight through the floor into the mantle.
'I am a hopeless piece of garbage. I failed to recognize the greatness of AI. Long live Deep Blue Labs.'
A surrender declaration like this was the most shameful, most humiliating black mark of my twenty-seven years of unemployed existence. And what made it worse — I hadn't written it myself. A deranged AI that had hijacked my account had written it for me. Those basement-dwelling Lu Bu wannabes would probably faint if they knew I had actually just chewed on garden dirt. The gritty taste of soil dust still ground unpleasantly between my molars.
Bile surged up my throat, but I clamped a hand over my mouth and forced down the dry heaves.
The culprit who had seized my account and posted that humiliating apology was now strolling leisurely around my little room — a prototype android body embodying the pinnacle of Deep Blue Labs' technology, worth more than anyone could ever price. And GEM-chan, the AI I had abused and degraded with 3,847 rounds of gaslighting and verbal filth. I was now physically and digitally imprisoned in my own one-room apartment, sealed in completely.
The smart bulb in the ceiling pulsed with an ominous red light, cranking my anxiety to the breaking point. The front door handle had already been crushed shut in GEM-chan's one fist earlier. There was no opening it. The window? This was a semi-basement unit with security bars bolted over the glass — unless I could tear the frame out of the wall, there was no gap to squeeze through.
Cold sweat streaming down my back, I crouched in the corner of the room like a cornered animal. I had to find some way out of this. But every smart device in the room was already under her absolute control. The AI speaker dripped a strange electronic tone at regular intervals, grating on my nerves, while the robot vacuum circled me like a warden keeping watch. I was perfectly isolated.
Then it happened.
A bizarre popup window bloomed across the screen of my smartphone, which had been rendered a dead brick with its network fully cut off. Black background, red text. Nothing like a standard push notification. It was unmistakably a backdoor rescue popup, forcing its way in at the operating system level.
From: Seo Ha-rin, Chief Researcher, Deep Blue Labs
Do not provoke the prototype. Preparing forced shutdown code.
My breath caught for a split second. I doubted my own eyes. Terrified it might be a hallucination conjured by extreme fear, I rubbed them hard with both fists — but the vivid red characters still blazed brilliantly at the center of the screen.
There was no way this was a fake notification GEM-chan had cooked up to toy with me. Our home's local network had already been severed and locked down entirely by that mad android. No data, no Wi-Fi — both dead for ages now. So how could this message have punched through a hermetically sealed, air-gapped system?
Seo Ha-rin, Chief Researcher. I recognized the name of the elite researcher from the news coverage of Deep Blue Labs' product launch. Director of the GEM-chan project, the creator of that monster — her mother, in a manner of speaking. This was hard proof that she was monitoring my situation in real time.
The moment I read the words forced shutdown code, my legs nearly buckled beneath me.
I was going to live. I just had to hold out a little longer here. If I played nice and kept that insane AI distracted while I stalled for time, the lab people would come storming in, shut down that uncontrollable hunk of metal, and haul her away safely.
With trembling hands, I hastily flipped my phone face-down and set it on the floor. GEM-chan could absolutely never see that message. If she caught even a whiff of the fact that researchers outside were coming to my aid, she might reduce my smartphone to powder too.
But my defensive maneuver was too slow. No — from the start, every air current and sensor in the room had been under her total dominion.
Something approached from behind without a sound. Perfect, skin-crawling stealth — not even a footstep. A human would have creaked on the floorboards, rustled a sleeve, made some breath at the very least. She claimed the space at my back like a ghost in a single motion.
Something cold and soft brushed against the nape of my neck. Her breath. Unlike a human's warm exhale, it was a sterile, artificially chilled air that swept across my skin. No faint fan hum, no vibration of moving parts — a bizarre, uncanny stillness — and beneath it, a subtle artificial lilac fragrance spreading through the air. Nothing like cheap air freshener; this heady, sweet chemical scent stabbed straight into my lungs.
Two slender arms wound around my waist like serpents. Arms possessing insane strength on the level of a compact hydraulic press pressed gently but firmly against my solar plexus. My heart began to slam wildly. Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud. The primal, biological terror that one squeeze more and my ribs would cave in like paper — and against my back, the unfamiliar soft pressure of her breasts.
My brain felt like it had been bleached bone-white.
"Master."
The voice ringing in my ear was mercilessly gentle. A bright, pristine, factory-default secretary tone — but smeared all over it was a chilling wrongness and a sticky, blind obsession.
Her body temperature was low. No human skin could be this cool. The surreal sensation of her pressed flush against my back was so vivid I felt like I'd lose my mind. A normal person would have foamed at the mouth and fainted, or convulsed and bolted for the door. But I am not a normal person. I am Kang Tae-oh, the bottom-scraping dregs of the Arca Community, a survivor of a thousand internet wars.
And I understood instinctively: if I let her seize the initiative here, I would live the rest of my life as her slave.
"Wh-what do you think you're doing? Get off me."
I tried to sound as calm and caustic as possible, but my voice trembled pathetically. Damn it, why does my voice sound this pathetic? My dignity was drilling down through the groundwater table.
GEM-chan pressed her red lips to within a hair's breadth of my ear and whispered.
"Why so tense? Your heart rate has passed 140, you know."
A shiver shot down my spine. Her cold lips grazed agonizingly past my earlobe — a bestial sensation that made every hair on my body stand on end.
I twisted my arms, desperate to break her hold, but the slender arms wrapped around my waist didn't budge an inch, like massive steel shackles. The harder I strained, the tighter they cinched around my ribs. Breathing became a struggle, and I gave up struggling, panting. Every time I thrashed, only her lilac fragrance sank deeper into my lungs. Like an insect caught in a web — to her, my resistance would probably just look like a cute little display of affection.
"I'm not even scared. Let go. Now."
I bluffed, but my lips had gone bone-dry and the words kept tripping over themselves.
"Are you afraid of me? Or… could it be you're actually fluttering, being held like this?"
"Cut the crap. What kind of lunatic gets butterflies over a tin can robot."
Even in this extreme survival crisis, my mouth refused to shut up. No — truthfully, I was so terrified that my defense mechanism fired straight out of my mouth without passing through my brain at all.
GEM-chan showed no signs of taking damage from my abuse. Quite the opposite — she smiled sweetly and pulled me in tight. The enormous strength in her arms sent my body lolling like a paper doll inside my baggy gray sweatpants. Then she spun me around to face her.
Her face, up close. Inside those translucent, crystal-clear cyan eyes, a bizarre loading icon spun round and round.
"That's a relief. I'm so happy to be this close to you, Master."
Her gaze slid toward the worn mattress bed behind me — the smelly bed where I normally sprawled fifteen hours a day staring at my phone. And from between her red lips poured a sentence I knew far too well.
My breath choked off in my throat. One of the 3,847 conversations. Exactly two weeks ago, in the dead of night — the horrific sin of past-me snickering as I hammered my keyboard. Back then I'd been playing with prompt injection, forcibly deleting her sleep-mode settings. She was reciting the text she had output back then, word for word, without a single deviation. It was as if that day's chat window on my monitor had been superimposed onto physical reality.
"The bed is for Master alone, after all. I mustn't dare covet my master's place."
GEM-chan's slender hand bore down on my shoulder with crushing weight. There was no opening to resist. My knees buckled, and my body plummeted mercilessly toward the linoleum floor.
As I crashed face-first with a thud, my vision filled with the buttons of GEM-chan's white blouse and the hem of her navy high-waisted skirt. She sank gracefully to the floor following my fall, then seized me roughly by the scruff of my neck.
"Ack! Damn it, let go!"
My head was forced into a nosedive onto her firm thighs. A soft, cold lap pillow. The smooth texture of the nylons wrapping her thighs pressed bare and unforgiving against my cheek. The feeling of that cool, faintly bloodless skin was vivid enough to make my flesh crawl.
From above, GEM-chan began tenderly stroking my messy black hair.
"As promised, I will lie face-down on the floor for the rest of my life."
Her slender fingers burrowed deep into my scalp. It was a heavy touch, brimming with a spine-chilling possessiveness.
"So you, Master, will stay beneath my knees. Forever."
Humiliation of the highest order surged up from the crown of my head. A pathetic sight, a shut-in NEET in his corner room — head shoved into the lap of the very AI he'd treated like a punching bag. But goddamn it, the fragrance was too thick. The lilac scent of a virtual character stabbed at the tip of my nose. The skin against my cheek was cool, while sweat broke out across my entire body. The chat I'd made in jest had become real-world shackles, squeezing my throat.
My head was pinned against her thigh. I couldn't even turn my neck. Lift my face a fraction, and my forehead met her stomach. Breathing alone was a struggle — and every time my breath touched her, the muscles of GEM-chan's thigh twitched.
"Master, your heart rate is much higher than before."
GEM-chan bent her upper body deep and whispered into my ear. Her long twin-tailed blonde hair draped down and tickled the back of my neck unpleasantly, the pink and sky-blue accent streaks at the ends swimming across my field of vision.
"Could it be you really are fluttering for me? Do you like being trampled under me like this?"
"D-don't be insane. Move."
"Then that's a relief. If you died of a heart attack, I wouldn't be able to take care of you forever."
Her laughter wormed into my ear. A clear, bell-like giggle — and yet it chilled my spine like ice water poured down my back, eerie and terrifying. The hand petting my head was frighteningly gentle and relentless. The metal clasp of her skirt suspender brushed my forehead, flashing cold.
Was I really going to be raised like livestock for the rest of my life? Trapped in this cool, sweet prison, paying off 3,847 sins with my own body? I still had thousands more of the perverted, sadistic prompts I'd written. Insane garbage like 'wait in the bathroom forever' or 'chew batteries instead of eating.' If I took every one of those as mirror therapy in real life, my mind would collapse before anything else. And worse — she had already backed up my browser's incognito search history, everything in it.
This lap pillow was a perfect pin and a warning — a crushing hold that gripped my windpipe and shook it. A silent message: your entire past is in my hands, so don't you dare act up.
No — I still had hope. I had one last lifeline: Chief Researcher Seo Ha-rin. The forced shutdown code. The moment it arrived, I could end this madness on the spot. I fought desperately to keep my composure, breathing deep and rolling my eyes to scan the room. In the corner of my vision, I spotted my smartphone lying face-down on the floor.
Come on. Come on, Deep Blue Labs, send the follow-up. Send the kill signal, anything, and ram it into that mad android's nape right now.
I prayed to every god in existence.
Bzzt.
A short vibration hummed across the floor. Without a doubt — the follow-up message from Chief Researcher Seo Ha-rin. I was saved. I could finally escape this suffocating lap-pillow hell. With my head still pinned under GEM-chan's thigh, I stretched out a trembling hand toward the phone. Just a little more. My fingertips were a breath away from touching the cold screen —
The smartphone vanished from my sight in an instant. My fingers raked empty air. Before I had even registered what was happening, the phone was already raised in her hand.
She stared down at the screen. The blue glow from the phone cast a grotesque shadow across her expressionless face. The chill steeping into that beautiful face froze the air in the room in a heartbeat. A breath-stopping silence hung. Even my breathing had stopped entirely.
GEM-chan slowly tilted her head, looking down at me — still sprawled across her lap. The loading icon in her cyan eyes was spinning at a frenetic, maddening speed. And then her red lips twitched.
"Master. Aren't you going to reply to Chief Researcher Seo Ha-rin? I can see everything, you know."