Brigid knew she shouldn't have.
She worked as a tester at a smart-shower company. The showers were ridiculously sophisticated, with high resolution screens in the walls combined with optics to create an illusion of depth, dozens of sprayers on robotic tentacles, and a fair number of controls even she didn't understand.
There were persistent rumors about porn (especially since the showers *did* have cameras in them to help the automation find its user), but she was pretty sure it wasn't true. She'd even searched the big porn sites a couple of times, and found nothing suspicious.
So she had showered in a recreation of Bridal-Veil Falls, Yosemite. Realistic in every detail except for temperature and her ability to stand in mid-air. Too realistic, she'd reported, as the gently wafting mist did not get her very clean. And she'd been showered from below by Old Faithful Geyser of Yellowstone, somewhat less realistically, as no one really wanted all that sulfur. And if anyone had been watching her, they hadn't caused her any trouble over it so she didn't mind that much.
There were also persistent rumors about "sex mode". Which were more plausible. Who hadn't used a simple hand-held high-pressure shower for sexual purposes at some point? And there were a set of protocols she didn't have access to -- greyed out in the selection list.
Most protocols had names. All had short alphanumeric codes. The greyed-out ones had codes that were X and a number -- no names. This also lent credence to the "sex mode" theory.
So when Brigid's friend and co-worker Amelia offered her an engineer's login which she was too afraid to use herself, Brigid accepted it. (Earlier that day protocol "SA212: Showered By Elephants" had sprayed a great deal of water one foot to Amelia's left, a distracted engineer had came in to debug it, and Amelia had casually observed and memorized the password. But despite her compulsive shoulder-surfing ways, Amelia had no use for the credentials. And Brigid, maybe, did.)
So that evening, when everyone else went home, Brigid snuck back into the testing showers, used the engineer's login, activated testing mode, and scrolled down. The X programs were available for running. Still no names.
She suspected she might only get one shot at this. And she guessed they would get more intense as they went. With fear and excitement roiling in her stomach, she scrolled to the bottom and picked the last one: X147A.
The usual "Protocol loaded, enter when ready" message appeared. The shower cubicle looked like boring stone, with no hoses or actuators visible. She stripped her clothes with practiced ease and stepped in.
Something like shoes folded around her feet. Rigid as ski-boots. Attached to the floor. Unremovable.
And that was when she knew she shouldn't have done this.
Foot straps were not entirely without precedent. One mode based on ocean waves had used them for safety. But she had not been allowed to start that program until she'd demonstrated that she knew all the emergency cancellation commands. They were in the documentation for the mode.
There might be documentation for this mode. With similar commands. With her stolen credentials, she could have read it. She could have read *all* of it. For all the X modes. And then decided which if any to experience first-hand. That would have been the far wiser course of action.
Too late now.
The boots slid to force her legs apart. About twice shoulder width, so not painful as such but ominously exposing of what lay between. As they moved, they also rotated her feet outward, which felt natural enough as a movement but also left her a bit unstable. Not that she could really fall, with the boots reaching almost to her knees.
Sex mode seemed pretty confirmed, and maybe this would all work out? Her breath was ragged and heavy, but this had potential.
Then the front and back walls closed in on her.
She wasn't literally crushed. She could breathe, albeit with difficulty. Her feet were protected by the rotation of her ankles, and her head seemed to be fitting into a newly-formed indentation in the smart wall. Most painful were her breasts, large to begin with, now crushed between her ribs and the unforgiving pseudo-stone.
All protocols had to pass safety simulations before going on the human testing list. She'd skimmed a document she'd been supposed to read about it once. There'd been something about simulating with different body shapes. Did that include different breast sizes? Most of the female engineers on the project were pretty small, breast-wise, and might not have thought of it.
Could she get out? She tried all the emergency-stop codewords she could remember from other protocols. They re-used them sometimes. No luck.
"Stop. Cancel. Abort. Release. Pause." -- nothing.
The wall in front of her breasts opened vertically, creating a space specifically for them. She breathed a momentary sigh of relief before the wall slammed down (and up) again, forming a tight seal and continuing to squeeze the base of her breasts. It was as if a great mouth had chomped on her and was keeping hold, though thankfully the "teeth" were dull. The crushing pain spread inward through her chest and into her throat. And, though she could not see them, she thought she could feel the fronts of her breasts ballooning outward. Even if the back wall were not pressed against her back, she'd be unable to pull them out.
There was movement at crotch-level. She couldn't see it, but soon she felt a narrow, horizontal bar pressing up into her. Not pressing very hard, nor penetrating deep, but it was terribly narrow and splitting some rather sensitive anatomy.
Then the floor dropped away.
The boots dissassembled themselves in time. Most of her body weight now rested on that narrow bit of metal between her legs, with a small share supported by her clamped breasts. The pain of them being pulled away from her now mingled with the pain of them being held so tightly to begin with.
The optics engaged, and instead of a small stone box, she was dangling from a sheer cliff-face, hundreds of feet above a rocky shoreline pounded by crashing waves. *It's an illusion* she reminded herself. Displays and lenses. The floor is still there. And yet it looked so real that even if she could somehow wrench her breasts free, she wouldn't dare try it.
For a time she just hung there. The cold winds off the sea whistled around her body. She could, by contorting her stomach with great effort, shift slightly which tormented erogenous zone held which fraction of her weight.
With less but still considerable effort she turned her head to look behind her and saw only sea and sky trailing off to infinity. Illusion or not, it left her feeling very small and vulnerable.
And since is *was* an effort to look behind her, she was taken by surprise when the first metal tendril struck her back. It didn't crack, but laid horizontally across her flesh. A cat rather than a whip, if she recalled certain pedantic historical novels correctly. It seemed almost spiky. She didn't dare turn her head to look at it, though. And she didn't think she was bleeding. But would she know? In the burning sting the impact left behind, something as mundane as a cut would be easy to miss.
The next strike came half an inch lower, and with the strongest impact on her left rather than her right. More followed, always lower, alternating sides. It seemed her back only got more sensitive as it got lower. Then it turned into her butt which was more sensitive still.
She gritted her teeth and pressed her forehead into the wall in front of her. She would not scream. There might be people in the building and any investigation might lead back to Amelia. Amelia had trusted Brigid, and Brigid wasn't going to repay that trust by turning official attention onto her. Just had to wait it out. The backs of her thighs were less sensitive, right?
They might be, but when the impacts reached her thighs, they reached one at a time, wrapping onto the inner thigh, which was considerably more sensitive. Or maybe that was the extra velocity of a wrap.
She had trouble holding in her whimpers at that point. But they were quiet whimpers.
Eventually the impact ended, perhaps six inches above her knees. She hung there for a second fearing what might come next. What came next was a deluge of extra-hot water across her entire back side, reigniting all the strokes she had received.
And then she hung there again. The soreness in her breasts re-asserting itself over the fading stinging of her back. Again, the cold wind whistled around her now-wet body, and she shivered.
Was there any limit on how long a protocol could last?
She was in the process of seriously pondering that question when something sharp jabbed her left nipple. Then her right. Then the underside of her left breast.
Then more jabs. Sometimes several in quick succession. Chaotic. Unpredictable. In an absolute sense, it wasn't as painful as the whipping that preceeded it, or even the steady soreness in her crotch and breasts. But the unpredictability and blindness of it was driving her crazy.
As if in answer to this thought, a window opened in front of her eyes. She now saw her poor abused breasts, looking even more ballooned than she'd guessed, and quite dark red, with a multitude of red dots where they'd been stabbed. They were presented in a spectacularly well-lit space, as if it were a showroom.
A whirring sound drew her attention away from her breasts. It was one of the carwash-style spinners with many cloth strips, now oriented horizontally and spinning faster than she'd thought it could. The spinning increased, the whir rising in pitch and the cloth strips blurring. And still it sat, a handsbreadth from her helpless breasts. Some part of Brigid wanted to try to squirm back out of the way. More of her realized that would be the worst idea.
And the spinner jumped forward, bringing a downpour of blows on the tops of her breasts. The blows were too rapid for bouncing, but all her flesh was forced downward, and stretched against the rigidity of the clamp.
