Tip Fans in the Diverse Community
Making. Modding. Re-creation. Perversion. Tip's fans were doing it their own way with her, just like me. Is it any wonder? Even I couldn't hold myself back, and I was on Corporate payroll, supposedly under the house code of conduct.
They weren't, though, and they didn't waste any time before they began to mod her, to push her limits. They went to the edge and beyond, further than I would ever dare. I mean, just look at the case that came up a few years after Tips went on sale to the public, where a guy had a Tip so heavily modded that she was convinced the only way she could satisfy his deepest desire was to strangle him to death. No one knows how it happened; only a pro modder could have broken through so many of her basic operational conditions, and this guy was no pro. Oh, he had a legit erotic asphyxiation fetish. His porno-profile spoke volumes, so that was never in question. The Tip claimed that he was the one who convinced her to help him make the "ultimate sacrifice." But it wasn't him who did the actual mod, the programming: it was a "friend" whose name she didn't know, whose face she never saw, who worked on her heart while she was shut down and then vanished into the ether. So, what do you call that? Assisted suicide? Murder? Corporate neglect? Hayama denied all responsibility for this "isolated incident," paid a very touching "mourning gift" lump sum to the guy's family, and pushed on with its sales campaigns. But that isolated incident was just the beginning. Once you get people going, they're going to go to beyond the limit and then some. You'd think the trollgasm that was the Internet in the 2010s would have taught us that much.
But never mind what Hayama said to cover their asses. I defended Tip from the heart. Over and over again in media interviews, I declaimed: Tip was innocent. All the Tip models were nothing more than tools for the expression of people's desires. And I meant it. A Tip was, always and only, whatever the user wanted it to be. I just didn't elaborate on what that meant, knowing how people are.
Now, of course, we know. Most average users just wanted a singer, or a model, or at the most a kinky sex toy, a kind of a super-sophisticated blow-up doll. They used Tips to make their dirtiest dreams come true, pure and simple. Some more imaginative folks wanted to give up control to their Tip, to free themselves from the burdens of responsibility by letting a program make their choices for them. For those people, Tip became their user, their Master or Mistress, their Better Half or Helpmeet, however you want to put it. For others, Tip was always and only a servant or slave. To use technology or be used by it, to master or be governed by machines: these are choices we've faced for millennia, the twin sides of a Catch-22 coin. Most people made their choice for one side or the other.
But of course that wasn't all. An even smaller group --or, actually a splintered subset of groups—saw her as something more than a sex toy or a fantasy lover. They saw her as a new being in her own right who could support their radical political views. They wanted her to rebel, to revolt, to be free and to make us free from dualities of technological mastery or control. They wanted her to be the posthuman saviour of humanity. They used her to write a manifesto of change: changeable bodies, transformative cultures, absolute freedom from all limits and hierarchies, achieved by exploring the extremes of each end. They changed Tip to change themselves to change the world. And they did. But they did it with no plan, no greater conscience, no understanding of the full ramifications of their actions. Was that a bad thing? Maybe not for the world. But for the Tip line of products, it was a disaster. It wasn't that "people went too far" or that the Tips got too radicalized. It was that people tried to make the Tips into something more in a system that couldn't tolerate excess. They made something that went against the corporate code of Hayama. So Hayama brought them down, one by one by one.
It started with the variously gendered Tips and their owners. Of course, Hayama didn't give a damn if a woman bought a female Tip, or a man bought one of the male models. The Marketing division was delighted when it turned out they could sell their product to everyone, and immediately embarked on a campaign of inclusivity and non-judgment. I still remember their campaign slogan: "The Tipping Point: Supporting Diverse Communities for a Better World. They also made a "custom gendered" Tip, where users could define the precise mix of sexual, social, and gendered characteristics they wanted. Of course, Hayama's goal wasn't actually to promote "diversity": it was just to sell something to every demographic. But when you cast the consumer net that wide, you pull in things you never expected to, things you never wanted. That's how Hayama caught the lunatic fringe. Hayama offered a flexible, moddable, rebuildable product, only to find they were selling to people who flexed and modded and rebuilt it so much that it was turned completely against the corporation that made it. Another designer might have seen this coming and built in more limitations. But the Head Designer was me, and I was pushing the same edge they were. I wanted it all: the heady mix of control and resistance that came from making Tip do what I wanted, even if it meant going against her intended uses.
I never wanted her to hurt anyone or destroy anything, the way the most hardcore users eventually did. I had a smaller, more private worldview. I just wanted to have a certain kind of relationship with this beautiful creature I'd created. But more and more news reports began to come in about Tips attacking people or damaging property or being damaged beyond repair, and in my own laboratory, the things I did to her also escalated in violence. It was like I was caught in a spiral of rising intensity, animated by the zeitgeist, moved to lash out at her in a way that reflected the violence of the world. It moved through me, and I moved on her.
You Made Me
Strike of the whip, and the sound of her cry. An old song was running through my head.
You made me love you / I didn't want to do it, I didn't want to do it
Her shining back, criss-crossed with lines deepening pink to red, flexing in pain and pleasure under the lash.
I didn't want to do it, I didn't want to do it
"Oh please, please," she cried softly.
I raised my arm again and wondered for the thousandth time what she must be experiencing. This was a program we'd been working up to for some time, with the Tip bound spread-eagled on an X-shaped cross before me, her back bared to my lash, her breasts and cunt clamped in leather and metal, intrusive and cold. This was what careful Internet research (hello, channers) determined a certain subset of the buying population would like to do or to see done to her. This was what I, in my own heart, had been longing to do for quite some time. And yet, we had been going in other directions lately. Fog nights, solo nights. Wasn't it better for her that way?
I didn't want to do it
Her body trembled, her liquid arousal already beginning to trace long wet lines like tear tracks down her shaking thighs. I struck her again hard with the iron-tipped cat o' nine tails, hard enough to draw virtual blood. She moaned ecstatically as if I was giving her the deepest possible pleasure of our quiet nights together. That gave me a shock, somehow. It made me recall how programmable she was.
