Tip

The Bellmerist's Doll

The Bellmerist's doll was more defiant than ever I programmed her. I never actually had to punish Tip seriously to dissuade her, but this doll, I did.

I caught her one day disassembling herself. We had been working to restore her body to its original state prior to her final shut-down. That way, we could be sure there would be no unexpected reboots, no flicker from the projector that we would archive, disabled in high-security storage, along with all of the others for historical purposes. But she was an anomaly, unpredictable and strange.

When I found her, she had taken off both of her long, slim legs and laid them like the stems of deflowered roses next to her. She was stroking the newly-smooth configuration of her lower body, two wide, shallow in-curves joined by the sweet, moist node of her sex. She knew it was wrong as soon as she saw me. I had given her orders not to touch herself, and I was so shocked to walk in on her disobedience that my jaw actually dropped. Seeing my control slip, she gave a small, mocking half-smile through the veil of her hair and curved her wrist, her fingers slipping inside herself.

"Tip! Hands to your sides." I commanded.

And she did as I said...almost. She brought her hands to her sides, but in a long caress along her light surface, up and down, ending with her fingers resting lightly against the sides of her upper thighs, which lay on the table beside her. She was twisting my orders, and she knew it. I narrowed the command.

"Palms down, touching nothing but the table. Now."

Again, she obeyed. But again, as she did it, she subverted my order by misinterpreting it. Palms down on the table, she arched her back, tilting her hips forward, resting her weight on that strange new erotic configuration she'd created.

"Ahh..." she sighed in pleasure.

"Enough! I'll close you down, Tip. That's my job and I'll do it. You need to be punished."

We had so many tools for manipulating her surface. The interrupter worked to open her surface layer, as Sato and I had done so long ago to the original Tip. The torch, on the other hand, was to close it. We called it that because it looked something like a welder's torch and did a similar job at the nano-level, sealing her surface with heat. I didn't even have to leave the room to get it; her holding room was fully equipped, and I kept my eyes on her the whole time I selected the tool and started it up.

She reached for her legs as I approached, maybe to get up and run. She was machine-quick, moving like sped-up film, and she had them both reattached almost before I could react. But I had my own tricks too: with the remote in my pocket, I triggered her bed's restraints, flexible projections designed to sync with her surface. The image-straps caught her at the upper arms, waist, wrists, and ankles. They held her down with her legs apart. Pinned, exposed, she began to sense what I was up to.

"Mistress, I'm sorry. Please, I didn't-"

"No good apologizing now, Tip. I can't trust you to learn any other way."

I thumbed the torch and it began to hum, a yellow-white glow at its curved end. Even before I touched it to her, light arced between her surface and the powerful generator like a tiny solar flare. She squirmed, but didn't cry out: clearly the sensation wasn't intense just yet. Just a tickle, a tease. Her legs opened a little wider despite her murmurs of resistance.

"This is the torch," I told her in my best doctor's voice. "It will help you avoid any more temptations to misbehave like this until the time you're put away. It might get a little hot, but don't fight it, Tip. This is for your own good."

I withdrew for a moment to let the knowledge of what was about to happen sink in. I was already breathing hard, adrenaline coursing through my veins. This could be our last scene, and I intended to play it to the hilt. I dipped back in again, letting the torch alight deep down on her perineum. I held it there a moment then drew up, slowly, half-parting and the same time fusing her lips. They opened around the torch and molded together behind it like liquid lava. As I approached her clit, she began to gasp, then to scream.

"It's hot, so hot...oh I can't, no, don't hurt me there...oh please, Naomi!"

"You have no right to call me that!" I said, trying to keep the shaking out of my voice.

In emphasis, I twisted the torch hard against her clit, the light an electric arc that flared until her whole body spasmed against the bindings. She made a wordless sound like the release of an emotion beyond naming, pure intensity. I pulled back and began the track up again, up a cleft growing increasingly smoother and more featureless as I sealed it with stimulation. Her clit was so dense with sensory algorithms that the arcs between it and the torch flickered like aurora in fast-motion as they unravelled. She arced again, her mouth open, but no sound came out: her voice drivers were down, all her processing capacities bound up in tactile sensation. I played the torch up and down across the complex of her image-flesh and burned her until she melted into herself. Her hands clawed the tabletop but she was baring herself now, pushing herself into it, driven by a deeply implanted desire to seek and respond to strong sensation. She followed what she felt until the end. A near-indestructible being embracing experience to the point of destruction...oh Tip, you were so beautiful. I made you that way, and as I pressed the torch against you, you came into your purest state of being. All else burned away until nothing but burning was left to you—burning, and the soft hush of collapse into embers.

You were so clean after what I did to you. But there is one projector missing from the vault, and that one is yours, my Bellmer doll. You were consigned to the all-too-literal flames. They couldn't take the chance of a phoenix. You had to be destroyed.

I realized something almost too late. I'd been staying away from the lab for the last few days leading up to her decommissioning. I knew that to see her again would be too painful (or too much of a temptation to go rogue with her, to take her and run away and try to atone for the unforgivable -no stop that thought right now.)

As I said, I stayed away. But I still kept thinking about her. As I replayed our last encounter with the torch in my mind, something incredible occurred to me, something that had me rushing to the lab. I bluffed my way past level after level of security, insisting that there was something I had to check before she went to the fire.

She was lying as always on her bed in the in-state, still restrained by the straps. Her legs were tightly crossed, as if to hide her sexlessness. I went to her bedside and did a very reckless thing. I climbed onto her bed, leaned over her so far that I was practically lying on top of her, and looked into her eyes.

"Tip," I said.

"Yes, Mistress?" she replied

"Do you know my name?"

"Yes, Mistress."

"What is it."

"Naomi."

My body jolted as if struck. I had never told the Bellmerist's doll my name. I had told her to respond to "Tip" and not whatever he'd called her, but I had only told her to address me as Mistress, in order to keep a firmer, more authoritative grip on her. And yet, when I was suturing her, she called out "Naomi."

She remembered.

From somewhere deep in the language I'd used to program the very first Tip, this copy remembered my name. She knew me. They all knew me.

I took a deep breath, then took her head in my hands, forcing her to look at me.

"Tip, you will be decommissioned soon. That's how it has to be. But I want to ask you first. My creature...do you love me?"

Her night-dark eyes focused on me, and she tilted her head, a tentative sparrow seeking out the kernel of an answer. Her lips parted and closed. Then, slowly, slightly, she nodded.

"Naomi. Yes." She whispered.

No repetition. No cloying speeches or tearful confession. Just a recognition, and a simple yes/no condition closed. Yes.

I gripped her as if I could pull her into me and hide her inside myself. Then I let her go.

She was the last. Now she's gone. Unless there's a copy. Oh God, let there be a copy.