RealisVere (Chapter 4) (Patreon)

Still not quite sure what was going on here, Halim guessed based on Rayda’s realistic complaining that the rsVR was simulating his sister and her corresponding behavior as an echo of their most recent interaction. Apparently she was only nagging him again to finish repairing that app for her, just like the real one. It was weird it had happened at all, but at least logically trackable. The best course here, Halim decided, was to just agree with the digital Rayda and then blow her off in continued pursuit of Chaima.

“I… told you. The app is being worked on. I promise. As soon as it’s ready, you’ll have it,” Halim said, impulsively politer to her than his real sister, then moved to march onward. Not only because he was eager to bypass this glitch, but also because Chaima was still waiting for him somewhere in the house, seemingly with plans to push his macrophilic hedonism into the stratosphere. He couldn’t miss that.

“What are you even talking about right now?” Rayda balked. She stopped dancing in place, again hiking her leg up and resting her bare foot upon the table. “How can someone be so smart with computers, and still so dumb about everything else? I don’t care about the app anymore. I only care about the OTHER promise you made me.”

Just before he could exit the loft, Halim turned around, intrigued again. Something strange was going on.

“What other promise?”

“You know the one. And Chaima told me herself that you’d help me, so there’s no getting out of it.”

“She… did?” Halim sighed. He stepped closer to his sister, again impulsively feeling his gaze drift from Rayda’s regally judgmental countenance down to that bountiful sole curve again – the milky-coffee hue, the velvety waves of arch wrinkles still freshly slathered in dance-earned sweat, the ruddy rounded toes wagging and smushing together again as if waving a coquettish hello at him. All of it was startlingly authentic. And just as in real life, he swiftly tugged his attention away before it could go on too long, as he always did when that problematic habit threatened to take hold again, even if there were no social consequences in here.

“Of course. As your wife, she knows you better than anyone. If anything, I trust her more than I trust you. So we both KNOW you want to help me. Now it’s just a matter of you doing what you want. What we both want. So come here, won’t you?”

Halim furrowed his brow, as he was unaccustomed to such cryptic talk from Rayda, real or not. Maybe he didn’t understand what was happening at all. More lost than usual while inside the realm he’d built, yet inexplicably compelled to pull on this thread, he came closer yet.

“All right, all right. I’m listening, Rayda. What do you want from me?”

“The thing we both want,” she dismissively replied with an all-too-smarmy smirk, then pointed down at her svelte plush-soled size-10, still displayed upon the tabletop. “For you to shrink and tie yourself up to the bottom of my foot, while I dance for my followers.”

Having worked at a cutting-edge tech company for years now, meeting a wide range of personalities in the real world as well as sorting out a host of alien-esque AI kinks in rsVR’s earlier versions, Halim thought he’d already seen and heard just about everything that could’ve possibly shocked him. Yet no entity, authentic or digital, had ever thrown him so wildly off-balance as this virtual incarnation of his little sister had just now when she uttered that sentence. His eyes popped and his vocal cords flummoxed, while his knees went to jelly again – this time not from arousal like when he’d humbled himself before Chaima, but out of unadulterated bewilderment. There was no way she’d really just said that.

“That’s… not what we both want,” Halim forcefully corrected, speaking to the whole construct now rather than his sibling’s specific fictional avatar. “It’s not! Understand?”

What a mess. He realized that the AI’s learning had gone off on a mutant tangent, perhaps accidentally teaching itself some extremely incorrect ideas about him, as bleed-over from his interactions with Chaima. Yet even while he sincerely believed this, Halim’s gaze was snapped back to Rayda’s foot when she wiggled her toes again in a ripple pattern, and even more so when she took hold of it with both hands again for a stretch. He watched that creamy suppleness of her perspiration-glazed arch distort and pale temporarily from the pressure of her fingers, then flush duskier once more when the squeezing relinquished. A tickle ran up his spine. Gulping and biting his tongue, Halim reclaimed focus above, only to see his VR sister’s smirk had widened into an ear-to-ear grin.

“I believe you’re mistaken, Hally,” she coolly insisted, her speech steadily gaining greater formality. “I suppose that’s only natural. When someone is as BIG and IMPORTANT as you think you are, sometimes things fall through the cracks. That’s why you always need someone to remind you of the little things, when you lose track of them yourself. For example: you have your lackeys working on that app for me at Hyperion. And then you also have me, to remind you that you’d like nothing more than to be roped good and tight to the bottom of your giant little sister’s bare foot, so soft and warm and dirty, while she does what she does best.”

“T-That’s… not-”

“Oh, but it is true, and you know it. Correction: you’ve longed to be small at my feet ever since you were old enough to know why the front of your pants sometimes got tight. This is not an opinion, but a fact. Next question?”

“I… I may have had some, um, inappropriate thoughts now and again, a long time ago, when I was younger, but I never acted on them. I never would act on them. And… I would never even think to… I mean, y-you’re… she’s… my sister, and-”

“Correction,” Rayda interrupted again. “I am not your sister. I am a perfect digital replica of your sister. Unlike her, I am not bound by societal norms or traditional laws. In accordance with the purpose you had in mind when you built the rest of this particular world, I also exist here to further your deepest desires, and bring you closer to ultimate satisfaction. Why would you deny the fruit of your own creation?”

Flustered, out of breath, with his brain in an anxious tailspin, and also a traitorous twinge of hopeful arousal still at his center, Halim knew that he probably ought to have force-quit from the rsVR by now. Regardless of whether Rayda was making true statements – which, shamefully, she was indeed – the whole system was currently way off its intended axis. This wasn’t supposed to happen, not unless he’d expressly intuited it. Yet he couldn’t leave. Not that he was literally trapped; rather, Halim realized, he didn’t want to leave. Not now.

“There’s a good brother,” Rayda intoned, seemingly sensing Halim’s intentions reluctantly shifting. Having momentarily adopted a personality more like a helpful AI chatbot rather than his actual sister’s snide self-serving atmosphere, however, she reverted back to that perfect Rayda representation with the ease of a light switch flip: “Seriously, is it really SO HARD to be even a little bit of help to me? Well, don’t just stand there with your mouth hanging open like a dope. Shrink already, then come closer, so I can tie you under my foot. I haven’t got all day, you know.”

Still deeply uncertain of this, and his heart hammering with embarrassment every step of the way, Halim chose at last to block out that constant analytical mindset he kept up while inside the rsVR world. Instead he let himself descend back into that more primal state he only ever reached while prostrated in front of Chaima’s immaculate sole, sucking up salty saffron fumes and licking one pithy sole wrinkle while copulating with another one lower down. Once he’d surrendered in that way, just as his wife had pointed out he yearned to do, it was surprisingly easy to climb onto the table in readiness to fulfill a taboo fantasy he’d learned to bury back in adolescence. He felt Rayda’s gaze upon him as he willfully miniaturized back to three inches tall.

“No,” she sighed, clenching her toes again. “Not yet. You want to be smaller than that. So do it.”

Again she was right. So Halim shrunk down to an inch. Then when Rayda raised her eyebrow and shook her head again, he shaved off half his stature again.

“Yes. That looks about right. Hey, you’re always making fun of me for my videos anyway, aren’t you? Which leads me to believe you don’t want to appear in one. Well, you’ll be pretty difficult for my fans to spot at that size, especially while you’re stuck under my foot!” she declared, suddenly producing a piece of blue string. “But I’ll know you’re there, and so will you. That’s what matters.”