Alt-world

Justin was woken from a sound sleep by his cellphone ringing. Normally he might have drowsed through it and let it go to voicemail. But when he realized which ringtone it was  –  the dramatic opening chords of Beethoven’s Fifth  –  his eyes sprang open and his hand was blundering around the night table until it came back holding his vibrating, insistently ringing iPhone.

He rolled on his back and stared for a second at the caller id. It said simply, “Alt-World.”

His heart pounding, he thumbed “Accept” and brought the phone to his ear. “Hello?” he said uncertainly.

A voice he didn’t recognize, filtered and mechanical sounding but on a connection that was so free of static as to be eerie, replied with an equally uncertain, “Hello?”

Justin hesitated. He realized he had no idea how to talk to whoever was calling him. “Who’s this?” he said finally.

“This is Lawrence. Who’s this?” Justin’s mouth dropped open. Lawrence was a character inside Alt-World.

And it wasn’t just that the software man Lawrence was calling him  –  he sounded, what, afraid? Upset? Justin tried to figure out what kind of emotion was being attached to this communication. He could sense there was definitely emotion  –  which was a lot more than what he’d expected when he’d installed the freeware CommSim module he’d downloaded into the Alt-World life simulation program he’d been secretly developing.

The module was just supposed to run a subroutine to alert him by phone if any of the characters within the simulation were experiencing distress. He’d expected that an automated voice, like a robo-caller or a voice-mail menu, would just vocally let him know there was something he needed to check on in the sim. What the specs hadn’t said was that the CommSim module would involve one of the characters seeming to call him.

Lawrence’s curious/frustrated “Hello?” startled him out of his reverie. He realized he’d kept his “caller” waiting. Who programmed this mod? “Hello, Lawrence,” he said, “this is Justin Perez. Are you calling to report a problem?”

As he said this Justin pulled the covers aside and got out of bed, barely aware that he was naked  –  there was no one to see, he had the house all to himself for the whole summer  –  and started padding toward the guest room he’d turned into the launch pad for his software experiments.

Lawrence now hesitated himself, and by the time he spoke again Justin was sitting in front of his hybrid workstation and was flipping on the array of flatscreen monitors across the long side wall. “I guess so. I mean, it’s not really a problem problem, but  –  this is the Help Line, right?”

Justin raised his eyebrows. “Y-yes, that’s right. How can I help?” At the same time, he pulled up the Locate window on the monitor in front of him and typed “Lawrence.” He was trying to remember which character he was  –  there were over five thousand men in the town he’d set up in Alt-World, and while they all had unique first names most of them had been created automatically according to parameter ranges he’d specified. He’d been watching a few as case studies, but he didn’t remember Lawrence.

“Well, I just  –  I feel like a freak, and I don’t know how to deal with it.”

Justin frowned. He feels like a freak? Had he really set up Alt-World with that level of self-assessment? All the coding he’d done had been geared toward interpersonal relationships, not internal feelings.

He realized the kid thought he was calling a crisis line. He tried to slip into hotline volunteer mode  –  “What’s making you feel that way?”  –  while watching the nearest big flatscreen where Lawrence’s environment was rapidly rendering.

“I just  –  I don’t look like anyone else, and I  –  ” Meanwhile the rendering completed, and Justin saw what he meant. An involuntary “shit” escaped him, and Lawrence paused and said, “Excuse me?”

In setting up the parameters for the automatic generation of characters, Justin had specified a number of ranges. For example, for age, Justin had specified a range of 15 to 35  –  he wanted children to develop naturally inside the sim and see how it changed things, rather than having them present from the start. Lawrence, according to the readouts displaying alongside the 3D image of the character sitting at the desk in his bedroom talking on his cellphone, was 18. The room was dark  –  the only light was moonlight streaming in from the window behind the desk.

But Justin wasn’t staring at his age. By some freak occurrence of probability  –  or, perhaps, a coding mechanism buried in the software core system he’d bought and adapted that made sure to throw out outliers within statistical samples  –  Lawrence had pegged at the far extreme of every parameter. And Justin had had some … fun with the parameters.

The first was height. Justin had set a range starting at 5 foot 6, but  –  and he remembered grinning as he entered it  –  he’d set an upward range of 8 foot 6. Justin was 8 foot 6.

He’d also set a range on muscle mass as a function of height. Normally, ideal weight ranged from 2 to 4 times the height in inches. So he’d set the bottom of the range at 2h. But, just for fun, he’d set the top at 5h. Lawrence had pegged out there too. His weight read at 510 pounds  –  all of it muscle. (The range on body fat was set between 3%—the male physiological minimum  –  and an average/fit value of 15%. Lawrence was at 3%.) Sitting at his ordinary sized desk, in the bedroom of a suburban house no unlike the one Justin was sitting in, Lawrence looked like a giant in the land of normal-sized folk.

Lawrence was naked  –  he probably had trouble finding clothes that fit him, Justin mused. From this perspective it looked like most of that muscle mass was in his pecs, shoulders, and upper arms, tapering down to a tiny waist—though everything below the desk was shrouded in darkness. Without his even realizing it, Justin started to get aroused as he looked over this impossible physique.

“Are you still there?” Lawrence was saying. Justin was watching him speak  –  it was a real-time display. He started zooming in from the room-wide view, and Lawrence started filling his monitor.

“Y-yes, yes,” Justin stammered. “I’m here.” He was barely able to respond as he finished zooming on a close-up of the character’s face and he realized just how good-looking Lawrence was. After months of trial and error Justin had come up with some algorithms that allowed him to quantify beauty for the purposes of the sim. For fun he’d set it up according to the old 1 to 10 scale made famous in the movie “10.” He’d set up a range in the sim starting at 5 and, not knowing what he’d get, set an upper range of 14.

Lawrence was a 14. As far as Justin could tell, suddenly realizing his condition, 14 meant “automatic boner.”

Lawrence was still talking, and Justin was having trouble listening. “  –  like no one ever really listens to what I’m saying, because they’re always staring at me, or feeling me up without even realizing it,” he was saying. “At least I don’t have to worry about that with you,” he added.

“Right,” Justin said automatically. His eyes drifted to Lawrence’s cell phone  –  it looked oddly small in Lawrence’s giant hands. Justin had to concentrate to find a question, his achingly hard boner demanding the attention of his hands. “Do you think people don’t respect what you’re saying?”

“I think they just  –  they get distracted by  –  my looks. And my size,” Lawrence added with a shade of embarrassment. “I’m, like, huge. Really huge. And  –  um, you know. Everywhere.”

Hearing him say this made Justin’s boner, impossibly, harder and more insistent. His eyes flicked to the readouts to the right and he suppressed a gasp. Justin had originally set a bottom range for boner length at the average of 6 inches, but then he’d upped it to 7, forgetting that he was already starting the bar high with the real-world average. And he’d set the top of the range to 16 inches.

Then changed it to 20.

Then changed it to 24.

Lawrence had a 24-inch cock. And as for girth  –  he’d started the bar at the real-world average of 5 inches, and the top, sort of arbitrarily, at 10 inches. Lawrence was at 10 inches around. Justin did the quick calculation in his head  –  that was over three inches across. The size of a large bagel.

Lawrence was waiting for a response. “That must be hard  –  I mean, difficult,” Justin corrected himself. Fortunately Lawrence smiled, making himself even more heart-stoppingly gorgeous in the process.

Justin’s free left hand was already wrapped around his own cock. He didn’t even remember putting it there. He quickly zoomed out so he could see all Lawrence again, but under the desk it was almost completely dark. Justin fiddled with the visibility controls, adjusting the picture’s brightness up a couple percentage points. Fuck, there it was, sticking straight out of his lap. It was flaccid  –  or mostly flaccid  –  but even so it was still a good foot and a half long, and at nearly its full girth. Justin stared at the monster cock, actively stroking himself, wishing he could stroke what he was looking at.

Lawrence, meanwhile, was frowning, looking up at the ceiling lamp overhead, then peering closely at his (currently off) desk lamp. Shit, Justin thought  –  I didn’t turn up the brightness on the monitor  –  I turned up the room brightness in the sim!

But Lawrence was now looking out the window with interest  –  he was evidently deciding the moon had come out from behind a cloud. “Yeah, it is difficult,” he said, not seeming a little more comfortable talking now that he’d broached the topic of his size. “And it does get ‘hard,’ too. All the time. I mean, fuck, I’m still a teenager, and all the guys at my college are like either ordinarily good looking or totally fucking hot, and they’re all staring at me and touching me all day, and lately they’ve started insisting on kissing me whenever I’m on the campus bus to class, and so my boner is like the thing everyone knows about me  –  I have to wear it sticking up under my shirt in case it gets hard, and fuck, when it gets hard, it’s like pushing past these fucking dodge balls I got on my chest and out of my tee shirt collar, and this cheer goes up whenever it happens  –  ”

Justin realized that Lawrence was turning himself on. Like Justin, his free right hand had strayed to his growing cock.

“It sounds like you have a lot to  –  enjoy  –  about being the way you are,” Justin said, his voice sounding a little raspy in his own ears.

“Yeah,” Lawrence said a little absently. “Yeah, it’s really hot.” Justin was now all the way hard, and it was strange and deeply erotic for Justin to see how one hand wasn’t nearly enough for the 10x24 monster cock. “But  –  ” he seemed to be struggling to remember why he’d called. “But  –  no one takes me seriously. I’m really smart, but people just can’t listen when I’m talking to them. And … there are other drawbacks as well,” he added, clearly frustrated at the inadequacy of his one-handed stroking.

“You need more hands,” Justin breathed, his cock firmly in control of his brain now.

“Fuck yeah,” Lawrence said. “That would help a lot.”

Without even thinking about what he was doing Justin said, “Allow me,” and started pulling up a component of the body matrix modules that he had written but hadn’t dared activate before.

“Dude,” Lawrence was laughing, “if you can give me more hands to stroke with I will personally come to your house and fuck you with my monster  –  ”

And then, in the space between one second and the next, Lawrence’s magnificent shoulders became broader and thicker, and from each side two looong, supermuscled armed were jostling each other, instantly finding the erotic sensation of front triceps rubbing against rear biceps, and even as Lawrence gaped at his new configuration he was so fully aroused that his three free paws all were wrapped around his impossibly hard pole just a single heartbeat later.

“Duuude,” Lawrence whispered. “Am I dreaming?”

Justin was close to coming, and Lawrence, now stroking three-handed and agog at what he was doing, already seemed close as well. “You called the helpline, right?” Justin gasped. “We can ‘help’ in lots of different ways.”

“Fuck  –  ” Lawrence said abruptly, and Justin realized they were both about to cum. Suddenly Lawrence’s two-foot-long rock-hard monster exploded with cum, spraying a huge amount of white-hot jizz all over the floor in the middle of the room, and watching him Justin came as well, covering his own torso with cum  –  and then Lawrence came again, harder, shooting a gallon of cum across the room with an audible splat.

Lawrence and Justin both collapsed, heaving, in their chairs.

“Thanks, man,” Lawrence said, panting. “I never had phone sex with a help line before.” He grinned.

“Heh, I won’t tell if you won’t.”

Lawrence was watching he three stroking hands gently massaging his still mostly-hard cock. “Dude, I so want to stay like this,” he said. “But  –  ”

“Relax,” said Justin, who now felt committed. No way was he dialing back this hot young man’s incredible bod! “I can ‘help’ with that too. No one will think having four arms is unusual or weird.”

“Wow. Really?” Lawrence said. “I’m kind of afraid of being an even bigger freak, but the idea of giving these up  –  ”

“I’ll fix it.”

“And  –  the other thing?” Lawrence added, as if afraid of pressing his luck.

“That too. I’ll make sure people will listen to you and not just see you as a sex god.”

Lawrence actually laughed. “That would be the real dream come true, honestly. Um, Justin?”

“Yeah, Lawrence?” Justin was enjoying the feeling of being covered in cum, and imagining it was Lawrence’s.

“Can I  –  call you again sometime? I have a feeling I’m going to have questions when I can think straight again.”

Justin, for the first time in several minutes, remembered that Lawrence was just software. Or was he? “I don’t know if I can answer them very well. But as for calling  –  I hope you do.”

“Good night, Justin.”

“Good night. Sleep well.”

Justin watched Lawrence end the call and set down his phone and, as Justin did the same, Lawrence now was clearly please to bring all four hands to bear on his rapidly reexpanding cock. Justin watched for a while, but his mind drifted. He now had a new priority, one that stripped aside all his unfinished goals and to-dos on this project.

Nothing else mattered. Somehow, he had to get inside Alt-World.