God mode

The most unexpected side effect of the changes to the world I’d accidentally made playing WorldController 3 premium plus edition in god mode? It’s a tough call, but I’d say it’s how it being normal guys having two dicks now somehow made it so that hot dogs always come in pairs, too. I mean, I’d always tacitly assumed sausages were phallic, hot dogs especially, but seeing two long, thick wieners crammed into every extra-wide hot dog bun at every cookout and ball game really made it incredibly blatant. Actually most things you’d think were phallic now had two shafts instead of one, especially in architecture. (Including the Swiss Re Gherkin… and the Washington Monument. Proof, at last! Not that there’s anyone I can tell.) Any old-fashioned column-shaped tombstones were doubled now, too. I read up on it, and apparently it goes all the way back to bifurcated ancient memorial steles in Etruria, Mesoamerica, and Xia-era China. Art, too, of course, was profusely affected. Everything from the naked heroes on Grecian urns to Michelangelo’s David had two distinct, decent-sized wangs.

Actually there was another upshot of normalizing two big, heavy dicks that was completely unexpected and took me a while to cotton onto, which was the fact that what I’d actually made universal was the possibility, and the likelihood, of dick multiplicity. It wasn’t that every guy had two dicks—just that it was normal for a guy to have two. Because, as I discovered very quickly, in the revised world I’d created a guy might have one, or three, or six. I think I read on Wikipedia that 73% of guys had two phallusus (the average length soft, I noticed, coming out suspiciously close to exactly 12 inches), with maybe ten percent each for one dick or three, and outlier populations with more or, in a few rare cases, none. In the past six months, out of the ten or so premium-hot hookups I’d fucked around with there had been at least two rakish, self-sure triple-cocked guys—and one tall, skinny, adorably bashful guy with four big ones that he couldn’t manage to get soft the whole weekend we were messing around.

Weirdly, this spread in the dick-count demography was in pretty stark contrast to the multifinger thing, which as far as I could tell was totally uniform in its presentation worldwide. Everyone had six fingers and a thumb, period, and everyone had fourteen toes, too. That was just, you know, baseline human, like the subtly pointed ears we all had. Polydactyl guys with more than seven digits a hand were in the category of urban legend and questionable online videos, though I’d seen the rare clips featuring these ten-fingers-a-hand families in Mexico and India that seemed pretty credible.

The biggest changes were probably cultural. My stipulations in the game, that most guys be attractive, and that casual kissing and touching between men who were attracted to each other be a routine thing, had not surprisingly mashed up and resulted (men being as they are) in a new normal that involved pretty regular man-on-man kissing and ongoing tactile contact. Deep, tonguey make-outs replaced not just handshakes but even your basic smile and hello in most social situations. This part of the change I experienced first-hand pretty much from day one. Cuddling and making out with hot guys was as much a part of my day as eating, no exaggeration (and some days it inches toward breathing). Seriously, there’s a lot of mouth and tongue. And hands. And because I made it so guys wear shirts pretty much only when they have to, most of the hunky, multifingered, massively cocky kiss-normalized adult male population is topless except when they’re actually standing outside in the snow, serving in uniform, meeting with boards of directors—that kind of thing. The rest of time: pecs and shoulders and soft, sweet smooches hello.

Examples of the prevalence of male toplessness were everywhere. Local news reporters are generally shirtless now, even if they’re handing back to the more dignified anchors on the studio set wearing tight polos or thin tee shirts. Casual Friday in most corporate settings these days means things like brightly colored belts or a fun temporary tattoo on your bared delt. And working from home tends to lead to your coworkers correctly assuming you’re getting your actual work done around chronic bouts of two-fisting your thick, distracting wangs.

All of this is reflected tenfold in media, as you’d expect, though interestingly the changes there are often more subtle than you’d expect from the radical revisions one could see in real life. We had the same franchises and media juggernauts as before, just with overt and subtextual changes along the way that altered their feel while keeping the overall story. For example, one of my favorite TV shows, Supernatural, was pretty much the same apart from all the (sometimes angry, always passionate) snogging the shirtless Winchester bros ended up doing. And a show like The Boys… well, there were some interesting plot developments that leveraged almost every change I’d made to this world plus a few side-effects I hadn’t yet clocked in the wild.

Speaking of media, another unanticipated wrinkle was that, with humans now all pointy-eared, the most common attribute signifying sci-fi aliens was now shifted to having four arms. Even the original ‘60s version of Mr. Spock was pretty convincing. From what I read, Roddenberry apparently persuaded Desilu to go all out on the extra arms Leonard Nimoy was fitted with below his own for three seasons despite the otherwise tight budget after the first try was deemed unconvincing. And as for the reboot? I’ll need proof before I believe that Zachary Quinto doesn’t have four very nicely defined arms inside that blue science officer tunic.

The “casual” part I’d specified for all the touching and kissing also culminated in “roommate” now equating more or less exactly with “guy you share your bed and the occasional orgasm with.” It’s so normalized that a lot of college dorms have only one full- or queen-sized bed, especially at state schools where the budget savings could be used for other things. Like, say, the men’s athletic programs. (These, like the pros, always played shirtless, even the ice hockey teams, so there was less call in the budget for uniform expense—but, c’mon, they still needed equipment and stuff.) Apparently, in this version of reality my random decision to rent out my extra room after a year of having the condo to myself had involved a rather intimate (if R-rated) application process, one that Ben still fondly remembered with a wry little smirk.

It wasn’t constant lasciviousness and nonstop sex out there, don’t get me wrong. People weren’t fucking in the streets or subways or anything. What I’d normalized was this casual male intimacy that fed off a concurrent hotness upgrade to create a rather friendlier baseline between guys. So, lots of hugging and making out and general closeness, even among strangers and pretty much always among friends and acquaintances.

Corporate culture has eased as a result, though the need for profit still trumps everything else as always. Still, I’ve read that some of the bigger, more progressive corporations have “break rooms” that let you do a bit of “socializing” to take the edge off during the day. My roommate, Ben, isn’t so lucky; the brokerage firm where he works is a little backwards in this respect, much to his annoyance, and the kissing in the halls and elevators that punctuate his actual work only builds up his horniness through the day. I’m happy to help him with that when he gets home, and he’s happy to let me.

Ironically my greatest gaming session ever resulted in a dramatic drop in time spent engrossed in digital hijinks. Before, I’d wile away days and weeks exploding enemy monsters into showers of misted blood and gore or roaring around hairpin curves in cars meant to break the laws of physics along with traffic regs—and I thought that was golden, the pinnacle of everything I’d prayed adulting would be like from the moment I’d gotten my first console on my eighth birthday. Now, though—what game could be more immersive than this fantasy world I’d created?

The other side was that I was a little spooked by what I’d been able to accomplish in that single sesh of WC 3 P+. I hadn’t even gotten past setup mode, and I’d changed myself and everyone else, permanently and for real. That day after it happened, after Ben left for work (sent on his way with a nice goodbye mutual handjob, naturally), for the first time in forever my premium, special-order gamer chair sat empty. I didn’t even fire up my computer—all I wanted right then was for my monitors to stay black, just like they were. Instead, after staring at my setup for a few minutes I turned abruptly on my heel and went back into the bedroom, pulled on jeans, socks, and shoes, left my tee shirts in the dresser drawer where they belonged without really thinking about it, and went out into the bright, beautiful, sunshiny world.

That first day out I was self-conscious of the big, double-lump I had in my pants—for about ten minutes. As I walked down the street and into the big, leafy part that adjoined our block I kept seeing all these attractive, hunky, pointy-eared men, all ages, heights, and ethnicities, all with prominent bulges pushing out their flies. I seemed to attract extra attention, true, but not for anything unusual about my crotch, as though ginger, freckly me had been blessed with an extra-strong attractiveness boost during my little reality makeover, even to the point of being on the verge of kinda irresistible. By midmorning I was already used to it, and by noon I’d started losing track of the number of guys who’d paused to share a kiss and an embrace with me on the winding paths of the park before resuming their business.

It was the same every time I went out. There was a commonality of behavior, and yet every one was different. As the weeks passed I met more and more guys, all different, all part of this new kind of masculine society. One day a month or so in it was very sunny but mild and breezy, and I found myself cataloguing the variety and uniformity of my male encounters as I went. There was one dark-haired, well-groomed guy in a white shirt and tie who tasted like chocolate when he kissed me and felt lean and hard under his business drag. There was a dark-skinned runner in emerald bicycle shorts, just cooling down from a lap around the park, with a damp, warm sheen of sweat that smelled like a field of wild grass and felt surprisingly nice pressed against my own bare torso as we snogged.

After him I ran into a tall, tan, skinny forty-something wearing heavy dark cargo pants that couldn’t quite conceal a package fully half again as heavy and thick as mine. He was walking a big, happy, yellow-furred shiba inu on a long leash, but we were only paying attention to each other. His brown eyes were earnest but edged with fierce curiosity, and I noticed the points of his ears were a little sharper than most, emerging from his thick, swept-back hair like little castle peaks poking out of a rolling forest. And then there was his body. I’m as big a fan of hot, hard muscle as the next guy, but something about that lean, sharply defined, fluid physique was positively swoonworthy. Honestly, I wanted to trace all its lengths and curves with my tongue, teasing him over the course of a long, lazy Sunday to hear all the little noises he’d make. He had a slightly earthy/minty smell—I had noticed early on how the attractiveness spike I’d induced in the male population wasn’t limited to just the visual, but included all five senses in a complex of hotness.

At first we just slowly stroked arms for a minute, staring into each other’s eyes while I made small talk with him and the dog wound the leash around our legs. Finally he bent and quickly gave me a brief, electric kiss that sizzled through me for several minutes after he’d sheepishly untangled us and we’d gone our separate ways.

Forget high-res wide-screen imagery, I thought as I bought an ice cream sandwich from a cart manned by an older, burly stunner sporting a white apron over his bare torso: this was the game I wanted to play. As I wandered I started thinking about possible pretexts for being out here and interacting with the thousands of diverse and dick-thickeningly hot men I’d unknowingly surrounded myself with.

As I got to the fountain at the heart of the park I had an idea. Smiling to myself, I reversed course and ducked out of the public space to a nice greengrocer’s across the street, returning fifteen minutes and a brief, eyes-only encounter with a long-haired, generously muscled blond behind the counter later, a paper sack full of form, red and white Gala apples in hand. I cased the center of the park a bit and found a shady spot along the edge of the wide, bricked disc around the fountain. There, I set down the bag, pulled out three of my fruity purchases, and, heart thumping, started to juggle.

To my great relief it all came back to me. I’d been really good at it once, but I hadn’t juggled in ages—not since college. Fortunately my revised body still remembered the moves, instinctively lofting and fielding the apples like I’d been practicing religiously all this time. Before long I had gathered a crowd of men, women, and children all willing to pause and be diverted for a little while. After a few minutes of three-ball cascade I started carefully introducing some of the more complicated moves I could remember, easing first into a rainbow cross, then a reverse infinity, letting the palpable appreciation of the crowd feed me the necessary confidence to escalate my performance.

One danger I had encountered when I was leveling up as a juggler was that once you slipped into moves that you’d trained yourself to do without thought, your mind can start to wander if you don’t keep a firm hold on your concentration. This as it turns out, was the main risk of my being out of practice. I had recently found out about the four-armed thing as the way aliens were signified in science fiction in this reality, and all at once while I was tossing my Galas around I had a sudden mental image of Spock, doing what I was doing, only he of course was juggling four-handed.

The idea gave me a prickle of excitement: if I had four arms, my imagination was telling me, I could give them all a crazy impressive show. The challenge of it would be a thrill, too. And the best part was, I had the power—I could go home, fire up my computer, and make myself four-armed for real.

I pushed the thought away and focused on my performance. I kept changing everything up for several minutes, wowing the crowd and provoking a few gasps and claps along the way, before finally segueing into a high-speed chop shower finale—one that was a little too ambitious for me and that I barely kept control of. Alarmed by sudden visions of me beaning my hapless onlookers in the face with hard, pulpy fruit I hurriedly rolled back into a simple cascade, pocketing the first two apples in turn before bringing up the last one for a wet, resounding chomp.

This earned me a round of applause from the amused crowd, and I grinned and bowed, chewing showily to milk the finale and trying not to give away I was breathing a little heavily—it felt like I had been doing push-ups all that time, and there were little beads of sweat dotting my delts and trickling down my shallow cleavage. As I bowed I noticed some of my transient audience was dropping coins and bills at a spot near my feet—I hadn’t put a hat out (I don’t need the money) but someone had donated a ball cap, the interior of which had already attracted fair bit of moolah. I think my improved looks had as much to do with it as my expert but slightly rusty skills, though, the giveaway being that I’d also managed to gather a collection of four or five hot guys who wanted to reward my performance in a more intimate fashion than with cold, hard cash.

As I was just finishing a very nice kiss and hug with a brash, wide-eyed skater-boi type who gripped me hard and who tasted a bit like waffles and syrup, I felt a hand on my shoulder and someone behind me spoke in my ear. “You were amazing,” the voice whispered.

I turned to see the tall, lanky, perky-eared cutie with the equally cute and perky-eared shiba inu, and one look in those dark brown eyes told me that he wanted to reward me, too, only a lot more intensively than my little crowd of fans was presently doing. Something swelled in me, and I don’t just mean in my pants. Giving him a quick nod, I bent and scratched the shiba inu behind his ears. “Hey, pup,” I said. “Want to show me where you live?” The dog grinned his affirmative, lolling his tongue amiably at me.

That seemed like a good sign. So, snatching up the spontaneously-appearing hat and my bag of remaining apples, I waved goodbye to the other fans, then joined the hunk-and-pup duo as we headed back to his place, there to unveil just what was packed away in that extra-large basket of his.

The sun beat pleasantly down on our bare shoulders as we walked, and a fragrant wind wound gently along the path with us, making me think we could almost float our way to wherever we were going. A dark temptation niggled at some secret corner of my inner being, telling me I could make that happen, too.

I snuffed the idea out with a thought. How could I need any more than what I already had? This, I told myself, this was the first day of a whole new life, and I could not wait to be out here in the real world (as it now was), exploring and enjoying everything, and everyone, that I possibly could.