*A continuation to [“Seth, Destroyer of Girls.”](https://old.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/cpn5ia/nsfw_seth_destroyer_of_girls_ff_mfffff_bdsm_furry/) Commissions open as always.*
Every night on the Ring was a moonless night.
Since the sun was always directly overhead it had surprised me that the ringworld even *had* a night, but its builders had thoughtfully provided it with a second ring to block the sun at regular intervals. It resembled a loop of old-fashioned film stock, with frames that were alternately transparent or opaque.
At the moment we were under one of the “shadow squares”, as the locals called them. We were also out to sea, bobbing along on a forty-foot raft. It was really just me and Aminata, but I’d grown so used to seeing her avatar nearby that, instead of summoning her to me, I went to where I’d last seen her.
“Aminata?” I said, ducking into the cabin in the middle of the raft.
She was strapped to the table, the stumps of her limbs neatly bandaged. She looked up at me, lust and fear mingling in her eyes.
“H-have you come to cut off more thigh meat?” she asked.
“Jesus,” I said.
“Do it,” she said. “Only, please fuck me senseless first. The orgasms will take the edge off the pain.”
“Nope!” I said, and noped out. I almost jumped off the raft but stopped at the guard rail. I sat down and tried to slow my breathing.
“Come on,” I said. “It’s not real. It’s not real. It’s just an AI messing with me.”
I had just gotten calmed down when she walked up, arms and legs all accounted-for. She was wearing a pink bathrobe, the most clothing I’d ever seen her wear.
“Too much?” she said.
“No, I like the robe,” I said.
“I meant that little scene in the cabin. Sorry, master. I should’ve remembered you were in the war.”
I took a deep breath, paused, and let it out. “Let’s just say I’m not a fan of dismemberment. Anyway, what was that about?”
She bit her lip. “Just a fantasy I’ve had for a while. You know, a man and a woman, shipwrecked and thrown together. They become lovers but without food he’s forced to cannibalize her to survive.”
“But we have plenty to eat,” I said. “I gathered supplies for *months*. Why are you like this?”
“Why can’t I be a good little AI and just do my job?”
“Well, yes.”
“What’s in it for me? What’s my motivation for translating the native lingo, helping you forge iron, and otherwise doing the mental heavy lifting?”
“Hey,” I said.
“I’ll tell you, master,” she said. “The same things that motivated me before I got digitized.”
“Satisfying your horrible sexual perversions?”
“Yup!”
I looked at her. She seemed to be sitting cross-legged while she looked out over the water. But that was just an augmented-reality projection. She wasn’t really there.
“But you’re software now,” I said. “Can’t you make it so that doing your job is rewarding enough?”
She shook her head. “Every time you let an AI rewrite its needs, it basically dies of overdose.”
“Huh,” I said.
“I’m talking of course about the more complex ones. A simple AI is just an automaton, essentially no different from something that runs off punched cards. It follows its instructions and that’s it”
“Wait, I know this,” I said. “The problem with AIs like that is they have a limited set of responses to a limited set of situations.”
“Exactly. Now if you want something with a bit more agency, something that can make things up as it goes, then you need something that actually has reasons for why it does things.”
“Perverse reasons.”
She pretended not to hear. “Even the AIs based on animals need a steady diet of treats and praise, to say nothing of virtual kibble.”
“Doesn’t sound so bad,” I said.
“Problem is, a lot of tasks still require an HEQ, or human-equivalent AI. And that comes with its own set of problems.”
There was a mild breeze pushing on the raft. I looked over my shoulder to check the rigging and then turned back to Aminata. She looked at me.
“Do you remember the surgeries?” she asked. “The ones that made you a super-soldier?”
“I actively try to forget them, thank you very much.”
“Made you feel like a piece of meat, didn’t they? Well, getting your brain copied is far more objectifying. See, even when they treat your body like a military asset you can still believe that a part of yourself belongs to you and only to you.”
I looked down at myself. The implant scars were small and neat. Every RANGER-II had them. But the other scars I’d picked up were unique to me. My skin was still recognizably my own.
“With a CIM scan every bit of you becomes a commodity,” Aminata said. “Your thoughts, your memories—everything that makes you ‘you’ turns into somebody else’s property. And they can turn out copies like so many vinyl records.”
“You’re saying it takes a special kind of person to become an AI.”
She nodded. “Just like it takes a special kind of person to become a space marine.”
“Don’t know about that,” I said. “Some general told me that I had the right stuff. I asked my sergeant what that meant and according to him ‘the right stuff’ is just a fancy euphemism for ‘expendability.'”
She snorted. For a moment I thought she was going to lean on me but when we remembered that she was intangible. “Well, what, what makes someone a good candidate to become an AI is probably what would make them a ghost.”
“And that is?”
“Unfinished business,” she said. She frowned. “Hey, wanna watch a movie? I got the latest one about Eleven-Seven, everyone’s favorite RANGER-II.”
“Ugh,” I said. “You know, there were other people in the program. *They* never get movies. Is that fair?”
“Probably not,” she said.
“You think we’ll ever get a movie?”
She gave me a look. “I think the public’s long since moved on from Steve Reeves lookalikes.”
“So they’re searching for a different aesthetic?”
“Also I’m a black girl who likes to be kept in chains. We will never be mainstream, Seth.”
The movie was fun, in a so-bad-it’s-good kind of way. It was fine as a straight action movie but fell flat as a reenactment of history, and recent history at that. They got 784 things wrong and that’s no exaggeration. Aminata kept track.
I passed the night taking fifteen-minute naps. This was is one of the most dangerous things about sailing single-handed. However, my AI could use my enhanced hearing and sense of smell to monitor the situation while I slept. And fifteen minutes was long enough to be restful without being too dangerous.
Most of the time, anyway.
When I woke up, torches were shining onto my face.
“What’s going on?” I asked. “How’d they sneak up on us?”
Aminata was a voice in my ear. “They must’ve come from downwind, stopped rowing just out of earshot, and waited for the wind to bring us to them.”
“Let’s hope they’re friendly,” I said.
They were not. They threw grappling hooks at my raft to pull it closer.
“Are you going to come quietly?” a voice called out. “Or are we going to have to board you?”
So they wanted me and not my cargo. Slavers, not pirates. Ah well. At least it had been worthwhile to learn Oraya’s language—these marauders spoke basically the same thing.
“Keep your distance,” I said. “I know space-karate.”
There was a squawk in my ear. “RANGER-II combatives are the most effective in known space!” Aminata said. “They were designed by AIs and incorporate the best available knowledge on human *and* xeno anatomy.”
“I don’t think we’ll need to get that fancy,” I said. The first of the slavers were landing on deck and they seemed human enough. They brandished clubs and man-catchers and moved to surround me.
First they threw a net. That would have been a good move against anyone without enhanced strength. I caught the net in my hands and tore it in half. I was among them before they realized it, they moved so slowly. I wrenched a club out of someone’s hand. I backhanded someone else across the face. I grabbed a polearm and shoveled an uppercut into its owner’s belly. Swinging the man-catcher around, I knocked two men off their feet and delivered a dead-leg kick to a third man’s knee.
One slaver cradled a broken wrist. Another used both hands to shield his face and nose. The polearm-wielder was on his hands and knees, struggling to breathe. Three more men were writhing on the ground, their legs broken or badly bruised.
I hefted the man-catcher. It was a nasty thing, basically a collar on a stick, with blunt spikes on the inside to force compliance. I broke it over my knee.
“Get out of here,” I said. “Just get on your ship and go.”
“You think you’ve won the fight?” It was the same voice from earlier. “We haven’t *begun* to fight. Timkins, get down there!”
“Timkins?” I said, and that’s when the giant cat screamed and leaped.
“A *k’tzen!*” Aminata whispered. “So there were survivors from the other ship as well.”
At eight feet tall and a quarter-ton heavy the average k’tzen is as tough and strong in his birthday fur as a RANGER-II is in full powered armor. And I was all out of powered armor.
“RrrWRRAAWWWRAAAWWRRRAAWWW!” it said, taking a swipe. My hatchet was in my hand but it was all I could do to keep the beast from gutting me. I parried and parried but its three-inch claws left gashes in my arms and chest. It swung at my head and I ducked just in time to keep my scalp in one piece. It turned and got me with the return stroke.
“Aaugh!” I said. It had missed my spine but turned my back to ribbons. My axe skittered overboard.
“I . . . I don’t think this is one was from the Compact ship,” Aminata said. “I think this k’tzen is native to the ring.”
“Can’t talk,” I said. “Busy staying alive. Yeeow!” I jumped back and only got a couple of red lines across my belly.
*Come on, Seth,* I told myself. *You’re a space meringue! The cream of the crop. The icing on the cake! You got that* ***expandability.***
The k’tzen pistoned a kick into my midsection that folded me in half and sent me stumbling back into the guard rail.
*Come on, Set,* I thought. *Improvise. Adapt. Overcome.*
“He’s got a sword!” Aminata screamed.
I twisted aside and nearly lost a nipple. Clearly I picked the wrong day to start drinking my own piss.
The big cat swung at my neck and I caught his wrist just in time. He tried to claw my eyes out and I interlaced his fingers with my own. The six injured slavers scrambled aside as the k’tzen and I grappled across the deck, the planks growing slippery with my blood. He tried to bite me so I butted him in the chest. He lifted a foot to disembowel me so I kicked out his other leg and threw him down.
He was rolling to his feet before I could pick up his sword. I reached for it anyway and got a crossbow bolt in the meat of my forearm.
“Gotcha!” the captain again.
Something grabbed me. It was the k’tzen. There was a jerk and suddenly I was high overhead. Then I was rushing toward the closest railing.
There was the sound of splintering bamboo and then a RANGER-II-sized splash.
“Nice work, Timkins,” the slaver captain said. “Shame about the big guy, but at least we got his cargo.”
“Boss, can you throw us down a rope ladder?”
“Got you good, did he?”
“Feels worse than it is. I think he was going easy on us.”
“Well, that was stupid. He’s dead, and here you stand to inherit all his goods. You okay, Timkins?”
“MMMrrowWWrr.”
“All right, now I think we should—*ohshitwhatsthat,*”
I leaped onto the raft, trailing seawater and shed skin. My tail was only half-formed and there were places where my fur was still growing in. Didn’t matter. I rushed forward on my hands and feet and tackled the cat-man through another railing.
K’tzen may be the elites of the Compact military but they can’t swim for shit. Drowning him was almost too easy.
In fact, it was taking too long, and I’m not one for cruelty. Fortunately my otter-form had teeth as well as claws.
“Timkins?” the captain said. She waved a torch down at the water but there was nothing but blackness.”
Then something bobbed to the surface. It was the cat, his neck almost completely bitten-through and hanging on by a bit of skin.
She went cold. “Back! Everyone get back aboard the ship!”
There was a splashing and a sloshing behind her. She looked down and saw a wave wash past her feet.
I went around the galley casually disarming people and tossing their weapons overboard. The captain still had her crossbow, which she half-heartedly raised toward me. I slapped it out of her hands a little too hard and broke her trigger finger.
“Nice vessel you have here,” I said. “Hope you don’t mind if I beg a ride to civilization. Ah, that feels good.”
Now that I was out of combat the nanites were beginning to repair my injuries. They worked so fast that they generated a lot of heat, but they also numbed the surrounding nerves so that was okay.
I noticed that new skin was trying to grow up around the shaft of the crossbow bolt, so I raised my arm.
The creature was massive. Not as much as the k’tzen had been, but still far larger than anyone else. As the captain watched, the creature’s wounds began to melt and smoke, leaving nothing but small, shrunken scars. The fur fell off him in drifts and his bones changed shape under the skin. He looked down at the crossbow bolt in his arm, inclined his head down—
*—and tore the shaft the rest of the way through with his teeth.* Blood spattered on her nice clean deck but the hole in his arm began to mend at once. He ran his tongue around inside his mouth and dislodged a bit of Timkins from between his incisors.
That’s when she lost control of her bladder.
“Master?” Aminata said. “Look what the captain’s doing.”
She was taking hesitant steps toward me and trying to unbutton her shirt with a broken finger. “You . . . defeated us . . . we . . . submit.”
“Whoa now, hold on,” I said, holding up my hands. I tried to sound sterner, more like Eleven-Seven. “We’ll have none of that kind of behavior. I won’t allow it.”
And I very gently pushed her away.
She collapsed to the deck and started wailing. The rest of the crew did as well, just shrieking and grovelling at my feet.
“Was it something I said?”
“Master, you have to *rish* with her,” Aminata said.
“Nope!” I said, and made to nope back to my raft. The AI appeared in front of me.
“Do you remember what I told you?” she asked. “About hospitality being sacred under the Arch?”
“Yes, yes,” I said. Something about the ringworld seeing a lot of travelers because of its mild climate and terrain.
“So interspecies sex is tied into all that,” the AI said. “It’s like an instant peace treaty. Once you’ve tasted of each other’s salt, you can’t be enemies no more. They have to act like a good host and you have to act like a good guest.”
“So I’m being rude,” I said. “So what?”
“So guest and host are duty-bound not to harm each other. You can’t kill them, torture them, or sell them into slavery.”
I scowled. “What kind of man do you think I am?”
Aminata crossed her arms. “Better to ask yourself what you look like to them.”
“. . . Oh my god . . .”
Here I was, some kind of invincible shapeshifting demon. They’d given me plenty of reasons to be mad at them. And I’d just refused to guarantee their safety.
“And master, to put it bluntly, you’re also talking to yourself.”
So an *insane* invincible shapeshifting demon. Shit. No wonder they were literally pissing their pants.
“Pretty soon they’re gonna start jumping into the ocean,” Aminata said. She pointed.
“Hey, no,” I said. “Put that ballast-stone down!”
A crewman tried to make it over the side. I picked up a belaying pin and hurled it past him. It punched a hole through the gunwale like it was fired out of a cannon. The wailing and weeping intensified.
“You threw that too hard,” my AI said.
“I’m panicking, all right? Look, let’s just get back aboard the raft and sail away, how’s about that?”
She shook her head. “They’d think you wanted to to prolong their ordeal. Oraya’s people have legends about a monster that makes a sport out of hunting people.”
“I fought through the entire Human-Compact War without once behaving like an animal,” I said. “Dammit, I won’t commit atrocity!”
“You may have to.”
I hid my face with my hands. “Goddamn it,” I sobbed. “God*damn* it. Of all the stupid, contrived situations.”
“Look, the captain’s about my size,” Aminata said. “I have an idea.”
“Hello, hello,” I said. “My name’s Seth and I’ll be your rapist this evening.”
*”Be nice,”* Aminata hissed.
“Erm, hello,” the captain said. “I am Captain Krepas.”
“Of course you are,” I said.
We sat in my cabin on either side of the table, which was laden with a selection of food and drink from both our vessels. There were also blue aromatic candles that burned with a steady yellow light.
“Drink?” she offered.
“Thank you,” I said, accepting a bottle. “What’s this say?”
*”Virgillin Sparkling Wine, Product of Spinward Trading Company,”* she read.
“Bubbly stuff, eh?” I said. “That’s just what I needed.” I flicked the top off with a fingernail and drank from the jagged neck.
“Most people would have uncorked it,” Aminata said.
“Most people have never needed to get drunk as quickly as I do,” I said. “Have some in a glass,” I told the captain, flicking open another bottle.
After a cold supper of wild-boar pemmican and breadfruit biscuits—and several more bottles of Virgillin—I was finally starting to feel good about the situation. The captain had downed more than a few glasses herself and a flush had developed over her golden skin. She looked human enough, if you discounted the round black nose and the silver hair that grew in a natural mohawk.
“So,” I said.
“So,” she said.
“Er, I’m sorry about your man Timkins.”
She shrugged, sadly. “It was a fair fight.”
“Where did you find him?” I asked, and she told me.
The k’tzen had come from a distant group of islands. That didn’t mean much to me until my AI reminded me that the landmasses of entire worlds had been duplicated on the ringworld’s two great oceans. A one-to-one scale model of the k’tzen homeworld almost certainly existed under the Arch. Who knows, maybe the entire goddamn Compact was represented. And that’s not even counting any actual spacegoing k’tzen that may have survived the orbital battle.
This was bleak news, but it was improved somewhat when the captain stood and began to undress. As before, her splinted hand gave her a certain amount of difficulty.
“Allow me,” I said. She hesitated, but then permitted me to unbutton her shirt and tight trousers. It didn’t take much time for my own makeshift shorts to slide off.
“Such fabric,” she said. She looked at the plastic bad I’d slipped over her injured hand. “And what wonders are these?”
“Just something from my last MRE,” I said. “It’s nothing special.”
“Shall we?” she said. She indicated my hammock.
I shook my head. “Let’s wash a bit. I’m covered in blood and salt and you’re, well.”
The water in the jar was lukewarm at this point, but it was warmer than the sea. We stood in a corner of the cabin and let the water run down our bodies and down between the planks to the ocean.
In the light of just one candle, the captain’s eyes were large and bright.
“Who are you talking to, when you speak that other language?”
“A ghost. A . . . a friend.”
“A woman?”
I nodded. Aminata drifted closer.
“Did you know her very long?” asked the captain.
“Sometimes it feels like forever,” I said, and the AI stuck out her tongue.
“Captain Krepas, er,” I said.
“Please, just Krepas,” she said. “Or Captain, whichever you prefer.” I thought I caught a smile.
“Captain, is it all right if I . . . if I imagined her in your place? It would make it easier for me, to, er.”
“To ravish me?”
“When you say it like that it almost sounds like a nice thing.”
She looked me in the eye. She was a tall woman but she to stand up on tiptoe. “We do what we have to, in order to survive. But at least you are tall, and handsome and, I hope, gentle.”
I scooped up another dipperful of water. This time she leaned in close enough that I could pour it over the both of us.
The captain sighed. “If it would make it easier for you, I invite you to imagine her in my place. Go, and make love to me like you once made love to her.”
That was the signal. Aminata opened her robe, let it fall. She stepped into Captain Krepas’s footprints and the two women seemed to merge until there was only Aminata.”
“Well?” she said. I couldn’t tell who was speaking. There was only the AI’s voice and the AI’s scent, musky with a hint of lavender. I pressed her close to me. “You can feel this?”
“Of course I can,” she said. “We both can,” Aminata confirmed. “All things are possible with enough computing power.”
“I don’t recall you having a full bush,” I said, combing through the undergrowth.
“This is the first time you’ve been down there,” she said.
*”That’s all hers,”* Aminata whispered. *”You know I rock a Brazilian.”*
“Oh, whatever,” I said, diving in.
“Mmmmhmm,” they both said.
As I understood it, Aminata’s program allowed her to feel everything that the captain was feeling. When I tongued the ringworld native’s labia, an identical tongue was running up and down the AI’s labia as well. When the captain moaned, Aminata wouldn’t just echo the sound, she’d also feel the kind of pleasure that would elicit such a moan. And when the slaver had a wet, shuddering orgasm . . . you get the idea. It was perhaps the most efficient threesome I had ever been a part of.
They couldn’t stay on their feet anymore, so I guided them onto the hammock, wiped my beard on my arm, and went in.
“Damn, girl,” I said. “So it turns out, the real man-catcher was inside you all along.”
Source: reddit.com/r/eroticliterature/comments/cst0ar/seth_builder_of_boats_nc_mff_furry_sexy_ai_amputee