Cranhedonics Welcomes You! Our taps can be run through any standard capacity neural hardware, but for the crispest, most lifelike emotions, sensations, and trauma-scarring, only CH8971 and stronger are going to deliver. Cranhedonics: It’s For Taps. 

IMPORTANT: By willing this tap to continue, you agree to the Standard Tap Liabilities of the jurisdiction which you are physically inhabiting. 

Tapping into Benjamin Sweet Child of Dallas in…3…2…1… 

[shhhhhlit]

Benjamin the Sweet Child of Dallas stumbles into the FlexTray, every strand of resilience in him stretched to the brink of its elasticity. He stands stalk still, his primary eyes focused on nothing in the space between himself and the far wall, which is itself slightly out of focus and at an indeterminate distance. He doesn’t hear the quiet click and the staccato sucking noise of the door sealing itself into the doorway he has unwittingly passed through. These sounds are obscured by his sobbing as he sinks down onto the padded floor and begins to cry in big, catching expulsions of air. Gradually, as his breathing becomes more violent and expurgatory, the sobbing becomes wailing. From a human standpoint, it is alarming, a tone universally recognizable as involuntary. It is the voicing of absolute despair, something at once expressing horror and deep sorrow. 

As he slowly descends into this psychic blackness, gradually arriving at a fetal position, the lighting in the room dims to a point no brighter than a single candle. His wailing continues unabated, and he seems to take no notice of the spongy floor that cradles him, gradually bringing itself around him like a huge hand under a sheet. It encircles him entirely, fitting itself to the contours of his fetal form. The temperature in the room and the surface of the floor are brought to his perspiration point, then held just below it. Unseen and unheard, the ventilation begins to circulate a complex cocktail of neural agents. His breathing between wails begins to slow and become less desperate. He starts to relax physically, allowing his core to slacken, his legs and arms to unfold slightly. The wailing has been reduced to mumbling, a few words forming before he has completely surrendered to the amnesiac vapors.

“A-a-a-all dead…go-o-o-o-ne…” Then nothing, complete silence. Long, slow breaths. But now, perhaps twenty minutes later, his eyes have opened again. His slow breathing and slack muscles remain. He has reached Mindpoint. The axis upon which the coin spins in mid-air, forever. He is unlimited potential, the man he should have been, would have been, and could have been, but now is. He is a blank page, the most priceless manuscript. He is renewed, but in the unrelenting historiography of Benjamin the Sweet Child of Dallas. 

Then he is standing, and presently the air becomes super-oxygenated, refreshing in a novel way that propels his mind into the moment. Slowly he becomes aware that he is in a jungle now. The green lushness and the hum of insects are troublingly familiar to him. This is not the comfortable cool of the Dark Wood, Dallas his Good Mother was far away. But somehow he had been transported here. The sweat on his face and neck had the characteristic grit acquired from being on the move through the dense undergrowth. In the distance a screech, a roar… Yes, he’s definitely smelled this air before. But where? Far from home. Definitely far from home. 

He has been raised on prophecies, this is what he should have anticipated. A quest, a challenge, some setbacks, loss, pain, and, somewhere in the murky distance of his future, vindication. For his Good Mother. For every Good Mother. But there’s a blank in his memories, an episode that ought to be there, ought to tell him something about this place, about having been here. Something about the smell sets him on edge, he knows it intimately. What happened here? Something terrible… But the last solid memory is of falling asleep on a grain cart headed toward the underground elevators. That cart couldn’t have brought him here. Why hadn’t anyone woken him?

He begins to take in his surroundings in more detail. A clearing is just visible from the gloom of the canopy where he’s standing. Competing shafts of the suns’ radiance indicate a break in the oppressive shade, beacons penetrating the undefined gloom of the mottled green darkness. Perhaps a hundred meters away to the north-east, the clearing is large, too large to make out the far edge. It appears devoid of trees, which suggests a lake. He makes his way towards it, the soles of his feet deftly adjusting their palps to accommodate the uneven ground strewn with igneous rock and organic material. 

His skin can smell several sinewls on the breeze carrying across the water, a male and two females, one in estrus the other near calving. The air also tastes slightly briny, which means shoals of vicious, glistening spyrannah. He feels his cerci tense into readiness at the thought, abdominal pincers that would make a quick and delicious meal of any spyrannah swimming within range.

Suddenly all thoughts of prey fall away. A new scent, the perfume of life. A female of his own species! Serine fills his lungs and saturates his hemolymph - she is fertile. As he passes out of the jungle and into the clearing, now moving quickly and with purpose, she is there to greet his hungry gaze. Her epigynum is a rainbow of metallic colors upon which the suns dance, ready to receive his sperm web. Her exo-udders dripping with the pink milk of maidenly beckoning, she will deposit her clusters within the week!

But there is also another scent on the wind, one that fails to register in his primary ganglion while he is so entranced by the female’s display. Luckily, one intelligent limb is able to respond a millisecond sooner and save him from what might have been a crippling blow. For now he faces a rival suitor, and it is clear from a single pulse of his ganglial waves that the attacker is both older and more powerful than Benjamin. 

He skitters deftly out of reach of another blow, which fells a twelve year-old tree as though it were a daisy. With this he realizes that speed will be his salvation if the fight is to continue much longer. But it is not to continue at all, for at that moment the female grows weary of their barbaric clicking and slashing and decides to take matters into her own hands. 

For now he faces a rival suitor, and it is clear from a single pulse of his ganglial waves that the attacker is both older and more powerful than Benjamin. 


He knows at once that she is sifting through his memory, each reticulation analyzed with lightning speed. Her brainwaves are far beyond his capacity while she seeks sperm web, all her systems primed and ready to coalesce in perfect harmony to achieve that one goal. His body is immobilized by the steely grip of her psyche. One hind eye is still able to see that his rival is also frozen in her grip, awake and aware but powerless. The next thirty seconds pass in agonizing slow motion, both males buckling under the psychic scrutiny of their would-be lover. 

Then the hammer falls. Or rather, the metasoma falls, its nine segments working as one mighty tail to drive home her hypodermic spike and trigger the draining of the bulbous tip. The venom glands flood the veins of the challenger, leaving Benjamin, still in the grip of her psyche, to watch as the other male begins the tell-tale flicking and salivating of one who’s been poisoned. 

“He’s mine now.” 

Her thought booms in Benjamin’s mind. Then she speaks aloud, her voice smooth, strong, soft and seductive.

“He’s ours.”

The poisoned male gurgles vaguely, something about serving while he waits. She has cribbed him into a series of regressions and hyper-realized memories that underscore his sense of inferiority. Every apprehension he has ever felt is reduced to a single impulse that tells him to obey her. He is trapped in a shame entirely of his own concoction. The only respite from that weight is to offer himself as a servile supplicant to her. Death might have been kind by comparison. 

The female loosens her psychic grip, although Benjamin is still aware of her probing his thoughts. 

Knowing that he is as eager as she is, she turns her back to Benjamin once more and spreads her translucent blue wings to reveal her epigynum…. 

Just as this is about to happen, the immersion of Korbal’s tap dissolves into a calm blue background and a voiceover plays: 

“They are about to embark on a mating flight that will rival anything you have tapped, neurally or even in your own skin! Talk to your agent and book your own unique tap for less than you’d think. Cranhedonics: It’s For Taps.”

A corporate logo hangs proudly in the air before his stream returns to the time and place where Korbal sits, where he has been sitting this whole time. He was not Benjamin the Sweet Child of Dallas, but he had almost felt as though he was. This effect was so strong, in fact, that he catches himself glancing at his reflection like a yokel who’s never tapped into anything.

“So, what do you say? Apparently, that mating sequence is 1700 times more pleasurable than the average orgasm and lasts for several days. I’m sure you could feel how clear the tap is. And remember, that was all recorded footage, what you’ll live will be live!”

“Recorded from a fetal plant.”

“Yes. Abducted from his bed chamber at Brindlewood, Daedalia Plane 417, 4:30am, 3051. Grew up farming. Mother is a C9, anchor knowledge is messianic revelation. It’s a subliminal insemination colony, psychic cyborg virginl mothers, natural male offspring, tapped, of course.” 

“So they grow up without fathers, the entire colony of male offspring? The C9s are an interesting choice.”

“Yes. Each a little miracle himself, taught by his mother to believe in a higher calling of which he is evidence.”

“And these males compete for what exactly? What do they mate with?”

“Incubated females, of course. We have a facility off-planet. But there are really only a handful of them in Dark Wood at any time, and there is no successful mating outside of the jungle. Females are far too powerful for that to happen unless they are comfortable, which requires heat and humidity. So the males just fight.”

“How much human in the mix? Sounds like more than a little bit.”

“About forty-seven percent. I know. Apologies. Couldn’t be avoided. Lots of agron, maybe 30%, some tardigrade for ultraviolet resistance and, well, you’ll see the rest soon enough. Tranquilized and dislocated for these encounters, the rest is really just the post-volcanic jungle and its denizens. A biome that has existed for several centuries.”

“Good. That’s good. Agron experience the most resonant emotions, human thoughts barely register in neuganglia, like mushrooms with legs, they are! Ba-ha-ha-ha!”

“Yes, haha. Well, these will be quite striking experiences, I promise you that. Twenty thousand residents in villages of 200 at a 3% fluctuation. Four seasons. Farmlands divided by stone-walled foot paths with a large boreal forest at the center, Dark Wood.” 

“I wish they’d do something with the names.”

“Yes, well those are all just descriptive and in keeping with the anchor knowledge.”

“And how far is Brindlewood from the jungle?” 

“It could be reached by his kind in about three days' travel overland, but the lack of water would make the journey all but impossible.”

“I see, so this is not an organic encounter. I like that, the emotions are incredibly complex.”

“Fully linked forebrain?”

“Metaganglion.”

“Oooooh then this might be a bit more than you, uh….”

“Do I look like I burn out on pleb taps?”

“No! No, haha, of course not. That’s a fair point. A very fair point. It’s your rotation, after all. If you’re satisfied….?”

“More than satisfied! I must say, even for my leathery old ganglion, that was quite the blast of hormones. Such an array of sentiment, and such depth to the feelings. What about the pain and the horror? Will it be on the same scale? I’ve seen a few things, you know.”

“Oh…Oh my, yes! It would burn me out, utterly. Every high will be matched by a lowpoint the likes of which few have thus far been able to discuss. A good many long term casualties, the odd tapper has even been known to top themself after a little too long on these signals. What has been said is that it will change you. You will feel a connectedness that defies explanation, according to testimonials. For most neurological conductors, this is a flood of extremely rich data. Resultant scars to the psyche are most unusual, sure to give you a stoicism and calm that will cause you to be held in high esteem in cultured society. That is, if you don’t burn out. As I would.”

“Hmmm, yes. Alright, run me through the tap. I can take it.”