The following story contains material of an adult nature. If you are offended by such things or are restricted by laws in your area from viewing such things, please turn away now.

LEGAL BS: Feel free to read this story at your leisure. The characters, the plot, and the machine which makes all this happen belong to me and may not be borrowed or stolen without written permission. If you are an archiver, please contact me if you are interested in putting this story up on your site. I will allow all free sites to post my work so long as I know where it is going and you allow me to prepare a copy of the story which is specifically "branded" with your site's information. (i.e. I put a Meta Tag in it with your site info so that we can identify that you do, in fact, have permission to post it) I will also write up a custom "Author's Notes" for the beginning of the tale which addresses your readers directly. You may NOT archive the TEXT versions of this story which have gone out onto the newsgroups. I have posted a few copies, but they lose considerable punch because of the format structure of a ascii text file. You MAY feel free to pass versions along to your friends, so long as you aren't making any cash from it. Again, I would prefer that the text versions just be used for the newsgroups, while the HTML versions are used for all other purposes. If you have questions about whether or not I'll approve of something you wish to do with the stuff, just ask. :)

Note from the Author: This story is a little different from most of the things I've seen posted around the net. In addition to being along a SciFi vein, it also has a plot which (I hope) people will find both entertaining and thought provoking. I have to admit, there are some pretty weird things in here, so I'm assuming that this probably won't be to everyone's liking. This is my first stab at writing erotic fiction for public consumption, so I'd be interested in hearing from people. You can reach me at grumpus@mail.gv2.net.

 THREE – Into the Game

I coughed and the sink filled with blood. I was being slowly eaten alive from the inside out. Whatever this shit was, I wasn’t sure I was going to live through the withdrawal.

The phone rang and I staggered out to answer it. It wasn’t my apartment, but Robbie knew I was here and maybe she had some good news.

It was her, but the news wasn’t so good.

"You were right," she sighed. "After about 90 minutes, it started in on me, too. Karen can’t stay off it for more than a few minutes and every time you come off, you have to go through the whole blind lust and orgasm process again before things smooth out. I’ve had Karen plugged in directly for over an hour now and she seems fine, though. How are you doing?"

Plugged in? What the fuck does that mean?

"I think I’m dying," I answered.

There was a pause. "When I went through again, I learned a little more. I’m more convinced than ever that you are supposed to come through with me."

I coughed up some more blood as the options flooded my mind. I was dead if I didn’t. But, who knows what would happen if I did. Even so, it seemed better than death.

"I’ll be right there."

"Prepare yourself," said Robbie as she reached for the handle to the closet.

Had Robbie lost weight? She seemed slightly thinner, and her breasts seemed to sag a little less than they had.

"Prepare myself for what?" I asked between gags. "I know how to have sex."

Robbie opened the door to the walk-in closet and I realized that I hadn’t prepared myself in the least. The plant had more than quadrupled in size, but even more disturbing was the vision of Karen totally naked, suspended vertically and entangled in the vines. The huge cucumber like appendage slid slowly in and out of her dripping pussy. Several more of the "cukes" had grown and were waving around and moving up and down over her flesh. Her eyes opened and she smiled blissfully as the thick scent hit me like a ton of bricks.

I was already feeling better and becoming very aroused when Robbie stepped into the closet and grabbed onto one of the cucumbers and shoved it into herself. The smaller vines immediately began to encircle her limbs and body as the plant seemed to have another growth spurt.

"Come on," said Robbie seductively. "It’s so much better when you main-line it."

To say that I was experiencing raw pleasure was an understatement. As the "cuke" slid into my dripping pussy, the colors around me brightened to shades I’d never imagined. The thinner vines engulfed me as Robbie reached out and pulled me in close to her, our bodies writhing in unison. Soon, our legs and arms were completely entangled in each other much like the vines which suspended our writhing bodies over the floor. I opened my eyes for a second and saw that I had been turned in such a way that Karen’s face was right in front of mine. Our lips met and sealed as we kissed like long-time lovers.

Then, a strange fluid began erupting from her throat. It tasted like – well, if there was a drink which smelled like the plant, it would surely taste like what was filling my mouth right then. It didn’t taste bad and I swallowed as much as I could, but a good deal of it seeped out and ran down over my chin, drenching my nightshirt.

The entire world was spinning madly and I wasn’t at all sure which way was up. The cuke in my pussy kept sliding in and out like the biggest, most satisfying cock I had ever felt. Still drinking from Karen, I felt my orgasm begin to build.

It was raining. I, of course, was a man – something which didn’t seem quite so strange anymore. I was with Robbie, or actually, a thinner slightly more attractive version of her. We were running down an alley, soaking wet and afraid. I held onto her hand as if my life depended on it.

"Hurry, they’re right behind us!" she cried as I forced open the door to an empty warehouse, my powerful muscles burning.

"Get inside," I said, waving frantically for Robbie to enter.

"Damn it, Jack." said the dripping wet Robbie as I pulled the door shut and latched it as best I could on it’s bent frame. She was patting herself down frantically searching for something. A thought struck me, and I fished in my own pocket and came up with a vial of greenish fluid.

"I lost my serum," she said with terror in her voice.

I realized the dire consequences of her statement and I regarded my own vial. Only one of us was going to "skip." The other was going to be wiped and sent back in with no knowledge of the past. It scared me to death. I loved Robbie more than anything in the world. I needed her and I couldn’t go on knowing that she was out there somewhere, lost and alone.

"You’re skipping," I said as I prepared the needle, my eyes checking the door every few seconds.

Robbie held out her hands and shook her head, "No way, Jacko. You’re the only one who can synthesize the serum."

"I figured it out before, I can do it again. You’ve got two more skips than I do, we’ll need the knowledge to find the others," I insisted as I handed her the needle.

Robbie stood up just as a loud banging and angry voices arrived just outside the door we had just entered. While I was looking the other way, Robbie jabbed the needle into me and pressed the plunger. My entire body was filled with pleasure and arousal almost instantly, much in the same way that the plant had affected me in my apartment.

"Sorry baby," breathed Robbie as she knelt before me and pulled my already hard cock out of my pants. "Just promise you’ll find me and keep me safe."

Her lips wrapped around my cock and she sucked it like a pro. The banging got louder and I could tell the door wouldn’t hold long. I could feel the orgasm welling up inside of me as Robbie cupped my balls. There was a bolt of energy or something which erupted from the doorway as it burst open. It struck Robbie just as the come started shooting from my cock. Her lips slackened around me and she collapsed to the floor.

My body trembled and the orgasm rocked me hard. The vines tightened around me as if the plant, itself, was having an orgasm of its own. I opened my eyes and saw that Robbie was experiencing the same thing I was. Within seconds, things seemed pretty much back to normal. The plant slackened its grip on me, but the cuke remained in my pussy, sliding slowly in and out of me.

"My God," I said, not certain I really believed in him much anymore.

Robbie just nodded and ran a finger through a pool of the goo which had stuck to my chest. She scooped it up and sucked it down almost seductively.

"Did you see what I just saw?" I asked.

"Me sucking your cock so you could escape?" she came back.

I nodded, dumbfounded. If there was anything to the vision, then we were living another life, our memories wiped or something like that. It seemed that I was actually a man, or at least had been a man at one time.

And Robbie had been my wife!

It’s hard to explain the emotional roller coaster one rides on when they discover that they aren’t who they think they are. And then, when you look at it even deeper, you realize that there’s a good chance that you aren’t even who you have been shown to be. Talk about your paradoxes.

We adjusted pretty well over the next few weeks. Though we never got more than a few bits and pieces when we had our "orgasmavisions", as Robbie called them, we did what we could to figure out just what was what and how things worked.

As time went by, we realized that we - at least Robbie and I – were part of a group of people, or maybe souls of people, who could pass from lifetime to lifetime. Or, maybe we passed from reality to reality. We didn’t know. We did know that there were at least two different ways for us to pass. With one way - when you died, it seemed – you would pass through, but you wouldn’t have the memories of your past life. With the other way – we weren’t quite sure how that worked, but it seemed to have something to do with a drug and an orgasmic experience – you could "skip" right to the next life with your memories and identity intact.

Or something like that.

It was also obvious that there was another force out there intent on stopping us from passing – or "skipping" – to the next lifetime as a whole. They seemed to hunt us down relentlessly, lifetime after lifetime, though Robbie and I had only had glimpses into two others lives, maybe three.

We also knew that not everyone had a "soul", if you will. Popular religion will have you believe that everyone dies and goes to heaven or hell or wherever, but somehow we knew this wasn’t the case. Karen was our proof of that.

She had none of the same experiences we had. Instead, she seemed to be just sort of a power conduit from which our plant could feed. She had no visions or repressed memories come back to her at all. Pretty much all Karen did was remain "hooked in" to the plant and ride a nice steady wave of pure and constant pleasure. That’s not to say she wasn’t functional, she was. She could speak, think for herself, and she would even listen to Robbie and I theorize, sometimes adding her own insight into it all.

And that left the plant. We had no idea what the hell its role was in the whole thing. We knew that the "serum" needed to skip had been synthesized – presumably by me, or at least a past me that we couldn’t remember. Therefore, it didn’t make sense to us that the plant was producing the serum. And, since we didn’t "skip" during the many orgasms we had shared since it had come into our lives, we were even more convinced that it was something else altogether.

The popular theory, which was originally come upon by Karen while she watched Robbie and I hook in and share one of our many "orgasmavisions", was that the plant was somehow there to help us remember our past lives. That way, by the time the "bad guys" caught up to us, we knew enough about what was going on to be able to "skip" before they could kill us.

The plant had grown considerably during the first few days, but it had stabilized thereafter. It filled up the closet and the branches, vines, and cukes extended out into the corner of the room a few feet giving it rather a pleasant ivied look. It could animate itself and its vines could actually extend to about anywhere in the small apartment, but it didn’t seem to move much unless one of us was "passing through" again.

"Passing through" might not really be the right term for it. If you stayed hooked in (i.e. You kept a cuke up your cunt) things remained clear, the memories seemed to make sense. If you "unhooked" the memories immediately began to slowly fade away and we became more and more ignorant of the "truth", as we’d come to call it. Then, after a while, the "sickness" would kick in and you’d have to hook back in, or – we assumed – die. Karen could only stay unhooked for a few minutes, but she liked to do it a few times a day. She said that the constant pleasure was all fine and good, but there was nothing like the rush of being off it for a bit then hooking back in for the big rush. Robbie and I could stay off for considerably longer. It started off at about 90 minutes, but by the end of two weeks, we could go three, maybe four hours before things got bad.

From day one, we realized, that if there were people out there looking for us, we needed to blend in as best we could. That meant that we needed to live our lives as closely to the way we did before as possible. Unfortunately, Karen couldn’t stay off the plant long enough to work her shifts at the club, so we had her call Al saying that her father had taken ill and she had to go down to Florida to take care of him. She had told him that she didn’t know when, or even if she would be back.

For Robbie and me, though, it was much easier. We could easily stay off long enough to do a set, pop back upstairs for our fix, and then return for the next one. In fact, by the end of a couple weeks, I could stay down at the club for my entire three hour shift without so much as breaking a sweat. I preferred to do it that way, in fact. The "passing through" was just too much and the visions, mostly of me being a man, were just too disturbing. In fact, with the exception of covering my shifts at the club, I pretty much always stayed hooked in just to avoid having to go through it all so often. I much preferred just riding the pleasure waves hour after hour with utter clarity until my next shift came up.

Robbie seemed to like the rush, though. Maybe not as much as Karen who was now hooking and unhooking every couple hours or less, but she liked it. Because of that, Robbie was sort of elected to take care of the needs around the house: buying food, playing the bills, all of that sort of stuff.

We were both considerably healthier, too. Robbie had lost her weight and looked more like the pretty blond in my visions than the overweight roommate I’d had up until now. I’d put on the weight I lost and, despite the fact that I didn’t do much exercise other than dancing, it was coming on as muscle tone rather than fat. Even my bad teeth had somehow mended themselves. A scar I'd gotten falling off my bike as a little girl had been invisible since the second day. It was all very strange, but made me feel rather good about myself for a change. We both looked pretty damned hot and that was definitely reflected in our tips.

All in all, it really wasn’t a very bad existence, it was just strange. I’d even started to get pretty comfortable with it. I was even starting to think of Robbie as my spouse, though we hadn’t taken the time to even see if it was legal to do so, not to mention actually go through with a wedding. That’s not to say that either of us didn’t partake in the pleasures of Karen’s flesh, but our emotional bonds weren’t the same as our physical ones.

I’d even started to forget that this whole silly thing had once been referred to as a game. To me, it was just a nice existence filled with mostly pleasure and no pain, unless I stayed downstairs too long. I was even becoming a pretty good cook. Everything was perfect – a routine which we could neither break, nor did we desire to.

That is, until Ms. Hollywood came back to the club one night.