Being offered the chance to work with Professor Trent in the university Cybernetics Department seemed an ideal opportunity for about-to-be-made-redundant lab technician, Mike. Little did he know that it was far more than a lab technician that Prof Trent wanted.

This is definitely not funny!
by Lin Dale

What has happened to me is unbelievable, and I’d better tell you in advance, it is definitely not funny! OK? If I talk about body snatchers, being transformed into a big breasted bimbo and forced to have sex, I know you’ll think it’s just one of those stories but I can tell you that it’s definitely not in that category and I’m definitely not joking. The real problem is that it’s true.

It started with a call from the University Bursar’s Office where I worked as a lab technician. As more and more courses have been going on-line, so the amount of work for people like me is reducing. In fact, for ages I’d been twiddling my thumbs, expecting a redundancy letter at any moment.

“Hi, Mike,” the Bursar’s Secretary said. “There’s a lab tech post become available with Professor Trent in the Cybernetics Department. You’ve probably heard that his wife has been seriously ill for some time so he only comes in for a few lectures a week, now. Mostly, he works in a lab he’s set up at his home. That’s where he’d want you to work from. Are you interested?”

I’d worked with Andrew Trent several years ago, before he became a professor, and had got on well with him. Some of the best UK factory adaptive robots are of a type designed by Andy and, incidentally, which I helped him build. I’d been to his house many times. It was miles away from the university, right out in the sticks and well over an hour’s drive, but I had a car and could get there. “That’s no problem for me,” I said. “I’ve always got on well with Andy. When could I start?”

“He’s suggesting the first Monday of next month, which is in just over two weeks’ time.”

***

Professor Andrew Trent had a Victorian house on the edge of a distant town. It was a large house but, by no means, a mansion. The original stable block had been converted into a garage with a flat above but it had been the adjacent large woodland park which had originally attracted Andy and his wife, Marianne, both keen joggers, to the house.

I arrived there on the agreed Monday morning. I’d had a chat with Andy over the phone and he’d suggested that I could stay in the flat over the garage and avoid the long journey every day, which suited me fine. Since my divorce, I lived on my own and had a pretty dull life. Maybe I’d have more fun living with Andy and Marianne.

“Mike, hi,” he greeted me after I’d knocked on the door. “I’ll show you around in a minute. First, come in and meet Marianne.”

“I’d like that,” I said, stepping inside the house. “How is she?”

“She’s been through a bad patch,” he said, “but I’m hoping she’ll be a lot better soon. She’s comatose now but at least you can see her.” He led the way to what had been a sitting-room when I’d last been there, but which had now been converted to a bedroom with a hospital-like bed.

I knew that Marianne had been diagnosed with a wasting muscular disease but when I saw her, I would never have known. She appeared to be asleep, lying flat on her back with just her head visible above the sheets. She was probably ten years younger than Andy and had always been a very attractive woman. She still was, her medium length dark brown hair cut in its memorable fringe and recently brushed. Her curvaceous figure was still obvious beneath the sheets, rising rhythmically with her breathing. As I stood watching her in that bright sunny room, it was as though at any moment she would open her eyes and smile. After a short time, Andy indicated we should leave.

“Does she sleep much?” I asked after we’d left the room.

“All the time,” he said with a kind of hopeless shrug, “but as I said, I’m hoping to improve on that shortly.

“It was actually her illness which got me onto my present project,” he continued. “I’ll take you into the lab now and show you around.” He led the way out of the kitchen door into the yard, saying, “I’ve converted what used to be the coach-house into a working laboratory. I think you’ll be impressed with the way I’ve converted it.

“When Marianne was first diagnosed with her illness,” he said, as he led the way inside the coach-house, “I knew nothing about human muscles, but I sat down and started to find out. Then, I thought that there must be a way of designing an artificial muscle that the doctors could use to simply replace the existing ones as they wasted away.”

He gave another shrug, in one of those hopeless gestures. “I should have known better. They insisted they would have to do years of research costing millions of pounds before approving such items for use on the human body, by which time, of course, Marianne would be dead.”

“So what did you do?” I asked, starting to look around the lab, where a number of plastic versions of human skeletons were in various degrees of dismemberment, with several of them dumped in a heap in the corner. Although innovatively brilliant, and in spite of Andy thinking I’d be impressed, I knew he was actually quite a sloppy and untidy worker. He needed people like me.

“Argued and argued, whilst continuing to research muscle replacement. In the end, I realised I was never going to win that argument, and that I should be thinking of devices external to the human body, which would do the same thing – exoskeletons. It was about then that I discovered this muscle replacement.”

He led me over to a device fixed to a lab bench. It was a cantilever arm with a 50 kg weight attached at the one end (that’s about 1cwt if you’re non-metric). But connecting the lever with the bench was something that looked like a chipolata sausage with plastic pipes feeding into it.

“I feed my chemical equivalent of blood into my muscle,” he said, switching on a small pump so a green fluid flowed through the pipes into the sausage, “and the muscle reacts like this.” The sausage contracted causing the arm to lift the 50 kg weight off the bench.

“Wow!” I said, impressed. “That’s pretty powerful.”

He gave a satisfied nod. “It certainly is. I’ve refined it since, and I reckon it’s about ten times more powerful than human muscle, weight for weight.”

“So this will power your exoskeleton?”

He shook his head. “Unfortunately, Marianne’s condition was deteriorating rapidly. I realised she’d be far too frail to be put into an exoskeleton. It simply wasn’t going to work. Instead, I started planning her virtual presence in a robot.”

“How do you mean, virtual?” I asked, slightly puzzled.

“I abandoned the exoskeleton and instead designed a robot,” he said. “I designed a rig that Marianne could be firmly strapped into. She could wear a headset so she could see and hear through the robot’s eyes and ears, and small movements of her muscles could control the robot. It meant that she’d be able to virtually roam the grounds of this house from her bed.”

“Sounds great,” I said, “but fairly complex to build. Have you got it working? Is that what you want me to help you with?”

“I contracted the whole design and build job for the rig to a company in Germany,” he said. “It was clearly going to be far too large an item for me to easily manage on my own, so I had it built into a container. It’s sitting on a lorry trailer right next to this building and we can access it through that door.” He pointed to a door in the far wall located a few feet off the floor. From the bare plaster around it, it had obviously been recently built into the wall, with unpainted wooden steps leading up to it. “Come and have a look. I think you’ll be impressed.”

He led the way up the steps and through the door. The trailer was parked immediately next to the building with a gap of just a few inches between, which we stepped over into the container. Suddenly, we had crossed from Andy’s Heath-Robinson laboratory into something resembling a build by the space industry. Occupying all of the space to our left, and looking just like some kind of space pod, we could see one half of a large white sphere, just under seven feet diameter.

“That’s the pod for Marianne,” Andy said. “Inside, she’d be securely strapped into the rig supported on gimbals so she could be moved in any orientation – standing up or sitting down, lying down or even hanging upside down, if she wanted. All the sound and vision would be coming from the robot, so she would be virtually inside the robot. Impressed?”

“Incredibly,” I replied. “How do you get her inside it?”

“There’s a tailgate lift at the rear which will take a wheelchair or even a stretcher. Let me open the pod and you can see how she’d be transferred inside.

He pressed a green button on the side of the pod and with a gentle humming, a section of the circular wall slid aside and a complex telescopic arrangement slid out in the same way that a drawer might emerge. There were black-painted steel rods and brackets, together with black upholstery currently formed into the shape of a bed but which, I guessed, could be reconfigured to be a chair, or any other shape the human body could contort to. Everything being black meant that there’d be no reflected light inside the pod so the helmet display would be the only source of light.

“We’d transfer Marianne onto the bed,” Andy said, “press the red button and she’d be taken inside the pod and the experience would begin.”

“Fantastic,” I said, “but...” I hesitated. “Isn’t Marianne a bit claustrophobic? How does she feel about being put inside this machine?”

“You’re right,” he said. “That is a major problem which I didn’t factor in. Which is where you come in.”

“You want me to be the guinea pig?”

Andy nodded. “How do you feel about that?”

“I’d love to,” I said. “Try and stop me.”

“Brilliant!” he said.

***

Half an hour later, I was lying naked on the bed-like contraption, my arms, legs, head and torso were all safely strapped to the corresponding metal rods; even my fingers and thumbs were strapped to hand-like metal structures. Andy had helped to strap me in and he had generally averted his eyes from my more sensitive naked bits. Nonetheless, I couldn’t help thinking that he had mentally scoffed at the size of my genitals. One or two girlfriends in my pre-marriage days had indicated my equipment was on the small side of normal; which I thought probably meant I had a tiny cock. I certainly had no desire to get into a cock comparison exercise with Andy.

I’d wanted to see the robot that I was going to be driving but Andy had vetoed that, saying he wanted it to be a surprise. Obviously, you, dear reader, will see what an absolute fool I was. I can only say I’d worked with Andy for many years, admittedly several years previously, and I trusted him absolutely. He’d shown me where the emergency release button was, which would release all the clamps and allow me to clamber out of the machine in the event that, say, Andy was suddenly taken ill. (That’s what he said, anyway. Later I found it didn’t work!) So, I was not only completely comfortable with the situation, but I was incredibly excited, raring to go.

Andy pushed the button and the mechanism slid me inside the pod, the door closed and I was in total darkness. Andy’s voice came through the earphones. “OK, Mike. I’m switching you through to the robot. It’ll take me a minute or two to get it going but then I think you’ll find it quite an experience.”

Silence and darkness followed, and then more of the same, and… more of the same. I relaxed in my cocoon, deep inside the machine.

***

Suddenly, everything was too bright and I screwed my eyes shut. Surprise – my robot eyes also closed. Wow! My robot had eyelids – now that was sophisticated.

I gradually opened them again and could see sunlight playing on a ceiling. I tried turning my head to one side. I could see I was in a hospital bed. In fact, it looked exactly like the hospital bed that Marianne had been lying in.

I lifted my arm which was trapped beneath sheets and I could see the sheets looked just the same as Marianne's. Suddenly, I had an awful feeling. I wriggled my arm from beneath the sheets and stared – not at a metal robot’s arm, but at a female arm, with long red nails at the fingertips.

“What the…” I stopped. The voice I had spoken in was not robot-like or even similar to Alexa or the Google Assistant. This was Marianne’s voice. I moved the sheets to one side and swiveled sideways so I could put my feet on the floor and sit up. I glanced down, wondering if my toe nails were painted the same shade of red as my finger nails, but my view was obstructed by two flesh-coloured globes suspended from my chest. Yes, I had boobs far larger than Marianne ever had.

I grasped hold of the bed frame to keep me steady as I stood up. Once I’d done so, I found I was reasonably well balanced on my feet.

“Good morning, Marianne. How are you this morning?” Andy’s voice came from behind me and I turned to see him standing there, smirking.

“Andy! You should have warned me this was going to happen.”

He smirked some more. “I thought you might not agree if I told you. You may have found it kinky.”

“Well it is bloody kinky, isn’t it? What does Marianne say about this? Where is she, anyway, if she’s not in this bed?”

“I’ll take you to her,” he said. “This way.” He turned and walked a couple of paces towards the door. Slowly at first, I took a few tentative paces towards him, then espying a dressing gown hanging from a hook on the back of the door, I reached forward to try to put it on. That’s when I first realized the mobility problems that a robot has. We simply don’t realise how incredibly versatile our own bodies are until we are suddenly restricted in their use.

I was desperately trying to get my arm into a sleeve when Andy said, “I’m sure you’ll get used to your restricted mobility with time and become quite nimble. In the meantime, let me help you put that on.”

It was actually quite nice, him treating me like a gentleman should treat a lady, although as I caught sight of myself in a mirror, I realized that lady might not be quite an accurate description. Huge knockers, a tiny waist and bulging buttocks and thighs gave me the appearance of a porn star.

“What does Marianne think of this particular design of body?” I asked.

Andy waved his hand in a kind of iffy way. “I bought a body mould from a manufacturer of sex dolls and this was the closest I could get to Marianne’s height and overall size. I gave them a plaster cast of Marianne’s face and they substituted that for their original face. Her breast and thighs had certainly got a lot larger in recent years, not too different from your current measurements so it’s the tiny waist which makes it look as extreme as it does. Incidentally, those skeletons you saw in the lab are made of carbon fibre and very tough. With my muscles, the combination is incredible. You may be interested to know that in the lab, this robot lifted 500 kg, which breaks the world record – for humans, of course. I have scaled your strength back, for now. I wouldn’t want you to go walking through walls. Anyway, you wanted to see Marianne. Come through and see her.”

He led the way into his study, and step by laborious step, I followed. “There she is,” he said, pointing over towards a shelf. On the shelf was an urn.

The dreadful shock swept through me. “Marianne’s dead!” I gasped. “But I didn’t know. I’m sorry but…”

“Nobody knew,” Andy said. “I kept it quiet. No funeral. Nowadays, you can order a cremation on the internet as easily as buying a box of pencils online. So her body was taken away and the urn delivered back last week. You see, my plan is that we will start presenting the new you as Marianne.”

“Hold it right there,” I said. “You want me to pretend to be Marianne.”

“I think, Mike, that it would be the ultimate test. Could you, controlling the robot, pass off as a real person. Obviously, all her clothes are still here. I believe that if we dress you up as her, few people, if any, will tell the difference.”

“Phew.” I shook my head in doubt, although with an excitement sweeping through me. “I’m not certain, but I guess it’s worth giving it a try. The problem is that I’m having so much difficulty in controlling my actions, it’s difficult to mimic a human being.”

“I think that will come with time. I am keen to put you through your paces with the simple stuff to start with – walking and then onto running.”

“Running! No way,” I said.

“You should be able to,” he said. “It would be great to get you running, again. Let’s get you dressed in some suitable gear and we can go out into the park and give it a go.”

I shrugged. “OK,” I said.

***

Thirty minutes later, I was wearing one of Marianne’s track suits, over a bra. No other underwear was necessary, Andy had pointed out. In fact, the bra was unnecessary for comfort’s sake, but was obviously essential to keep my breasts under control and prevent me looking like a hooker. The track suit bottoms had fitted my waist like a sack around a broomstick, but the large tracksuit top fitted down over my hips, and totally hid my tiny waist. On my feet, I wore white socks and track shoes. Andy had done most of the dressing for me, but had said that, in time, I’d be expected to fend for myself.

When we went outside, he suggested I took a walking stick with me, not so much as an essential need to assist my balance, which was all right, but as a prop in case we met anyone who knew Marianne and would be astonished that she was out and about, and looking so well.

“It’s going to be really difficult,” I said. “They’re bound to stop to speak and ask me how I am. I won’t even know their name.”

“Wait and see,” Andy said, a twinkle in his eye. “I’m not going to give the game away, but Javid has designed the software.”

I’d first known Javid when he was an undergraduate doing his project in the Cybernetics Department, and he proved to be a brilliant software designer and programmer. He’d stayed on in the department to do his doctorate and the rumour was that he would be the next head of department when Andy eventually retired. His hand in the design certainly showed through in the way that my voice speaking into the microphone in the pod was converted into Marianne’s voice speaking from the robot. It certainly meant I was no longer fearful about meeting someone Marianne knew, but rather looking forward to it.

We left the house by the rear door and walked towards the gate set in the boundary wall that gave access to the park. Although the first few steps were as tortuous as my previous ones, I picked up speed as I got into the swing.

The park itself was heavily wooded, with plenty of paths providing pleasant woodland walks, and it was beloved by joggers. Fortunately, on that Monday morning, it was almost deserted and we walked for a good ten minutes without meeting a single person, by which time my steps were almost normal. Then, behind me I heard a voice.

“Marianne! Is that you?”

I turned to see a woman jogging towards us and – thanks to Javid – in my vision a square appeared around her face and text said: Sue Larkham, neighbour and close friend. Husband’s name is Gerry, who has been suffering from heart problems.

“Hello, Sue,” I said.

She jogged right up to me and then threw her arms around me. “Oh Marianne. It’s brilliant to see you up again. Goodness though, you feel thin. You’ve lost a lot of weight. These look good though.” She poked my breasts. “Did they give you a boob job while you were in hospital?”

“If only,” I said. “But I do feel a lot better than I was. How’s Gerry?”

“Oh, he’s OK,” Sue said. “Are you well enough to meet up again.”

“I don’t want to tax Marianne too much at the moment,” Andy interrupted. “Perhaps we’d better be getting back towards the house.”

“OK, lovely to see you looking so good, Marianne.”

“Bye,” I said.

“See,” Andy said. “I told you it would be all right. Now why don’t we try a little jog?”

I was on a slight high after my successful conversation with Sue, so I said, “OK. Why not?” I passed my stick to Andy and turned back in the opposite direction to the one Sue had taken.

Learning to run was a whole new experience, and several times I fell to the ground. But robots don’t feel pain, and as I began to realise this, so my confidence grew. It didn’t matter if I fell over because it didn’t hurt and I wasn’t going to damage myself. Within a few minutes, I was running with confidence, then as Andy increased his pace, so I increased mine. Faster and faster we went, until I was outpacing Andy and I could hear his breathing start to labour.

After a minute, I pulled to a stop and waited for him to catch up. “Slow coach,” I teased him.

“I can’t say the same about you,” he replied. “The muscles are working brilliantly.”

“Yes,” I said. “They are.”

I was feeling pretty pleased with myself until we got back to Andy’s house. We came through the gate from the park and walked towards the house. That’s when I noticed it – or rather, noticed that it wasn’t there.

“The trailer,” I said, pointing towards the spot where the trailer containing the pod had been parked next to the coach-house. “It’s gone.”

“Yes,” Andy said.

“But…”

I thought through what I wanted to say. “My body is inside the pod in that trailer, yet I’m still virtually here, inside Marianne.”

“The trailer has a mobile data link on it,” he said. “There’s no problem.”

“But where has it gone?” I asked. “I’ll need it back here for when I revert from being virtually inside Marianne to being really inside me.”

“I’m afraid that’s not going to happen,” he said.

“Whoa. What are you talking about? Of course I’m going to revert to being me in my real body. For one thing, it’s almost lunchtime. I’m beginning to feel hungry. That’s not the robot felling hungry, it’s my real body feeling hungry.”

“You’re absolutely right. Your body will need feeding, and it would starve if that didn’t happen. Fortunately, the pod is able to provide you with sustenance without you taking back control of it.”

“But Andy, you never told me you wanted me to permanently occupy Marianne. You’re cheating me.”

“Ah,” he said. “I wondered whether you might want to talk about cheating.”

“Well, you are cheating!” I was getting angry, now.

“Yes. But whilst we’re talking about cheating, I should tell you that, before she died, Marianne made a deathbed confession.”

“What?” My heart suddenly fell into my shoes. “What are you talking about?” But I knew exactly what he was talking about.

“Marianne told me on her deathbed that she’d been having sex with you for most of the ten years whilst you were working for me. Now that’s what I call cheating.”

“Andy… It was… She always loved you. There was never any question she would leave you.”

“Because you were married at the time. Presumably, that was why your wife divorced you. Because of your affair with Marianne.”

I inclined my head in acceptance. “But Marianne loved you. It was just sex between the two of us.”

“Whereas with me, she was always too tired, or had a headache, or it was that time in the month. You stole my wife from me for all those years. And now I think it’s payback time.”

“Payback time?” I echoed.

He smiled. “Yes.”

***

When Andy moved from one of the London universities to take over as Head of Cybernetics, he and Marianne had been married for a few years. I’d recently joined the department as a technician and was keen to impress the new boss. So when he rang me one morning in my basement workshop and asked if I could pop up to his office, I said I’d be up straightaway. Andy introduced me to his wife, who was very sexy, but one learns at an early age not to show that, especially when you’re married and even more especially if you’re looking at the boss’s wife. It appeared that she needed help setting up her new laptop and I immediately asked about her problems.

“Sorry,” Andy interrupted, “I’ve got a meeting starting in a few minutes. Could you take Marianne down to the workshop and sort her out there.”

If only, I thought.

Apparently, that’s exactly what Marianne thought, because as soon as we entered the workshop and she saw we were alone, she said, “So, Mike. Are you going to sort me out?”

Ten minutes later, she was saying, “Thanks. Now, could you sort out my laptop?”

In that time, there’d been a few minutes of frantic coupling, ten seconds of ecstasy for me, and ninety seconds of earth-shattering orgasm for Marianne. And as I sorted out her laptop, the event might never have happened. The only reference to it came at the end when she asked if she could visit me again if she had more problems that needed sorting out.

So I was perfectly truthful in what I had told Andy just now. It had only ever been sex, rather than afternoons of loving lust – just quickies on a regular basis. There was never any pillow talk – indeed, there were never any pillows – merely a brief sentence to talk about the logistics of what we did.

I’d never discovered why Marianne so desperately needed me for her sexual satisfaction when she had a perfectly good husband. She was obviously using me as a sex object but still, if someone has to do the job, better it be me. Why she chose me, I don’t know. I’ve never regarded myself as a super stud and as I intimated earlier, I’ve always been aware that if size matters, then I didn’t cut any ice.

It came to an end ten years later, when I was in my forties and, let’s say, my physical stamina was not up to what it had been when our relationship started. My wife suspected an affair and hired a private detective to dig the dirt. When she found out, she was all for telling Andy but I told her that, since shagging on the premises was a sackable offence, then she’d better keep quiet if she wanted to collect reasonable alimony from me. But she did make me transfer to another post, where I would not have the personal freedom and quiet workshop that I’d had until then.

***

So there it was. Guilty as charged. Except that it takes two to tango and I would never have dreamed of instigating it, or have taken the lead as Marianne did. Why she found her husband inadequate, I still don’t know. Clearly, from what Andy had just said, he’d been incredibly frustrated for many years.

“When you say payback time...” I said, as we continued walking towards the house.

“I want you to be my wife, in all senses of the word.”

“You mean iron your shirts and cook your meals?”

“Of course. And I also want you to make up for my ten years of sexual abstinence.”

“Right,” I said. Keep calm, I thought. “And if I don’t?”

“Firstly, look on the positive side. You are occupying the superb body of a person who is physically much younger than you. You’ll be so much fitter than you ever were in real-life . You will live in comfort with me, able to experience all kinds of luxuries that you currently cannot afford. I will lavish you with clothes and jewelry, and, yes, I will have sex with you and I believe we will both enjoy it.”

“But Andy, I can’t feel anything. How can I enjoy sex if I have no feeling?”

“It’s not true that you can’t feel anything. There are certain parts of your body that you will feel. Indeed, as they are the only parts you can feel, this will be so pleasant for you that you’ll will crave to have those parts touched.”

I eyed him. “You mean my erogenous zones?”

He smiled and nodded. “Yes.”

“But where has my real body gone? What have you done with it?”

“A haulage company came to collect the trailer soon after we left the house. They are now taking it to a secure place which will remain unknown to you. Your body will be kept perfectly safe, it will be fed and your body waste disposed of.”

“Right,” I said, trying to get my head around what I had just been told. It looked as though Andy had thought things through fairly thoroughly. Since I was in no position to reject his offer, it made sense to go along with it until I could see a way out.

“So can we eat,” I said, “before we have sex?”

Andy smiled. “We certainly can,” he said.

***

Over lunch, Andy told me that the process of me, as a robot, ingesting food resulted in the pod pumping a nutritious gunge into my real-life mouth. Similarly, when my own body told me that I needed to use the toilet, I would have to direct my robot body to the toilet and when I was sitting comfortably, then my own real-life body could excrete its dirty stuff.

But it was when I was clearing away and loading the dishwasher that I discovered the most important aspect of my robot body. Andy came up behind me, placed his arm behind my neck and pushed it down. He had clearly turned down my earlier strength and I was powerless to resist as I was forced to bend even further downwards. With his other hand, he pulled down my track-suit bottoms and released his own fly.

It’s worth saying that although my head was literally between my knees, being bent over double like that wasn’t at all painful, such is the advantage of being in a robot’s body. I could see between my legs, and suddenly I understood very clearly why Marianne had not wanted him to put his cock inside her. In fact, I could understand why no woman – or perhaps not even a regular-sized donkey –would want to have that thrust inside.

But I wasn’t being given any choice at all, and Andy had been right about a few parts of my body being able to feel what the robot was feeling. I was trying to work out how the technology worked to achieve this, but suddenly, it became irrelevant. I had one of those exquisite moments which I hoped would go on and on forever. All I could say was, “Fuck me!”

“I certainly will,” Andy said.

And he did.