Living Outside

Episode 07: Omni 4

MeganOh, weird! I'm not used to having a penis. ChesterIt's awkward at first, until your brain adapts, but you should definitely get yourself a cock. Penises and their variants are damn useful sex tools. They're fun, easier for masturbating, and how else can you suck your own cock? PawnTact, Chess! ChesterEveryone does it. Where is this shame coming from? Who has time for politeness with so much to experience and explore? There's all manner of fantastic proxies, mods, sensation enhancements... like, there's the sensation of endless urination and defecation, although you have to be careful with your physical there, because those are mixed states and you can make a mess. PawnBefore you speak, you should taste your words to make sure they're palatable. ChesterI'm peeing right now in the physical. What you gonna do about it?

MeganHow would this penis thing work for me exactly? ThomasThe same way you can experience any proxy senses not matched directly to your physical body.

ThomasYou can see the analogous anatomy. You just remap your proxy form to redistribute your senses, and then it's a matter of your brain adapting to a different mapping of your genital sensations. Luckily, brains are really good at that sort of thing after a bit of practice. Not that terribly long ago you'd have to get expensive and painful surgery to switch sexes. Now, once you have one virtual body, it's easy to adapt to all sorts of forms. SaitouGoing the other way, getting used to a vagina wasn't too hard. It just takes practice. Personally, I think vaginas are more fun. MeganIt's great how relaxed this place is about everything. Sex is treated like internet porn used to be. You don't even hear much about protests anymore. SamPeople got over it. There was a good deal of moralizing in the beginning, and attempts at passing restrictive laws. But who the hell can beat boatloads of free, safe, virtual sex? Chester, do you remember how they closed down that one place when full-immersion tech was just taking off? ChesterOh yeah. And then like ten clones with extra kink popped up the next hour hosted all around the world. The only thing it did was give advertising to the free sex movement. Anarchy Outside! Free love rules, baby! SamSo much of the world used to be so damned sex starved. Outside uncoupled sex completely from biology, leading to the ultimate sexual revolution. Who would want to go back to a world where sex's relative scarcity practically made it a form of currency? Or a time when people chose life partners based so strongly on whether they could solely fulfill you sexually for the rest of your life? Way too much pressure. MeganI'm glad it's there and everything, but I don't know if I'll ever get into the orgy scene. Anonymous sex just seems so impersonal. SamI feel the same way. I did have a slutty period, but I need to feel an emotional connection for it to really work for me. I'm glad that polyamory has become fairly common, but I'm more of a serial monogamist. ChesterI'll take whatever, it's all good to me. The whole "sex as currency" thing shows up in old movies and shows, but I wonder how true it really was. The "war of the sexes" and that Madonna/whore thing and all that nonsense. I mean, sex was definitely treated way too seriously. Sexuality gets distorted by antiquated social mores, sometimes in violent directions. There was so much repression and fear about it, even about nudity. It wasn't good for anyone, but it particularly oppressed women. There were people trying to stop women from nursing their babies in public, for Goddess' sake.

SamIt used to be rare to treat sex as a form of art. And gender was so tightly defined. It was partly a result of everyone being stuck in a single physical body, but still. Sexual experimentation carried the risk of significant social stigmas. Now, you can switch genders or have any sort of crazy sex you want anonymously. Hell, do it publicly on the floor in front of everyone and who's going to judge you? ChesterThere was quite a fight in certain parts of the world over transhuman principles regarding control over your own body and nervous system, and being able to adopt new bodies and sensory schemes at will. Simulspace features a liberation that scared a lot of people. SamBasically everyone's a transhumanist now, to one extent or another. Augmented reality at a minimum, and with the plant you can have as many different types of bodies as you want. You can look however you want, try out being male or female or androgynous, or appear as different ethnicities. You can have every type of human or nonhuman body and develop a truly flexible identity that encompasses all different types of people. It gives empathy for so many different perspectives, and increases acceptance of all types of people and ways of being. ChesterOutside really is the great equalizer, as they say. Everything is plentiful in digital environments, so there's much less judgment in terms of wealth, since everyone can have any sort of proxy or virtual living space they want. Instead, people judge you for your presence, your character, what you bring to a place, how you interact. Flaunting money Outside is just a joke. At the least, it shows a sad lack of understanding for how Outside works. How well you interact with the virtual is what's important here. Having a Plant gives an advantage for that, but it's cheap enough now that most people can afford one. And Mike has a successful Outside presence without implants. MeganHow well does Omni work for you, Mike? MikeIt's lacking certain elements, for sure. But my gear makes sight, sound, and most tactile elements pretty convincing, so I feel like I'm really here. I also have special equipment for more intimate sensations, but it doesn't work for some of the weirder sex stuff. SamYeah, I've wondered about that. How is teledildonics for males, Mike? MikeI have no complaints. The sensations that precision virtual actuators can simulate are amazing. It's a bit messier of course, since men need a Plant to have an orgasm without ejaculation. ChesterOn another topic- hey Meg, you have any favorite sexbots yet? MeganI've tried a few. They work pretty well, but they lack something. ChesterReal humans brains are better, definitely. But bots are good for practice. And with sexbots, you can keep the basic patterns of old lovers and bring them back whenever you want. MeganThat sounds kind of creepy. ChesterBah! You should have sex with everyone you get the urge to. Celebrities, friends, random people you see in public, whoever. Just use their proxies however you want. It's limited without an actual copy of a person's sex ghost, of course, but you can always just throw in your favorite sexbot. If you've had sex at all with someone, you can get at least a partial sexbot from them, though it might be limited. You know, like creating a virtual copy of a house by walking through it. MeganWhat else do you guys do?

ChesterThis is a pretty typical example of virtual sex. If you check their sensory mapping, you'll see that they're sharing the sensations of the sensitized vagina of whoever happens to be female at the moment. Other erogenous zones and physical sensations are mapped dynamically to their bodies to keep things flowing. The relative size of the penis to the vagina is determined automatically by both of their responses, and the clitoris for the biological woman is being mapped over a larger area of the vagina so that it's more directly stimulated. MeganInteresting. So how do people usually set things to taste? Do people usually have natural smells and such? ChesterA lot of people make their body odor and taste available if you want it, including saliva, sweat, vaginal fluids, semen, and such. You can smell them to see if you'd like their smell in the physical, or make them smell however you like. It's completely up to you how you experience that. Or anything in virtual spaces really. Self determination of your sensory input is a fundamental principle of Outside and transhumanism in general. MeganWhat about games that make you experience unpleasant things? Like how Golden Martyr has that psychic guidance system that supposedly only works if you really smell foul odors or feel pains which can direct you through mazes and such. ChesterGames will try to make you experience unpleasant things, but you can turn those things into analogous sensations. Pressure or tingling can often effectively take the place of pain, for instance. Some games will even try to determine if you're experiencing pain or such by your brain's automatic reflexes. But obviously, you don't have to play those games. And fuck Golden Martyr and "the one who doesn't deserve a name."

SamIt's also common to reassign the sensations from your sexual organs to other parts of your body. It's convenient, less awkward than the thrusting hips of biological intercourse, and it can be quite subtle. Check out how their senses are mapped to their hands. Just by rubbing their hands together, they're stimulating each other's genitals, the guy's prostate, and various erogenous zones. MeganSounds pretty intense. SamIt depends on how they've got it set up. It can seem more intimate than traditional sex. Check out the french kissing couple next to them. Kissing via proxy is awesome. You can adjust taste, friction, saliva, the presence of teeth, the shape and length of tongues and mouths, and lots of other stuff. It's great to play around with. That couple's mouths are stimulating the neural pathways for their genitals and anuses, giving "oral sex" a whole new meaning. As you can imagine, anal stimulation is a lot more popular Outside than in the physical. Everyone can tailor their own experiences however they want, and no one has to know about how you experience any given proxy or space. ChesterHand jobs by proxy are also awesome, since you can adjust lubrication and texture at will, and can put the entrance to your vagina or your anus on your hand, which allows much better control over the angle and depth of penetration. Or you can replace your mouth with your vagina. That works well with blow jobs, which are easier to perform Outside. At the least, you don't have to worry about neck cricks. It's cool, because you can have as much sex as you want and you'll never get sore. Speaking of stuff that would make you sore...

ChesterIf people had sex like that in real life they would have bruises and marks all over their bodies. You can set up sex by proxy so that you don't have to worry about hurting your partner or yourself and really go to town. Biological genitalia are so cramped and unwieldy. By mapping your genitalia dynamically over your body, sex can be so much more... robust. But why stop with just human proxies?

ChesterNow, tentacles are wicked fun. MeganThey have such a naughty reputation. ChesterYou know how all that started? The earliest porn with tentacles, from Japan of course, depicted a woman having consensual sex with some octopi. Hentai artists later used penis-like tentacles to get around Japanese laws that censored penises. It was as much for satire as anything, as it showed how ridiculous the law was. I mean, they couldn't show a penis involved in consensual sex, but they could have a dozen tentacles, that were clearly penises, raping and dismembering a woman with no problem. Japan's sexually repressed culture warped their sexuality, as repression tends to do, and people developed a taste for sextacles. MeganOK, but how do they work as proxy appendages? They seem a bit unwieldy. ChesterIt's actually not that complicated. First, you'll need a penis. Developing one of those will be the hard part for you. Once you get one, you make it prehensile, so you can move it around freely. "Love muscles," and conversely, intricately controllable vaginas, are great just for sex in general. Then, you just need to get the controls down. Most people start by mapping a tentacle to arm or finger movements. Try it for a moment, it's easy.

MeganNeat! ChesterYep. And once you master the use of one tentacle, it's easy to work up to managing multiple tentacles. I find using about 6 at a time to be optimal. The next step is to create duplicates of your penis, so you're getting stimulation from multiple cocks. That's fun in itself, since you can get multiple blowjobs at the same time. You have to learn to adjust the sensitivity and such, or it'll be too much. I recommend you get comfortable with new things by trying them out with sexbots first. There are lots of great sexbots designed as sex trainers for everything you can imagine.