VRansomwear

by POW

CHAPTER 1

The little white pop-up with the blue text on Colin’s phone didn’t look particularly menacing at first. It looked like any other nag screen, wanting Colin to upgrade his OS because he was still running last week’s version and was therefore woefully in need of something better, or informing him that he might like to purchase this killer new game, or letting him know that 4G coverage was spotty here. Colin almost clicked OK from sheer habit.

Even reading the text wasn’t all that distressing . It read “Your phone has been locked” and there was only one button below that read “Instructions”. No cancel, no other explanation.

It was only when Colin tried to clear the message that he started to get a sense of how disturbing this really was. There was no way to clear the message except by following the link, which he had no intention of doing. But nothing got rid if it. The screen didn’t respond to his touches and pressing physical buttons had no effect. The only thing he was able to do was turn the phone off, but this didn’t help because when he brought it back up the message was still there.

If he had had more time, he might have poked at it a bit more, but the subway was nearing his stop and he’d need to walk the two blocks to Jimbo’s burger place. So he shoved the phone into his pocket and figured he’d deal with it later.

Later turned out to be a little after 10:00 PM when his shift ended and he started the trip home. Not having the phone all evening had been inconvenient. No music, no Facebook, no texts with his buddies. Maybe it had cleared itself up.

But no, the irritating message was still filling his phone screen when he next turned it on. Annoyed, he jammed his finger down on the “Instructions” button. A browser opened and text filled the screen.

“Your phone has been infected by VRansomwear. Your data is safe, but encrypted. To gain access to your data, use any of the links below to make a payment of US$150. You will receive further instructions upon receipt of payment.”

Colin was incensed. This sort of thing should not be possible!

He began furiously pressing controls. Nothing he tried had any effect. The phone was now capable of showing only three things. One was the instructions page in the browser; the second was the original message, only now there were two buttons under it: the one for “Instructions” and a new one for “Enter Unlock Key”. The third screen was reached by tapping the “Enter Unlock Key” control, which brought up a screen with a text entry field and a keyboard. Angry, he entered “FUCK THIS SHIT” and hit the “Go” button. The screen flashed red and said “INVALID UNLOCK ATTEMPT #1. After the fifth unsuccessful unlock attempt, your data will be permanently scrambled.”

“FAAAACK!” he swore. It was now 10:20 and he needed to get home to sleep. He had to be up early for his shift at the construction site tomorrow. He figured he would try again later when he had more time.

 

Three days later, Colin conceded defeat. In the course of trying, he used up two more of his unlock attempts. There just was no way to unlock the phone, nothing he or any of his buddies could do with it. One of them recommended he just replace it with a brand new one, which would be only a bit more expensive than $150.

To Colin’s chagrin, this didn’t help. First of all, it was considerably more expensive than $150. Because of his lousy credit rating, they wouldn’t let him put the phone on an installment plan unless he paid for at least half of it up front. So he dropped $375 for a brand-new phone (half of it borrowed from his girlfriend Eva, who was not pleased about being his ATM), but when he tried to get his music and contacts brought down to it, he learned that the damage done by the hijackers was even more insidious than he thought: the cloud-stored copies were encrypted too! He had a brand-new phone, but couldn’t use any of the purchases he had already made on it. And as soon as the first file copied over, the new phone locked itself up with that same bland “Your phone has been infected by VRansomwear” message displayed immovably on the screen.

Fuckers can’t even spell “ware” right, he fumed.

So here, on the third morning since he first saw the message, he was filling out the form that he reached by tapping on the PayPal button at the bottom of the hijacker’s instructions page, preparing to use the very last money he had available on his debit card to send a hundred and fifty bucks to some acne-faced geek in Romania or god knows where so he could have his stinkin’ phone again. He only hesitated a moment before committing the payment.

Gratifyingly, the response was immediate. The system spat out a string of letter-number gibberish. He copied it and pasted it onto the unlock form and – halleluia! – his phone was free again! He ran it through a few test paces, and it all looked good. Nothing was missing, nothing was out of place. Everything worked again.

“The end,” Colin thought.

Only it wasn’t.

 

Seven days after that, an e-mail message arrived. It was from a generic “no-reply” address and contained an embedded photo. There was no need to click anything – it just showed up on his screen. It was a picture of… him. Or at least, the face was his. The body under the face was not his, and it certainly wasn’t doing anything he had ever done. It was stark naked and it was crouched in a straddle position over another male body. The man on the bottom had his erect dick sticking upward into Colin’s – the fake Colin’s – ass. The expression on Colin’s face was one of puzzlement mixed with wonder.

Even though the photo had to be faked, whoever had made it had done a very convincing job. The skin tone was consistent with Colin’s own and there was no visible transition line at all between what was legitimately his and what belonged to the body double. The activity portrayed may have been equally simulated, but Colin suspected his head had been grafted onto an actual gay porn scene. He knew there was certainly no shortage of that available, even though it was not a corner of the internet he had any interest in visiting.

He stared at the image, lips working soundlessly, for a good long minute before it occurred to him to read the text of the message. What he read did not leave him any less thunderstruck. It said:

Colin read the note as his heart steadily sank. When he was finished, he re-read the whole thing from top to bottom. Then spot-re-read a few other paragraphs. By the time he looked up from the phone, he felt well and truly fucked.

These people had everything on him. His face, his voice, his contacts… and he had no doubt they would use them exactly as they threatened to. He sat stunned for a while, then went through the motions of verifying the contents of that bit.ly site. He paged through the material, horrified, for about a minute before snapping the phone off in disgust. A minute was more than enough time to see that they had ample material to cause him some serious embarrassment. Not that he had doubted.

 

He waited two days, just in case something happened to change his situation, some white-hatted hero riding in from the sunset to save his ass. No such salvation came. Tracking down the location specified by the GPS coordinates was not hard to do without going there: it was a few blocks from the Port Authority building.

On the morning of Friday the 21st, Colin caught a train to midtown and found his way to the locker. The combination worked on the first try. Inside the locker was a gym bag. Taped to the front was an envelope with a paper sticking prominently out of it. Ignoring the paper for the moment, Colin unzipped the bag and took a look inside, cautious to make sure none of the other dozen people in the room could see inside. He found a heap of black rubber, stiff and strong.

Down one side of the bag was an envelope. He pulled this out, zipped the bag shut again, and began to read.

So much for going home and deciding what to do from there…

Colin shoved the paper into his pocket, checked the time on his phone – 10:24 – grabbed the bag, and took the stairs to the second floor. The changing rooms were, thankfully, private, with doors that closed fully. Colin set the bag down and lifted the heap of black rubber out. There were two pieces – body and head. The bag also contained a pair of plain black boots. With still almost two hours to go before the deadline, there was plenty of time. He paused to inspect the pieces.

The rubber on the larger body piece was as thick as a pencil with very little give. The only opening was a zipper on the front of the body that ran partway down the chest. With the zipper open, he would be able to get his body into the suit, then zip it up. The legs were straightforward, just long rubber sleeves that ended in booties for his feet. The crotch area was smooth and featureless on the outside, but on inspecting the inside he found separate pouches for his balls and his cock. He could see that the cock tube had an opening that led down and back – that must be what the note meant about “waste elimination capability’. There was a larger hole on the back side. The arms, like the legs, ended in attached coverings for his hands, but unlike the booties that contained all his toes together, each finger got its own separate enclosure, so he would have use of his hands while wearing the suit.

The hood was scarier-looking. There were holes for the nose and mouth, but nothing where his eyes and ears would be. Instead, there were electronic-looking things both inside and out, bits of metal and plastic whose function he could not figure out. The idea of putting that… thing… over his head and being entombed away from light and sound… it completely creeped him out.

And yet… the alternative of NOT putting it on…

Best to get this over with as quickly as possible. He stripped, coated up the inside of the legs with the talc and began working one leg in. The fit was not too tight and before long he had both feet in place and the rest of the body suit bunched up around his waist. Fitting his crotch into the holes was awkward. His balls were drawn up tight against his belly and his cock was about as small as it ever got due to the utterly unarousing circumstances. He finally got his balls lower by wrapping his fingers around the base and pulling a few times. This allowed him to insert them into the enclosure designed for them. A loose elastic band held them in, but not so tightly that he couldn’t pull his nuts back through. With his balls tucked away, his cock could then slid into its tube above and he could pull the waistband up over his hips.

It felt strange, this layer of rubber over his skin. It just sat there, neither tight nor loose, neither warm nor cool against his skin. It was almost as if the rubber was an additional layer of skin itself. He flexed his knees a few times. There was resistance, but not uncomfortably much. He continued pulling the rest of it on.

More talc. It took some awkward stretching to get his arms into the sleeves while pulling the body of the suit up along his own body. His first two tries failed, in fact, leaving him with his arms stuck midway down the sleeves where his fingers were useless and the rest of the suit stuck unmoving in just the wrong place. Fuming, he decided to watch the how-to video. It was hard to find, and turned out to be buried among all the other videos on the site, so he had to wade through multiple copies of his face in various expressions of wondering bliss riding atop some stranger’s sexually adventurous body. The text tags were no help; there was nothing labeled “rubber suit tutorial” or “readme” or anything obvious like that, so the hunt took a while. He eventually found it, 2/3 of the way down the list and labeled “Colin’s Secondskin Gangbang”. The video was mostly about “Colin” having sex with at least four different men while dressed in a rubber suit (minus the hood), but the first 5 minutes did indeed show how “he” put the suit on.

The real Colin followed the imposter’s example, coating the inside of the suit liberally with more powder, then working one arm fully into its sleeve, requiring him to bend way to one side. A few squirms got his hand all the way to the glove, and then it was a matter of carefully aligning the fingers until everything was snugly in place. That arm could then help the other arm in, and with both in place the rest of the suit flipped nicely into place over his shoulders.

Like the legs, the top fit well, but not too tightly. He could move around, with slightly more difficulty than usual, but it was not uncomfortable. It wasn’t fun to be dancing to the tune of these remote pipers, but so far it wasn’t bad.

But there was still that horrifying hood left to put on…

Colin was absolutely repelled by the idea of fitting putting his head into that thing. Tight rubber against his ribs or thighs was one thing. Against his cheeks? His forehead? Covering his eyes and ears and leaving only tiny holes to breathe through? It just gave him the shakes.

And yet… the alternative…

He stalled a bit by adding the boots over his feet, then checked the time… only 22 minutes left, crap! He picked up the hood with all its cryptic sci-fi ornamentation. Carefully, he set it on top of his head and began to work it downward. The fit was tight so it took an effort to get the thing started. Once it was over his forehead, he was able to grit his teeth and inch it slowly down until it was more or less in place. He panicked briefly when he tried to breathe in through his nose and found it misaligned with the holes, but he could get air just fine through his mouth and a quick adjustment then fixed up the nose hole alignment.

But he could see nothing, and sounds were muffled. He wondered what he was supposed to do next. All that was left were the two zippers, the one up the front of his chest and the other around the neck to attach the hood to the body of the suit. But what would happen then? How could he get told what to do next if he was locked in a dark, silent prison?

Well, it was always undoable. He zipped up the front of the chest, then fumbled with trying to get the hood zipper started. It was a tough go without the use of his eyes and with his fingers working through a thick layer of rubber (not quite pencil-thick around the fingers, but still thick enough to make fine motor work a challenge).

At last the zipper was seated correctly and it only took a few tugs around his neck to get the zipper wrapped all the way around.

The room appeared.

Colin was thrown by this and nearly fell over from the surprise. One moment it was pitch black; the next, he could see as plainly as if he did not have a thick rubber mass covering his eyes. He reached up to see if the hood was, in fact, still in place or if it had somehow managed to vanish without him noticing. It was still there.

It all clicked right at that moment. Crap, he thought. It’s a VR headset. All the extra plastic and metal bits on the hood… they were virtual reality gear. He wasn’t seeing a room at all, he was “seeing” a virtual projection of one. One that just happened to match the room he happened to be standing in… oriented in exactly the direction he happened to be facing.

Experimentally, he turned to his left. Seamlessly, the projected view of the room turned along with him. He stretched out his arm and there, in his peripheral vision below where his eyes were pointed, he saw a black limb come into view. He looked down, and there was the arm, absolutely lifelike. He clapped his hands together; the sight of his rubber-clad palms coming together was simultaneous with the sensation that traveled up his nerves from his hands. And, come to think of it, with the sound of two slapping palms, twice muffled by the rubber over his ears and the rubber over the palms themselves, but still audible.

There was a shimmer off to his right and he spun to look at it. Slowly, in a twinkling of ethereal stars, a figure gradually materialized, like Captain Kirk beaming aboard the Starship Enterprise. As it slowly became visible through the sparkles, Colin could make out a tall figure, his skin tan and dusted with dark hair. The glitter faded away, leaving some kind of Greek god standing in the small room with him. He stood at least six and a half feet tall and was wearing only a pair of shorts, black leather that clung tightly to his waist and thighs, boots (also black), and wraparound mirrored sunglasses. Colin stared.

“Put the lock on, Colin,” the god said, staring back at him. Or at least facing him – the sunglasses completely hid his eyes from view. The voice was monstrously deep, seeming to reverberate off the walls of the tiny changing room. Colin realized, looking at him, that his skin glowed. Literally, there was light emanating from the bronze skin, forming a faint halo all around him, everywhere his skin showed. Which was most places. The effect very much reinforced the “god” idea, as if the bulging muscles weren’t doing that well enough on their own.

Colin had no idea what lock he was talking about. He reached out his hand, certain this apparition – glowing muscles and all – was nothing more than pixie dust generated by the visor over his eyes and ears, but before he could touch the interloper (or, more likely, sweep through the empty space where the mirage was projected), the god vanished.

“Put the lock on, Colin,” the voice boomed again, coming from everywhere and nowhere. This time Colin answered aloud. “What lock? I don’t see no lock.”

“In the bag.” Unspoken, but very much implied, were the words “you moron,” which did not sit well at all.

Colin looked in the bag and sure enough, tucked in a fold of fabric was a lock. It wasn’t quite as heavy-duty as a bike’s padlock might be, but it was still sturdy enough. Colin pulled it out slowly, weighing the implications. Presumably the lock was intended to keep him in the suit, which meant that if he clicked the lock in place, he was committing to whatever these nut jobs had in mind for him. Up until that point of no return, he was still free to tear the rubber off his body and get the hell out of here. Of course, that freedom would have its consequences.

There was something odd about the lock… he puzzled at it for a few seconds before realizing what was so odd: it had neither keyhole nor numbers for a combination.

“Hey, how does this lock open?”

“You don’t need to know that now. Right now, you just need to put it on.”

He stalled for time. “Where does it go?” he asked the empty room. The god reappeared on his left side. “Thread it through the two zippers of the hood and suit. Close it.” The voice was patient, almost annoyingly so, as if the god felt he was delivering a lesson to a particularly stupid child.

Slowly, carefully, Colin reached up under his neck with the lock. It was hard to feel the zippers through his rubbered fingers, but not that hard; some of his fumbling motions were definitely for show. Or for stalling, more accurately. He really, really did not want to click this lock into place.

As if reading his mind, the god spoke again. “Nine minutes. More or less. Then we click ‘send’.” The god stared at him, impassive and making the already-small room feel cramped with his presence.

“All right, goddammit,” Colin muttered. The shackle was already through the two zipper pulls. He lined up the hasp and pressed the two parts together. The click was tiny compared to the god’s booming voice, but it still reverberated in Colin’s ears with a horrible finality.

The moment the lock clicked, things began to happen all at once. The suit, which had been tight but not oppressively so, now began to contract around him. All over his body, the rubber began to change shape, expanding in a few places but contracting in many more. Within a few seconds, Colin could feel the rubber pressing him pretty much equally firmly on every square inch of his body. He gulped in a breath of air, afraid that the pressure on his ribs would prevent him from being able to.

While this was happening, two tendrils inserted themselves into his ear canals. They probed their way in, stopping short of the eardrum, then expanded until they filled the space. The ambient sounds of the room cut off.

Something else was happening at his crotch. The pouch that had been gently holding his balls grew tighter. The ring around the base of his scrotum shrank until there was no way he could possibly pull his balls out. And the pouch itself shrank just a bit so that rubber pressed firmly in on his balls from every direction. It didn’t exactly hurt, but it was certainly uncomfortable.

Colin’s arms flew around undecided, fluttering up to his ears to see if he could draw out the plugs, down to his groin to rescue his trapped testicles, up to his neck to undo the clicking of the lock… None of what he tried had any effect. The hood was molded seamlessly to his skull and resisted any movement. Likewise, his crotch was covered by a smooth, featureless expanse of rubber. He could press his fingers against it, but he couldn’t get a grip to adjust anything inside. And the lock wasn’t going to open just because he tugged on it.

The god strode forward and grabbed him by the arm. His hand was huge, large enough to wrap all the way around Colin’s upper arm. Colin could feel the fingers squeezing.

“You need to understand what the suit is capable of,” the god said. “It can generate the sensation of pressure; observe how you feel me holding your arm.” He lifted Colin’s hand and placed it against his own thickly-muscled chest. Colin’s fingers looked like a child’s up against the massive pecs.

“Push,” the god commanded. Colin pressed forward and met resistance. He tried to straighten his elbow to press the god away and found he could not. Instead, his own body shifted backward; the god’s remained rock steady.

Dammit, there was no way anyone else was really in this room!

“We control what you see,” the impossible god said. “We control what you hear. We control what you feel. Most of the time, the sensations we deliver to you will be accurate representations of what you think of as the real world. You will be able to walk around and not run into walls or people or step into the path of oncoming traffic. But our world is equally real, and you will also see, hear, feel, and be able to interact with the objects and people in it. It is in our would that you will find the object of your quest.”

“My… what quest?” Colin stammered.

“You are playing a game. Much like the way we locked up your phone, now we have locked up your body. You had to pay to get back your phone, but to get back your body you must play. When you reach 1,000 points, you can request that an unlock code be sent to the lock around your neck, and it will pop open, setting you free.”

The grip on his upper arm grew stronger. “We strongly recommend that you do not attempt to remove the suit by any other means.”

Colin’s voice was a mouse squeak compared to the god’s booming tones. “A thousand points? How do I get points?”

“The game has begun.” As he was speaking, the god began to disappear in the same sparkly way he had arrived. The voice faded away, echoing slightly, and the pressure around Colin’s biceps eased at the same rate the god’s grasping fingers vanished. In a few seconds, the last of the starry sparkles had evanesced, and Colin was alone in the room… just as he had been all along.

For the next part, click here

 

Metal would like to thank the author, POW, for sharing this story!

 

Disclaimer: This story is a purely fictional account. Any relationship to any real person living or dead is coincidental. The narrative contains non-consensual male-on-male sex and torture. It is intended for mature readers who wish to view such material, and for whom it is legal to do so. The author in no way condones or promotes such acts in real life.

Copyright © 2016 by POW. For spam prevention, an animal name has been added to the author’s e-mail address. Remove the animal name to get the actual address: POWauthor zebra at yahoo dot com. This story may be freely copied and distributed so long as it is copied in its entirety, unchanged, including the author credit information and disclaimer. Other POW stories are available at https://powauthor.wordpress.com. The author welcomes feedback.