1.

When Horace gets home and finds his wife waiting for him by the door, on her knees and stark naked, he thinks that maybe she is having a heart attack or perhaps, hopefully, just a hot flush. He really, really hopes it’s the hot flush, not just because he loves her, but because there’s lots to do tonight, like the ironing of the colours and getting the sausage rolls for the cards with Brian and Janice on Saturday. He simply doesn’t have time for the hospital.

He’s just about to ask her to clarify the status of her health when she beckons him forward, tips the lunch box from his limp hands, and fumbles at the zip on his trousers. This is not usual behaviour. Usually, when he asks if she wants to have sex, he gets a look like he’s just announced that he wants to unicycle across the Great Wall of China. There’s no boredom or scorn or rejection; that’s the worst bit. It’s utter bewilderment as to why anyone could possibly want to do such a bizarre thing as let their hair down and have some fun. It’s not how adult lives work.

Now, as she strokes his shaft through his vaguely uncomfortable boxers, some dark thoughts threaten to restore the status quo. She could be having an affair, and foolishly thinks this carnal act is averting suspicion. Worse, she could be lusting after an inanimate something that costs a lot of money. Such thoughts are granting his penis a stoic softness despite the rhythmic squeezing. Everything could, and maybe should, grind to a halt right now until he teases out the reasons behind such suspicious sexiness through a carefully devised series of questions which would ensure he never has sex again. But then, there’s a cool airiness from below followed by a glowing, moist warmth as she removes the penis from its safe retreat and closes her lips around it. And if Denise is willing to face the shrivelled worm in all its patheticness and still wants to remain within ten miles of it, then she must really be turned on.

Her enthusiasm transforms the penis into a Cock. Or maybe it’s just the tongue.

Whatever it is, Horace no longer cares about motivations or manipulations. He gives in to the warm wetness of his wife’s mouth. He wriggles out of his trousers, clutches at her long hair, desperate to grab the back of her head and thrust deep but not quite lost enough to forget the ten months of fancy meals and grovelling that would surely come of that. At least, that’s what came of it last time.

It was the only thing that came last time.

Of course, now that he only cares about the beautiful woman below him with his cock in her mouth, the explanations begin.

She’s just downloaded that new app that all her friends are talking about. SexTime. The social media platform to catalogue all those erstwhile treasured private moments and broadcast them to the world for points in the form of little pink hearts. The one that Susan had got confused with Facebook, resulting in a sombre sit down with her grandkids to explain that what she meant was that she was seriously looking into buying a rooster to replace her alarm clock, and that she’s always better at making life-changing decisions whilst lying naked on the dining room table, and that we have to mindful that we all have some pretty weird quirks but that’s okay because we accept our family for who they are. He did know Susan; she was that blonde woman she’d talked to in the milk aisle of Tesco about the swimming club five years ago. The stupid fat bitch that taped over Stars in Their Eyes when they were still in school. It wouldn’t have been so bad if it hadn’t been replaced with that awful film with John Cleese, the one she really can’t stand. That’s the kick in the teeth.

Horace nods along quite impatiently, because all of this is said between slurps of sausage and this isn’t the time for Denise to show off her frankly impressive multitasking skills. In a sudden flash of inspiration, he sees the key. He claims that yes, he does remember Susan, and Denise goes to town. He groans with pleasure, then looks hurriedly over to the window to double-check the cat hasn’t moved the blinds. The cat comes trotting, summoned by whatever brainwaves it picks up on when someone is relieved it’s not there. But Horace is ready. Before Gerald is but halfway across the room, Horace has unwrapped a handy stick of processed meat derivatives and hurled it towards the kitchen door. Yeah, he thinks, looking down at his naked, bobbing wife. Look at me, all in control. I’m a real man.

Then Denise jumps up and runs upstairs. “Please don’t go!” Horace whines after her. “It was starting to feel nice!” No response. He thumps the back of the couch in frustration, knowing he’s done something Wrong but not entirely sure what that could be. After standing obediently in one spot for the past five minutes, only speaking when spoken to, the options should be limited but after fifteen years of marriage the possibilities are in fact limitless.

Cock deflating into its natural form, he scrambles after her, already forming an apology in his troubled mind. He has most of the words; he just needs to adapt it to include the cause, long-term effects, and commitments to exactly how he can guarantee it won’t happen again. She has him well trained.

But as he reaches the bedroom, Horace stops. His worm is reconsidering its premature downgrading of girth.

Because Denise is greeting him not with tears or slammed doors or despairing roly-polies through the quilt, but with a faceful of pussy.

“You took your time,” she says seductively.

She’s on the very edge of the bed, face hidden, legs spread wide, arse in the air. She’s wetter than ever, even including the time she had to excuse herself from that book signing with Michael Palin. She moans, wiggles her hips, spreads her legs even wider. Hair tumbles over her shoulder as she looks back at her husband. She parts her lips and sucks on the tip of a finger. Then she moans some more.

Horace becomes a caveman. He loses the hastily recovered trousers, and takes a step forward, and stops.

“What do you want to do now?” he stutters. He might be a caveman, but that doesn’t make him confident.

“Urrrgh!” Denise moans with what might be lust and what might be a base desire to drive one of those nails on the bed stand cheerfully through her husband’s temple.

Horace thaws. “Come here,” he decides, stumbling forward out of the discarded trousers that will take him twenty bloody minutes to iron now that they’re all over the bloody carpet. “Give me a nice kiss.”

“Horace,” says his wife, raging into her pillow. “Get your cock out and shove it in.”

Horace gets his cock out and shoves it in, sighing as much in relief as pleasure. Finally, some actual guidance.

If he thought he was a caveman before, he wasn’t because he is a caveman now. All thought vanishes in that warmth. He surrenders to all cares other than the nagging sensation his knee is going to give out somewhere within the next ten seconds to half an hour, and that he’s really slacking with those exercises the physiotherapist set him back in February.. He tries to start slow to give it a bit of a warm-up, but that’s not on the cards any more, now that he’s a caveman. He thrusts faster and faster, and Denise rocks her hips back to meet him with every stroke. She’s gasping rhythmically, and one still-conscious section of his brain double-checks that her inhaler is in its rightful place on the Denise-half of the dressing table, but he’s starting to hope - nay, suspect - that she’s actually deriving some sort of enjoyment from him. He watches with interest as his hand, which has formally seceded from twenty-first century computer-grunt imperialism and declared animal autonomy, reaches forward and pulls his wife’s hair, hard. She arches her back in response and moans around the fingers of his other hand, which looks like it has decided to join its comrade in attempting to remove Denise’s head in the sexiest decapitation in history.

A minute later, Horace experiences the rather unwelcome realisation that he might not have ever given his wife an orgasm before in the fifteen years of their joyous marriage. However, this is because she has rather definitely just had one now. It’s a strange mix of emotions to face right now. She’s squeezing him in ways he thought impossible to be squeezed, and it’s all getting a bit too nice for comfort when he thinks he hears something even more unwelcome than the unwelcome realisation.

“Did you just shout ‘Michael’?” he roars above the sound of his own body, which by now has entirely abandoned all sense of all those emails that urgently need answering. He slows down, hands unclenching from Denise’s reddening buttocks. “It wasn’t even his best book! Get a grip, woman!”

He finds that Denise doesn’t slow down. This is because Denise has stopped moving some thirty-three seconds prior. There she sprawls before him, sexy as hell, tits swinging like pendulums, elbows on the bed, and face buried deep within the glare of her mobile.

“Not him!” she cries back. “I mean, it’s been a long time since that one in Nepal. Sharon’s Michael.”

“What about him?” Horace puffs. His cock is still buried deep within the woman before him and his boss’s hands are still ready to shove his P45 up his arse when that spreadsheet isn’t done for the tea-time Skype call.

“Two minutes twenty-nine!” she rasps triumphantly. Without moving hip nor neck, she swings the screen up somewhere towards the vicinity of his belly button. “What a pussy. Look, look!”

Horace is still fighting for that nice feeling, which shouldn’t particularly need to be fought for when he was balls-deep in Denise on the edge of a bed straight after work on a day that wasn’t a major birthday, or at least it shouldn’t in his opinion. But by now, both hands have decided they aren’t quite as ready for the swirling storms of bodily passions as they thought, and instead they fumble for a reassuring grip on that little black device that is far more familiar to them than the warm caress of the flesh.

The screen is gone as quickly as it came. It’s now squashed back up against that unseen face, and Horace notices that his wife makes a pretty good impression of a pig like that. Her body is as still and unmalleable as a statue, though admittedly a statue in a position so rude so as to be banned from public viewing wherever it had intended to be erected.

Unfortunately for Horace, he is sadly unattracted to statues.

The worm, Horace, Horace thinks unhelpfully. The worm. He doesn’t want to see his old friend again so soon. He was having a good time with Mr. Cock. And then, when all seems thin and elasticated, inspiration strikes. It worked downstairs, and it can work again.

All he has to do is pretend to understand his wife.

“Ha! Yeah!” Horace grunts, pushing inside her again. At least, he hopes it still goes inside. It’s a bit too titchy to tell right now. “What a wimp. Tell me more, darling.” A dream of a hint of a push from her hips, a ghost of a gasp. Either he’s really getting back into it or there’s something exciting on that phone.

There’s something exciting on the phone. One finger jabs at the screen half a centimetre below Denise’s rocking snout. Saliva curdles across the table of figures that’s displayed there, magnifying half a name.

“Keith! Keith!”

“Who’s Keith?” Horace screams. He wants to stop but it’s definitely in again and Denise is doing her wifely work all too well. Maybe it’s even getting a bit too nice again.

“It’s that.... bitch’s lad. Oh fuck! Susan’s!” Denise cries out, getting back onto her hands again. “His personal best..... four minutes and... ten.”

Horace looks at the app and looks down at his wife’s back and listens to her scream and wonders if the cat’s been sick again because it hasn’t come back for any more treats. He does anything not to feel nice as she quivers hard against his legs, and then the fact that he’s being entered into some awful personal competition against those twats from Tesco and that all this fucking’s just another of Denise’s ways of ignoring him catches up to his caveman noggin and he puts his once-again-civilised hands out to steady her hips and slide away.

Two angry legs draw together to trap him. “Stop now and you’re doing tea... and the dishes.”

The worm, Horace. The worm. Faced with such a threat (especially seeing as he’s up at seven for a pre-conference pre-meeting early morning brainstorm), it’s manifesting in all its lack of glory again until his eye catches those evil rankings once more.

He speeds up, steps it up a gear, gains mass, and as his beloved wife of fifteen years screams in unrestrained joy about how they’re going to get Keith and that bitch Susan, and not to stop then because they might even have a stab at that hunk Robert and that horrible little tart of his from the dry-cleaner’s, his dead, world-weary gaze never leaves the numbers that in his wildest fantasies have realigned into the pre-Christmas bonus table.

2.

“Doctor, doctor,” says Doctor White to Doctor Hallen. “I’m detecting a relaxation of the corpora cavernosa, and an engorging of the penis.”

“Doctor, doctor,” Doctor Hallen whispers to Doctor White. “I concur with the good doctor. Would the doctor be so kind as to perform an examination of the doctor?”

“Which doctor?” Doctor White teases, crawling closer.

“This doctor,” says Doctor Hallen, smiling, as he whips off his sensible doctor’s tighty whities.

They are on the bed just off the break room in Ward 25. They work in Ward 24, but last time they checked there was a nurse screwing one of the visitors in their break room, and no one was in any immediate danger of dying. So off they went, and here they find themselves, in the tangled arrays of Doctor Hallen’s new SexTime Premium Pack, because they’re doctors and not a couple of insurance brokers or whatever it is that poor people do with themselves.

Doctor White performs an expert examination to confirm her readings of what Doctor Hallen likes to call Appendage 7.4. She is so thorough this evening that it might have even become Appendage 7.5. A few moments later, she leans back and settles herself at the foot end of the bed, arms outstretched, blouse tantalisingly untucked a little beyond standard clinical protocol. As Doctor Hallen will soon find out, her underwear is far from sensible. It is non-existent.

“Doctor, doctor,” she begs Doctor Hallen when their pagers finally settle down. “I am feeling a little peaky, though without localised symptoms. You’ll have to examine all of me.”

Doctor Hallen shifts his sensors and clips clips where the clips ought to be clipped, though not necessarily where Doctor White wants them. He scoops up his mobile from the bed, opens up the biometrics tab, and frowns.

“Doctor, doctor,” Doctor Hallen says at last. “I am detecting a serious case of supraventricular tachycardia upon my monitor.”

“Oh, doctor,” Doctor White sighs, squirming out of her cardigan. “Forgive my heart. I’m just a little.... excited about my diagnosis. And as for the treatment...”

“Doctor, I’m serious,” insists Doctor Hallen as he plants his sensible buttocks upon the sensible pillow. “I’ve got all your records right here.” He shows her his screen. “Set to private, of course. I’m maintaining my professionalism throughout.” He shifts uncomfortably as his pager buzzes frightfully somewhere below his testicles. “See here? This is from the Wednesday early. Nothing. And from Thursday mid-shift, it’s nothing like this, and that was when I used the hoist in Room 3 and stuck it up your-”

“But I’m just desperate for-” Doctor White begins, massaging her nipples through the thin cotton of her blouse.

But Doctor Hallen has made up his mind. He stands up and puts on his best doctor’s face. “Doctor, there shall be no Appendage 7.4 tonight. I’m sending you for a scan, just to be sure.”

“You can’t be serious!”

Doctor Hallen places a compassionate doctorly hand upon the doctor’s shoulder. “Best to get dressed, doctor. The porter’s coming for you now.”

The next day, Doctor Hallen learns that the scan had found no trace of supraventricular tachycardia, or any other type of tachycardia for that matter. It turns out that Doctor White was just really looking forward to some invasive procedures. He concludes that the SexTime Premium Pack may not be the most accurate system for cardiac diagnoses. But it is best to be paranoid, Doctor Hallen thinks. He is a professional, and not only that, a professional with an idea.

Two weeks later, he already has an article in a well-respected medical journal regarding the dire need for user-friendly interfaces on modern hospital apparatus. A month after that, he is appointed executive consultant for a leading manufacturing firm specialising in cutting-edge ICU innovations. Three years later, and he is widely hailed as a revolutionary in medical data displays, or as widely as the circle of medical data display enthusiasts allows, anyway.

He keeps his secret under wraps for a while, but by the third or sixth panel dinner or perhaps at his inauguration ceremony at the WHO, he starts whispering to a select number of attractive young ladies after a glass or two of wine. It’s all pretty simple, he confides as he hungrily drinks in all the visual data he can manage. It’s all just a rip-off of the SexTime UI. You can’t trust these stuffy old farts with such intuitive design, he goes on. You’ve got to look to these Silicon Valley start-up entrepreneurs for that, or whatever it is that those poor people like to call themselves.

Occasionally, very occasionally, the pretty young thing he has cornered suggests a demonstration.

But it’s not quite so simple, he invariably explains. There was a little adaptation required. Like getting rid of the hornometer and converting the orgasm stacker to something that might take a little bit of explaining, so he best get a couple more wines.

They’re never there when he gets back from the bar.

Never again is he the life of the party. Never again does he meet Doctor White in their break room, or anyone else’s break room either. When he closes his eyes, alone in his Pennsylvania penthouse or Singapore suite, he can still see her there, the curves of her soft breasts, the lips parted at the vibrations of an urgent message ignored, but it’s all visual data now. It was their bloody sensors that have ruined his life. He performs his own examinations now, rapid and unfeeling, and then happily he falls asleep to fantasies of someone of bearing finally overhearing his secret, and reporting him to that stupid entrepreneur back in California, and facing down the billion-dollar lawyers of SexTime across a courtroom from where he shall leap to meet his doom with the hammer of righteous lifesaving held aloft in his proud fist.

He never sees the news seven years from launch, when SexTime loses all rights to a certain titan of social media from whom they stole their neat and nifty UI. But maybe this is for the best, when he has dedicated all these long, bitter years to blotting out his foolishness with that irresistible layout that fateful night. Like Appendage 7.4, his crusade is prematurely and unknowingly obsolete.

3.

Meet Ryan.

It is back in the past again; the Saturday after launch. A nightclub twenty-three hours and eight units of assorted alcoholic beverages into the day. Ryan has migrated here with all the other chequered-shirted, festival-banded members of his kind from the nice quiet pubs along the high street where people can actually hear you and where you might actually have a nice time.

They gather here throughout the weekend, and the pattern is the same each time - grab another drink at the bar, approach the dancefloor, and stand swaying awkwardly in the same spot gazing around gormlessly until the cup is empty and the process is repeated.

Looking at them swarm here like beetles out of the vomit-soaked woodwork, you would be forgiven for thinking it a complete mystery as to why they even bother coming to this shithole at all.

But science has found an answer.

Are they here... to feed? No.

Are they here... to have nice clean recreational time with their mates? Oh, no!

They are here to mate. A couple even might.

Wait! We haven’t met Ryan, have we? And we won’t here. Because Ryan is currently hiding in the toilets, keeping watch through a tiny gap in the door, waiting for the hottest girl he’s ever seen to move on so he can come out.

She’s gorgeous. A perfect 10. Showing cleavage and legs. She’s showing almost everything to be accurate, and Ryan can think of absolutely nothing better right now than to march up, introduce himself and call a taxi. There’s a semicircle of males keeping a respectful distance from her all the way around the bar where she stands alone, vodka and coke in one hand, phone in the other. They all want to do the same thing as Ryan, but they can stand nice and safe out in the open and gawp all they like because those douches have rookie numbers. She’s on SexTime already, Ryan knows, and she’ll have dismissed them all with a derisory flick of one beautifully manicured finger.

If she detects Ryan, however, she’ll down her drink in one sultry, hippo-like gulp, march over, introduce herself and call them a taxi. They’ll be all over each other by the time they turn the corner. He’s a little worried about the make-out stars, but he’s read a lot that says most hot girls don’t go too much on that. What he’s really concerned about is what happens after they get to hers, where she will swallow him up (figuratively and literally) in a blurred montage of the two or three best experiences he’s ever had and then, judging by her fuckbuddy archives, undoubtedly destroy all his pro sex statuses with one swipe of a beautifully manicured finger, all those unbelievable numbers he’s worked so hard on by swapping phones with his sister earlier and getting her to tap a bunch of thumbs-ups for the promise of a KFC.

Ryan wants his pro sex statuses so that he can take gorgeous girls home from the club.

His phone buzzes in his pocket. It is not his sister, who will just have to wait until tomorrow for her box meal.

It is the gorgeous girl at the bar.

Ryan chain-swears for an impressive seven seconds as he jabs at the invisible status. He decides this app has the shittiest UI he’s ever seen. But how can he have forgotten to switch off his location? For one blessed moment he thinks he’s in the clear, but then one of the douches breaks from the salivating pack and makes the douchey decision to use the toilet as a toilet and not a spyhole like any decent self-respecting pro sexer. The door swings open, and Ryan stands there in all his exposed handsomeness as the perfect 10 turns and smiles.

At him.

Ryan steps forwards and bolts for one of the several other bars that this sophisticated establishment boasts. The bass pounds in his torso as he weaves between the douches hunched over their phones like a load of old grannies over their knitting. He holds his phone aloft like a beacon in front of him, scanning for a diversion. The beat in his chest quickens, and he imagines the gorgeous girl closing in on him, reaching out to hook him with those amazing nails as years-old piss sucks at his soles, but she never could in those jaw-dropping heels and he slows down just in time to locate her.

It’s another unaccompanied girl across the room, and she’s pretty too. But more in a homely way, because her top covers her nipples and her dress actually reaches what could generously be described as upper thigh. But none of that matters. What matters is the numbers. Overall fuckbuddy rating of 6.4, and in her quick history she’s scored her five most recent partners perfect 10s.

Ryan wants with all his heart to be a perfect 10. This is the girl for him.

Quickly, before the hottest girl in the club ends the chase, he approaches his target.

“Hi,” he says, waving his drink in the girl’s face. “Do you think you’ve ever met my sister?”

The girl frowns. “Errr, I don’t think so?”

“Good.” No one can ever know what he did with his sister. And then to break the awkward silence, he conjures up something bold and original. “What are you drinking?”

The girl is smiling right up to the point where she slips her phone from her bra. Then she scowls instead.

“Twenty seven orgasms per hour? Dude, I’m out.” She waves a hand and turns back towards the bar.

“But... isn’t that good?” Ryan is all at sea.

She twists her head. There is a gleam of disgust in her eye. “That’s just... painful. Just no.”

And that’s all he gets.

And there, crowded on all sides by sweaty, writhing bodies, at half past eleven on a Saturday, he experiences a revelation, a moment of sincere self-reflection that drops that monotonous beat to a mere annoyance at the edge of his ears.

He is intimidatingly good. He needs to drop his numbers. He needs someone to disappoint.

The gorgeous girl.

When he backtracks across the hellscape, however, he finds she didn’t get far in her pursuit. She is talking to a douche in a chequered shirt much like Ryan’s. She’s giggling in his ear. He’s calling them a taxi. And, Ryan notices with grim disdain, he even goes to the same festivals.

The douche in the chequered shirt does not have SexTime.

4.

As Ryan is waking up alone and hung over on Sunday morning, Sally is waking up in the warm and loving embrace of her boyfriend, Adam. She is cosy and happy and their first day off together in forever stretches out before them in all its undulating, uncountable hours, glistening in the sunshine. She forces herself to move, opens the shutters, and gets the box as Adam snores on.

Sally and Adam are not like Horace and Denise, because they like each other. They are not like Doctor White and Doctor Hallen, because they love each other. Nobody is like Ryan because, let’s face it, that guy’s a prick. But they are a little like them all too because they’re human, and they’ve seen the app charts, and they can’t help but wonder about things that everyone else is doing no matter how much they say they despise all the other sheep.

So that’s why Sally wants to surprise her man. Curiosity doesn’t kill the cat, but it certainly gets the pussy. Sally doesn’t mind if it does. Adam stirs as she comes back upstairs, naked and raring to go.

“Ta-dah!” she says cheerfully, setting the box down on the duvet. Adam grunts with genuine appreciation. She climbs on herself and wriggles over her boyfriend’s body, skin against skin, lips against lips. Then she remembers the other box and jumps off.

She’s gone a while because it’s gone down the back of the couch, but luckily Adam has read the instructions and started clipping his sensors on by the time she gets back. It takes longer to put her own on, she finds, when one hand is too busy stroking a cock to help.

When she’s all set, Adam sits up and parts her legs with one hand. Something jingles on her phone when he starts massaging her clit. She’s really enjoying herself until she sees the disapproving comment from her gran, and promptly remembers to disable Google integration.

Adam does his best to make her forget the false start. He rolls her onto her back and slips a couple of fingers in. She gasps, then she moans, then she says “Shit! We forgot the microphone add-on.”

The microphone add-on is sitting comfortably in its own box, downstairs. The loving couple decide it will be easier to go together than unclip all their bits. They edge down the stairs like a pair of anxious crabs, grope for the parcel, which isn’t quite as rude as it sounds, and then they stumble back to bed.

Adam wonders if it would be best to get the dildo integration companion app up first, but Sally can’t be arsed to configure it right now. “Where do you want me?” she asks. She shimmies to the edge of the bed and lifts her legs, stretching her toes towards the corners of the room. “Like this?”

Adam isn’t looking at his girlfriend. He’s looking up something on the internet. “I mean, we could if you want,” he says, “But we won’t get any golden hearts if we skip the first level of the campaign.”

“What’s the first level?” Sally asks as she wiggles back up the bed.

“Missionary,” Adam says. “But, you know, flat. Normal. Like this.” And he flicks over to the campaign screen on her phone and shows the helpful diagram in the mission briefing.

She gets into place beneath him. But, just as he’s about to put it in, she holds a hand up to his chest to stop him. “Hang on, what about the copycat reduction? Have you added anyone yet?”

“Yeah.” He takes a moment to find the friends list, poised over her, inches away from her moist lips. “Oh bugger. Gary and Meg have already done it today.”

“No way!”

“Three AM. Must’ve been before bed.”

“That’s cheating,” Sally observes, pouting. “What about the daily challenge?”

Adam frowns. “It’s something called... the reverse double elephant.” He shows her a slightly less helpful diagram.

Sally throws up her hands. “Better try that then.”

They shuffle. Then they roll. Then Adam howls when Sally’s stabilising wrist rips off his left ear indicator.

Sally and Adam are perfectly in tune with each other’s bodies, and also with each other’s minds. Together, they decide that sex isn’t so fun now that everyone’s doing it.

They’re not like that. They want to do something spontaneous and romantic. So they begin the laborious process of disentangling themselves from the assorted detritus of the Platinum Lovers’ Pleasure Pack and go downstairs to make cups of cocoa. No-one drinks cocoa these days.

Buzzing and flashing and abandoned in the crumpled sheets, Sally’s phone warbles out the poorly recorded soundtrack of a booing audience.

The monitor flatlines.