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Komari is riddled with bad code. Anchored with human desires, he’s a failure of a cyborg, rid of human suffering, but not of their indulgences. His skin is pristine plastic, and so he lusts for the feel of human flesh, and though it wouldn’t be considered cannibalism, he must want to consume it too, frowned upon it as it would be.
Midousuji first meets this strange machine when he is winning one of his races. He has reinforced his organs for protection, but his muscles, arteries and skin are real, and he takes no substances. All his modifications fall under the rules for professional bikers, but sometimes he itches and feels his body curling into itself, and wishes to undergo more surgery.
It’s not entirely uncommon for him to see cyborgs with plastic skin, but few of those undergoing such modifications come to watch sports. Komari stands out, even amidst a colourful crowd, with his impeccable fake face, slim, thoughtful eyes and teal wig. He stands a bit to the side, with docile body language hard for a machine to match, and shyly observes the victor.
For the following five races, whenever Midousuji wins, Komari is there, nameless to Midousuji yet but sharply recognizable. He comes alone and leaves on his own, without words or sounds. Sometimes, Midousuji catches a glimpse of him during his practice too, even though his routes are atypical and private. It becomes apparent, after weeks of this, that he is being stalked by an eccentric, pretty cyborg.
Typically, he prefers cyborgs to full humans. The more machine the better, and judging from Komari’s polished skin, straight limbs and mechanic, visible joints, he is practically a robot. Yet his behaviour is erratic, causeless, disgustingly human-like. It contradicts what Midousuji likes about their kind, and so eventually he aims to stop it, when Komari’s presence becomes more of a nuisance than of interest.
His bike comes to a halt right in front of the cyborg, who innocuously peers at him over the top of his book, seated on a bench of the other side of the fence from the bike track. He parks it and walks over to the fence until he is standing right in front of the bench, a meter away from his stalker.
“You’re gross, huh,” he states.
Despite his plastic features, Komari’s face reads discomfort.
“I apologise,” softly, he replies. His voice has a pleasant mechanic reverberation. “I didn’t realise I was bothering you, Midousuji Akira-san.”
“Why’re you here?”
Komari hesitates, even though the reason is clear.
“I came to watch you.”
“Why?”
Komari fidgets. Midousuji has never before seen a cyborg fidget.
He thinks that Komari might be regretting his enhancements, then. That he wishes he hadn’t undergone so much surgery that he would be deemed at an unfair advantage, and thus unable to compete.
“Do you like road racing?”
At that, Komari bends his head down slightly, his teal wig swaying with him.
“No,” he says, then, with uncanny, raw honesty: “I like flesh.”
There is no such time when someone has touched Midousuji without repercussion. Just a little bit later, he stares, transfixed, at Komari kneeling before him, and feels his skin crawling when the cyborg reaches out his plastic fingers. The joints are silver bullets, visible as he bends his fingers to grab onto Midousuji’s calves. He starts to rub them, with a little human like huff of excitement, so gross and wrong, even though his touch is uniquely acceptable. Every part of Midousuji’s being is on alert, he doesn’t understand why he allows this, why he doesn’t just shove this half-boy away.
But he likes the plastic. The firm pressure, the hardness, unlike that sticky feeling of human skin. He doesn’t understand this proclivity of Komari’s, why he doesn’t just bury his sharp plastic nails under Midousuji’s flesh, and peel off the first layer already to get deeper, beneath the muscle, towards the bone. “I like flesh,” he’d said, and so on a whim, Midousuji allowed this.
Komari’s tongue is not real either. It has a fake softness, like a car seat, a leather like quality which strokes up Midousuji’s hamstrings next. There is no saliva or replica wetness alongside it, but it’s more intimate than his digits. Komari has his right hand up on Midousuji’s back thigh, lifting his leg – spreading them – to allow more access. What is the point of being cyborg if one is still haunted by human desires? The process of figuring out this malfunctioning doll leaves him dizzy. The hand on his thigh is dangerously close to slipping into his shorts.
Next, he is nuzzled, the quality of the lace wig too reminding him that this is not real. His left leg is embraced, clung to, as Komari sighs wistfully once more, as if this is his recharging station.
“Is this a bug or something?” Midousuji asks, somehow a little breathless – a despicable notion.
“I don’t know,” Komari replies, cryptic and muffled as he speaks directly against the thigh.
“You didn’t become a cyborg willingly, did you,” Midousuji pushes, tries to get back to his roots – taunting, cracking his opponents, finding the kinks in their armours – the bugs in the system – the weak code to exploit and tarnish. Though this isn’t a bicycle race, Komari is clearly a foe.
Plastic finger tips travel down over his knee, slowly, just a bit too straight to be natural.
But Komari did do precisely that. He can’t tell Midousuji yet, but he had all the procedures necessary to make him as fraudulent as possible – to become a robot with a flesh heart, to be encased in pretty covering and colour, and visible joints to remove any doubt. He chose a dated design and scorched the skin off his body to replace it in a breakable layer as close to porcelain as he could get away with, and then a wig so eye-catching, he’d be noticed.
The engineer working with him, building his new arms and legs above and through his old, enforcing the organs, adding improvements into his brain, reprogramming his nerves to obey, disliked the process. He called it a waste, and not advanced enough – he said there were ways to keep him more human, ways to hide the mechanical aspects, to bring in his old person into the new shell. But Komari had already shed that cocoon and was ready to emerge – or submerge – into the new.
He lets Midousuji think that it wasn’t on purpose for now. He gets to taste, with muted senses, and he gets to feel, with hampered skin. Moreover, he gets to be near, around – and maybe soon, within. This is further than he dared to hope, back when they first me, when he was an average human boy, fake-reading a book by the bicycle lane, watching his mysterious crush: the star of the bicycle club, one year ago.
The rejection of his feelings had not been as severe as the hard shove and the disgust expressed at his hasty touch. Midousuji had hated pale, easily bruised skin, and the softness of humanity. But now, he lets what he thinks is a stranger touch him, so long as it is machine.
Komari hums against the warm flesh to avoid lying, and nests. After the next big race, again he reaches out to the victor, and Midousuji lets him in once more.
A month goes by of practice and races, and a persistent cyborg harassing him in the aftermath, rubbing sore muscles, rubbing soon all over, seeing his naked meat on display. It is more carnivorous than lustful: even as porcelain teeth gnaw into his shoulder, while skinny doll legs straddle his hips, there is nothing sexual to the relationship that forms between them. Midousuji is consumed while still alive, but nothing is swallowed, and his muscles ache hollowly whenever their odd ritual comes to an end. He mostly likes watching Komari then, as the cyborg moves with finesse, yet clearly restricted in his flexibility by poor design.
Once or twice, he topples Komari over, just to watch him rise without the awkwardness of human motions. Sometimes, he likes to twist Komari’s fingers, bend them the wrong way – once, he pulls off Komari’s right hand from its socket, and holds it out of reach. Just like he lets Komari experience his own, involuntary humanness, so too does Komari allow him to experiment with the extent of his build.
One day Midousuji asks: “Say, where is your power switch?” with overtly fake nonchalance. He knows that Komari will humour any request, but this is a trust exercise they’ve not yet crossed. As he asks this, Komari was sucking on his jutting hipbone, and from that position of worship he looks up with a dazed quality to his eyes – eyes which are still human, protected by lids which constantly scratch against them. He seems contemplative for once, and Midousuji delights at the challenge – he’s come to like little acts of rebellion, of pushing the boundaries between them.
Then, Komari smiles, as much as his static face allows, and he takes Midousuji’s right hand into his, guiding it to the back of his head.
Together, they brush back his lace hair to reveal a small port behind the left ear. Midousuji strokes his long fingers against it, feels a small electric current sizzle behind it.
“I won’t be turned off,” Komari murmurs, leaning into the touch, starved for the smallest affections as always. “Not completely.”
“Your body will be,” Midousuji says. “You’ll just be an invalid, trapped in an unmoving bot.”
He can’t demean it more than that. Not even to be cruel can he call a grossly beautiful doll something like “a piece of metal junk”. They both know, too, that he wouldn’t want to turn off the one thing he genuinely likes about Komari.
The body built for him, built to house something gross, but in a more honest casing: an intimacy he can allow precisely because it’s wrong.
If he wanted to, though, he could turn off Komari at any time, and store him somewhere secluded: in as shed somewhere, under his bed, in a junkyard. It’s something he sometimes considers, so he can bring him out only when he truly wants to. Komari is too confident, showing his weakness so openly, so Midousuji just has to pull the plug.
Within his still body, Komari still looks up at him through human eyes, lying in an inhuman pose on the ground so bereft of life. Contorted, twisted, with a screw lose somewhere deep inside him, just enough so that Midousuji lets him suffer for only an hour before rebooting him.
After his state of limbo, Komari clings to his neck, near childlike in his hunger.
By this point, Midousuji knows where it all went wrong, having figured it out, that the strange cyborg had once been a stranger boy, who he had picked apart and soundly discarded. His inspired upgrade left that body in the dust, but sometimes he can still see traces of it.
That vile, awkward human side of Komari still lingers, and it’s the side that craves him like it should a battery, the side that was willing to sacrifice it all for his victory, in having Midousuji for a prize.
The veneration of a faulty machine gnaws at him from the inside, bangs against the reinforced organs for release, escape – abort. So, sometimes, Midousuji comes to turn him off for a few minutes, or hours at a time, just to still that fear within him.
Whenever Komari is off-powered, Midousuji doesn’t move much either, other than to occasionally kick his side, poke his hard case, brush the cheap hair. And then, turn him back on, and be there in the aftermath to be fed on.
Until he can join him in plastic, seeing the kinks of Komari’s programming is the most he can do to experience the other side. And so though he hates the itching of human skin, and the scraping against it, for both of their sakes, he stays in the flesh. Preprogrammed.