He Lost the Bet and They Turned Him into a Doll

Adrián Solveira crossed the threshold of the studio with the air of someone who had never had to wait for anything. His suit, custom-cut in a Milan tailoring house, isolated him from the common world like a second skin. He checked his gold watch, not for the time, but to remind himself how much he was worth. The air conditioning raised a chill on his freshly shaved nape.

This is a joke, he thought. A drunk bet. I go in, prove I’m above this televised trash, collect the check, and go back to my office.

The door opened again and the air changed. It smelled of construction-site sweat and cheap tobacco. Tomás Bravo filled the doorway: a slab of working muscle, not gym muscle, packed into a black T-shirt that barely contained his chest. Steel-toed boots, worn jeans, forearms tattooed with old ink. The bulge in his fly announced, without his meaning to, a cock the kind people remembered.

—Technical support, I assume —said Adrián without deigning to look at him—. The air makes a horrible noise.

Tomás let out a dry laugh, rough as sandpaper.

—You the competition? I thought they were looking for men, not storefront mannequins.

Tension vibrated in the sterile air. Class against strength, calculation against instinct, two ways of being a man about to collide. They got no further, because an electronic fanfare exploded from everywhere and the mirror walls slid apart to either side.

They had been on the main stage all along. Thousands of screens came alive around them, showing the faces of viewers connected from half the world: smiling, booing, applauding in real time. They were inside The Showcase, and there wasn’t a single corner without a camera.

***

In the center, atop a rotating glass podium, she waited for them.

She didn’t look entirely human, and that was the point. Under the studio lights her skin didn’t seem like skin, but polished porcelain without a single pore. She wore a pink latex bodysuit cut so high it split her pussy into two glossy lips beneath the taut fabric, gold epaulettes on her shoulders, and a black top hat crowning an impossible mane. Her transparent platforms lifted her twenty centimeters above both of them.

—Good evening, my dear peepers —she purred, and her voice came through processed, sweet as saccharin and twice as toxic—. I’m Madame Lux, your hostess. This season the game has changed. No twelve hopefuls. Two opposite poles. Two men who think they know what it means to be one.

The camera closed in on her eyes, two pools of an unblinking blue.

—We’re going to break you —she said—. And the audience will decide what you become.

She struck the crystal-covered whip against her latex-clad thigh. The wet crack reverberated across the arena. Two attendants in smooth, faceless masks stepped out of the shadows holding chrome injectors.

—Before we begin, a small formality —she sang—. What you signed, gentlemen.

—What is that? —Adrián backed up, his composure wavering for the first time—. My lawyer reviewed the contract. It didn’t say anything about drugs.

—Clause fourteen, subsection C —she recited, savoring every syllable—. The participant accepts any aesthetic enhancement necessary for the integrity of the program. It’s not a drug, darling. It’s Nectar. Pure beauty nanotechnology.

—No fucking way —Tomás growled, clenching his fists—. Nobody sticks anything in me.

Madame Lux sighed theatrically.

—The door is right there. But your father’s hospital debt pays itself while you play, Tomás. And your coward face will be viral in five minutes, Adrián. You decide.

The silence stretched until it hurt. Tomás looked at the exit, then at his boots, and thought of the bills, the tubes, a clinic room. He was the first to give in. He held out his arm, a trunk of veins and dark hair.

—Make it quick.

The cold metal bit into his shoulder. Pssh. He clenched his teeth without making a sound, but a second later he rubbed his arm: it burned, as if liquid fire had been injected straight into his chest.

Adrián, cornered by his own pride, refused to be outdone. He took off his jacket, folded back his sleeve with surgical precision, and offered his pale arm.

—I hope that’s sterilized.

The prick made him gasp, a metal wasp sinking under his skin.

—Perfect! —Madame Lux clapped, and the lights in her platforms went wild—. You’ll feel heat. A delightful tickle. Perhaps a sudden urge to buy shoes. The usual.

***

The lighting shifted to alarm red. Two podiums rose from the floor, and above both their heads digital scoreboards blinked at zero.

—This isn’t a popularity contest —she announced, striding between them like a predator—. It’s a test of endurance. You’ll answer questions. Every correct answer adds points. In the end, whoever has fewer points loses. And in The Showcase, losing doesn’t mean going home. It means evolving.

She paused, letting the word hang in the icy air.

—Whoever loses submits to a corrective enhancement. And the audience chooses it.

—What does that mean? —Adrián clutched the podium—. Surgery?

—It means transformation, darling. The Nectar running through your veins will do the rest. The nanobots already know what to do; they’re only waiting for the order.

She snapped her fingers and the first question lit up on the podium screens.

—Beauty general knowledge —she said—. Things any girl would know. Let’s see if you do too. What’s the difference between a matte lipstick and a glossy one?

Adrián looked at the options. His brain, trained in figures and balance sheets, didn’t have a single file for any of it. Neither of them pressed anything.

A deep buzz.

—No one answers —Madame Lux sighed—. And not answering gets punished too.

She snapped her fingers. Both felt a hot pulse at the base of the skull; for an instant the set seemed to spin.

—Minus five intelligence for both of you —she crooned—. Every mistake makes you a little stupider. And the stupider you are, the harder the next one gets. Isn’t that delicious?

Adrián tore the microphone from his lapel.

—I’m leaving. This isn’t what I signed up for.

For the first time since they met, Tomás nodded toward him.

—It’s a trap. I’m leaving too.

They took a step toward the dark. Madame Lux snapped her fingers, a small, intimate sound that nonetheless stopped them like a gunshot. The giant screens changed.

On one appeared the face of an old man: tubes in his nose, monitors blinking, skin the color of ash. In the corner, an impossible red figure. Tomás went without air.

—Dad —he whispered, and his steel voice turned into a child’s.

—The clinic keeping him alive gets paid by us, darling —she purred, approaching with the click of heels—. If you walk out that door, the payment stops tonight.

On the other screen, a headline: the CEO of Solveira Digital humiliated live. Adrián felt the floor tilt.

—That story runs in forty outlets if you quit —said Madame Lux without looking at him—. Your investors. Your board. Your ex-wife.

—This is extortion —he whispered.

—This is entertainment. Back to your places.

And their legs obeyed, as if they no longer entirely belonged to them.

***

The second question arrived with a low, pulsing rhythm. A simple calculation: how much a dancer took home after the club kept its cut. Tomás looked at the numbers and, to his own surprise, the answer surfaced by itself in his head, clear, as if placed there by another hand.

—One hundred twenty —he said, hoarse.

Madame Lux tilted her head. The option lit green.

—Correct. Seems somebody knows the trade.

The audience roared. Adrián clenched his fists. How the fuck does he know that? But under the rage something new was beating. The Nectar throbbed with every second, and with every beat he felt a part of what had once been his slip away: an idea that before would have been quick and was now becoming sticky, slow, sweet. He also felt, with horror, his cock harden by itself inside his expensive trousers, throbbing against the seam, without permission, as if the Nectar had found a direct channel between his humiliated brain and his dick.

I can’t lose any more, he thought, and didn’t even finish the sentence.

***

—Final question —she announced, and a single spotlight carved her into shadow—. Whoever has fewer points submits to the audience’s decision. And the audience has already voted. We only need to know who gets the prize.

The question appeared on the screens: the height of a professional platform heel. Tomás hit the button first.

—Six inches.

Adrián answered a moment later, not knowing where he’d gotten the number.

—Between seven and nine.

Madame Lux stepped closer and stroked his cheek with a gloved finger, cold against his burning skin. She slid her hand down his chest, over his belly, and squeezed the hard bulge showing beneath the expensive fabric. Adrián let out an obscene gasp he couldn’t swallow.

—Something inside you already knows things you don’t remember learning —she whispered—. The Nectar works fast. Look at you, your cock’s going hard while I dismantle you in front of half the world. What a filthy boy you are, darling.

Pause. The audience held its breath.

—The correct answer is between seven and nine. Adrián wins. Tomás loses.

Tomás’s podium turned blood red. He backed away, but the podium trapped him.

***

Madame Lux walked toward him with a small pink remote in the palm of her hand.

—Oh, Tomás. The audience voted, and this time they decided to be generous with you. Not one enhancement. Both.

She raised the remote. The man who minutes before had filled a doorway trembled like a leaf.

—You can’t... —he began.

—Of course I can, darling. Relax. You’re going to like it. That’s the worst part.

She pressed the button.

The heat sleeping in Tomás’s veins woke at once. It wasn’t pain; it was something worse, a pleasure he hadn’t asked for and couldn’t stop. He felt his nipples harden until they hurt, two rigid, sensitive points rubbing the black T-shirt with every breath, and from his throat escaped a wet, high moan, alien to him. His skin turned tight and then soft, too soft, as every hair on his body surrendered and vanished forever. The air itself stroked him like a tongue, and he felt with horror his pussy opening between his legs, wet, swollen, throbbing, where until a minute ago his trucker cock had hung.

He brought a trembling hand between his thighs, inside his pants, and his fingers sank into slick flesh he had never touched. Thick, hot juice instantly soaked his fingertips. He rubbed without meaning to, searching for what was no longer there, and instead found a swollen clit that sent an electric shock from his crotch to the nape of his neck. His knees gave way. He bent over the podium, ass raised, and another moan, longer, more obscene, escaped between lips that were no longer his own.

The lips. He felt them swell, fleshy, impossible to close completely, glossy under the spotlights as if painted with permanent wetness. A mouth made for sucking, and his body knew it before his head did. His tongue, long and hungry, slid over them by itself, and saliva hung from the corner of his mouth. He tried to protest and the words came out dragged, soft, clumsy, a caricature of his old steel voice.

—Plea...se... —he stammered, and the whole set laughed.

The black T-shirt suddenly stretched over him. Underneath, two new tits pushed against the fabric, heavy, round, nipples marking the cloth like two dark pebbles. The brush of cotton over that newly born flesh was so brutal it jerked his hips back against his will, and the juice from his pussy soaked the inside of his jeans, a dark stain spreading over the fly that had once hidden his cock. There was no cock anymore. Only a throbbing, hungry hollow between his legs, a newly opened hole that clenched by itself, looking for something to fill it.

His hands, once broad and callused, suddenly seemed delicate to him. He searched himself on the mirrored floor and found no trace of the man who had crossed that door. He found the beginning of something else: a creature of porcelain skin and doll’s mouth, sensitive to the point of torment, made to be looked at, made to be fucked.

—Welcome to The Showcase —purred Madame Lux, savoring the feminine ending. She ran a gloved finger over the swollen lips, and Tomás, unable to stop himself, opened his mouth and sucked it, hungry, ashamed, tears filling his eyes—. See how pretty you are when you stop arguing? Look at you already sucking without being asked, darling. The Nectar knows what you are before you do.

What remained of Tomás wrapped her arms around herself, trembling, and discovered with horror that the trembling wasn’t only fear. Every brush of her own arms pulled a spark of pleasure from her, clouding her thoughts, making her docile, sweet, obedient. She squeezed one breast without meaning to, and the nipple answered with a jolt that went straight down to her soaked pussy. Her thighs opened on their own atop the podium, involuntary invitation, and from the center a bright thread ran out and dripped onto the mirrored floor, where her own transformed face looked back at her with its mouth open.

Adrián, a meter away, watched her with a devastated face. But it was no longer only horror he felt. His cock had turned to stone inside his three-thousand-euro trousers, pushing against the fabric, beating in time with his heart. The Nectar was beating in him too, patient, and deep in his slow mind a new little voice whispered that next time maybe he wouldn’t mind losing so much. That maybe what he wanted, without ever confessing it, was to kneel before that glossy-lipped creature and shove that doll’s mouth down its throat. That maybe, after that, he wanted to be the one dripping.

Madame Lux noticed it, how could she not. She came closer, grabbed the bulge over the fabric, and squeezed slowly, weighing it like a jeweler appraising a gem.

—Easy, darling —she whispered in his ear—. You still have time. And when it’s your turn, you’re going to come so hard from losing that you’ll beg to lose again.

On the screens, millions of strangers were applauding, some with one hand busy out of frame. Madame Lux spread her arms toward the cameras, radiant beneath the rain of lights.

—And this, my loves, has only just begun.