Points for Ads

— No way! No fucking way! You’re kidding, please tell me you’re kidding! — Victor Carter lamented, not believing his own eyes, as he stood in the middle of a dusty barn behind Aunt Liz’s farm, holding out an unusually dark-skinned arm with his old phone in hand.

The fingers were too thin and too long, with phalanges that were way too narrow, trembling as he held the phone in front of him. On the screen was the very app he’d downloaded a couple of months ago, after finding it somewhere deep in the back alleys of Google Play — “FaceSwap Real+”.

Back then it was a simple evening, when Victor was lying around in his room after college, scrolling the internet out of boredom, tapping on weird ads, testing out useless apps people usually install just for laughs. But this one, with its overly simple interface of only a few buttons and a function way too basic for modern times, didn’t work like a normal app — it swapped faces not only in photos, but in real life. Each swap cost 25 points, which you could easily earn by watching ads.

And, it seemed like the 99 out of 100 points he had should’ve been enough for Victor to fool around with the pre-loaded presets of random people from the internet. One of them happened to be this randomly photographed African tribeswoman whose face in the app photo was now replaced by Victor’s own, after he decided to try it the second he walked into the barn, while Aunt Liz was gone in town all day. Only thing was:

— Oh come on, I’m just one damn point short, just change me back already! I can’t get stuck like this! — he said irritably, taking a small step and instantly regretting it, because at that moment his heavy, firm, huge breasts bounced, slapping against each other. Startled, he threw his hands up, but hit his own breasts with his elbow, and both soft spheres reacted even stronger, spreading and then snapping back with a delayed, dense thump.

— Why the hell… — slipped out of him in a thin, unfamiliar, melodic voice that now sounded especially wild, and definitely not funny like it had a few minutes ago, when he was running around the barn with a stick, babbling nonsense and pretending to be a tribal woman.

The phone blinked:

“Not enough points: -1

Buy premium subscription

Watch ad”

Only the problem was that, due to some bug, the subscription couldn’t be bought from the very beginning — and Victor hadn’t even tried, because who needs a subscription when you can earn points by watching ads? Ads that he now simply couldn’t watch, because the internet out here sometimes just cut off completely.

Victor jabbed the “Swap” button with his thumb in frustration, but it only flashed the same nasty pop-up:

“Not enough points: -1”

— Yeah, I know, I fucking know, goddamn it… — he grumbled and, almost without realizing it, pressed his finger harder against the screen. — You piece of shit app… Aunt’s gonna be back in an hour, and I…

At that moment the screen jerked, and the phone let out a heavy “sigh” of sudden vibration. A submenu appeared on the screen, with three buttons just as dull as the rest of the app’s design: “Genetic Swap”, “Behavior Swap”, “Cultural Swap”.

— What the hell?.. — Victor whispered, feeling an unfamiliar chill run across his new skin, because he had no idea the app even had more functions.

Next to each button was the cost, styled exactly like in the main swap menu — 80 points — but after the “/” symbol there was the precious word “free”.

— Free?… Maybe… maybe this could help? — he muttered, almost daring to hope that this new menu was a chance to get out of all this before Aunt Liz saw some dark-skinned woman with her nephew’s face standing in her barn.

At that moment something shifted in the far corner of the barn, and in the air there came a barely audible shrr-kh, as if hay lightly slid under someone’s foot. Victor jerked in surprise, forgetting about the phone in his hand for a second — but that second was enough. His thumb slipped just a little and tapped straight onto the “Cultural Swap” button.

The phone didn’t even vibrate — instead, something clicked inside his head.

‘Probably imagined it…’ Victor wanted to say, but instead what flew out of his mouth was:

— Ku-mala (Ears deceived)

Victor froze, shocked by what he had just said with his own voice — still high and feminine, but now carrying deeper notes and a drawn-out “u” accent.

‘Uh… I wanted to say…’ he tried to force out in English, but what came out was only:

— A… ku-no… ta-lu? (I… why mouth not obey?)

He touched his throat automatically. Everything was the same as a minute ago — the same narrow neck with smooth skin, still strange but familiar now — so why the hell was he speaking… like that?

His gaze flicked to the phone screen, and that became the next blow — all the symbols that were perfectly readable a second ago had turned into strange patterns, like a mix of small lines, circles, and spirals. What used to be a normal English menu now looked as if someone had swapped the font for a set of ritual pictograms.

‘What the fuck?! Why did the phone change?!’ he started to say, but what burst from his mouth again was foreign yet somehow perfectly clear:

— N’kaza ta-mbu! Ngu-ngu ka ta-ta?! (Cursed spirit! Why talking box become different?!)

Victor’s eyes widened in terror, his breathing quickened, and because of that his heavy breasts began to rise and fall in rapid jerks, once again dragging his attention to them and making his hands — unconsciously, or more likely out of panic — press them tighter against his body. But that didn’t help. Those masses only spread under his elbows, making Victor let out a tiny squeak and immediately clap a hand over his mouth, shocked by how painfully feminine that sound was.

— Ha… ku-naa… (No… this not should…) — he whimpered through his fingers.

He hit the “Exchange” button with his finger, knowing exactly what it was for and WHAT was written there… although he could no longer read it, seeing only something like “—͝1 ᑫᵒᶜᵏ. Na-tu-ra ki.”

— Heh! Ku-fara mi nda! (Hey! Do like before!)

But the screen only popped up the same old message about lacking 1 point, offering to watch an ad or buy a subscription.

Victor turned his head in despair, thinking it might at least help him calm down a little — but that was a mistake. His gaze stopped on the unremarkable, quietly standing tractor in the corner, the one Aunt Liz kept after old Greg passed on. A simple, gray, time-worn tractor that had served faithfully for decades and was now living out its final days here. But to Victor, it suddenly looked wrong, strange, and terrifying at the same time.

It wasn’t just a tractor anymore.

It was a huge iron beast, sleeping, heavy, with a belly full of hidden growl. The wheels looked like legs rooted into the earth. The steering wheel — like curved horns. The cabin — like an empty eye that could open at any moment.

Victor froze, unable to look away, feeling his heart bang harder and his fists clench painfully tight.

He tried to force himself to think: it’s just… just that big thing that used to help Uncle Greg plow the field, but the word slipped away like water through fingers. Only one description surfaced in his head: an iron beast with a belly full of growl and horns rooted in the ground. His legs felt glued to the barn’s wooden floor.

— Ka-bara… ka-bara ta nguu… (Big sleeping beast… don’t move, don’t move…) — slipped out of him in a quiet, drawn-out voice with a deep guttural tone.

His breasts swayed again when he leaned forward, as if trying to hide from the gaze of the iron beast, and the movement pulled the skin on his new ribcage so tight that Victor barely held back a quiet sob, feeling how the skin stretched and the soft, heavy masses dragged downward, trembling lightly with his quickening heartbeat.

He slowly, very, very, very slowly, like a hunter afraid to disturb a sleeping lion, turned his head to look around — and immediately realized the barn around him was no longer a barn.

In the corner where the workbench used to be, with that old faded poster of an anime girl, now stood a witch doctor’s altar, crudely nailed together from wooden planks, and above it hung something that froze the blood in his veins.

It wasn’t a poster.

It was a woman from the flat world, trapped in thin fabric by the spirits of the white men. Her eyes, huge like two full moons, stared straight into the soul, unblinking. Her hair was blue, like the night sky after rain and lightning. Her clothes — strange, too tight, as if her skin had been painted with bright colors and stretched back on. She was smiling, but the smile was wrong — too wide, too calm, too empty. No fear, no hunger, no pain lived in that smile. Only eternal, inhuman bliss.

Victor recoiled instinctively, and again his heavy breasts swung, slapping against each other and hitting the ends of his ribs with a dull, wet thump. He wrapped his arms around himself under his breasts, trying to press them down, hold them still, stop this constant irritating swaying — but his wrist only sank into the softness, and his nipples, suddenly sensitive, responded with a sharp sting against his skin.

— Ta… ta-lu na… m’bora kwe? (This… this woman? Or demon pretending woman?) — he whispered, and his voice trembled on a high note, almost breaking into a squeak.

He forced himself to turn away.

Next to the “altar” stood a can with dried paint — the same one Victor had recently used to repaint his old bike. But now it was a pot of spirit blood. Thick, black, crusted around the edges. He knew — felt it in his bones — that if he dipped his fingers into it, he could call the voices of the dead. Or drown in them. He tore his gaze away quickly, his heart pounding so hard that every beat echoed low in his stomach with a strange, deep vibration, as if something alive and hungry was waking inside him.

Victor swallowed. His throat tightened, as if wrapped in a dry vine.

And then from above, through the gaps in the barn roof, came a low, muffled, vibrating “uuuuuooo-rrrrrrr.”

A plane. Just a regular damn plane flying somewhere over the farm — but to his ear, the sound unfolded inside him like the roar of a massive sky-beast.

Victor’s face went pale. His eyes widened. Air burst out of his lungs in a hot jolt.

— KA-BALA NGUU!!! (SKY BEAST!!!) — he screamed, his voice breaking into a high shriek that made the earrings in his earlobes tremble in panic.

He instinctively ducked, his breasts swinging with huge inertia, hitting painfully against his forearm from below, and then, driven by pure animal fear, he bolted toward the nearest place his mind recognized as shelter.

The pile of hay by the wall.

He lunged toward it, clipped the wagon’s edge with his elbow, slammed his hip into it, lost his balance, and the phone in his hand jerked.

— No-no— ku-maa—! (Stop— don’t—!) — he exhaled, trying to hold onto it, but the phone had already slipped from his fear-dampened hands, arced briefly through the air, and landed face-down in the dust with a dull thud a bit past the hay pile.

Victor hesitated for a split second, but the howl of the plane snapped him back to reality. The phone wasn’t important. Survival was. So he dove forward, behind the mound of hay, closer to the wall, curling into the corner, feeling his breasts crush against his knees and his trembling fingers clutch at the stiff stems of dry grass.

Outside, the plane’s noise faded… but in his ears it still thundered like a roaring beast flying far too low.

He sat there, shaking, pressing his head to his knee, burrowing into the hay, feeling every drop of blood pulse with heat in his breasts, his belly, his throat, and he whispered through ragged breaths:

— Ha… ha-kuu… sa-mala… (No… no… take me not…)