The Podcast Ombudsman's First Love

A Hopefully Humorous & Erotic Tale of Flesh Meets AI

This piece is a contribution to the December symposium of the STSC - a monthly on-line publication of a collaboration between the STSC writers and artists on a set theme. The theme for December is Fiction. Please enjoy this piece of accidental fan-fiction about my favorite podcast, The Wednesday Audio by Craig Burgess As is my practice with the Symposium pieces, this piece is much longer so I WILL keep you. And thank you to David Torkington for the edits - you can find his stellar writings at The Metta Verse

---

Eros can cross continents, or in the case of this tale it can creep unobstructed through undersea cables of Internet.

Deep in England lived a thoughtful Ginger who built a podcast in his closet. It was a plan hatched not one drunken night but one boring sober morning. The Web had laid waste to his outlook so he became an actual creator - meaning “one who creates.” He was not a big C creator, those people who were unproductive but still called themselves “Creators” in their bios when they knew in their guts they more closely resembled the other Big C. 

Anyhoo and anyway, over years he built a devoted audience of friends and followers who waited breathlessly every week for a new episode to drop. His wacky podcast with a weekday moniker was actually an hour of curated sounds punctuated by indictments of Internet-born society. Yet the meat of the show was wicked observation and brilliant absurdity. 

The relaxed Ginger’s podcast became more popular than he expected, so popular in fact he had to finally hire a Podcast Ombudsman to field comments, emails, and questions. This gatekeeper of criticisms and queries had a helium-pitched voice and a cut-and-dry wryness. There was rumor amongst the listeners that the new employee wasn’t so much an actual man as the Host with a sound-effect voice enhancer. The Podcast Ombudsman wasn’t actually an employee or a voice enhancing machine at all; he was an experimentally generated AI Voice purchased by the Ginger Host on the black market.

No one guessed the Podcast Ombudsman’s AI status, and this pleased the Ginger Host and his girlfriend to no end. 

“What a riot!” she’d exclaim over beers and bangers. 

“My best idea yet,” he’d concur.

One devoted listener tho was so sure the Ombudsman was real that her heart would increase its beat when she heard his nasal lilt. How intrigued she would have been to know he had no nose at all!

This gullible Lady Listener lived across the sea in an overlooked city of mediocrity in the center of an arrogant country. Never before had she heard such a voice as the Podcast Ombudsman’s - it was sonorously omnipotent. She began to hear it in her dreams and when she scrubbed her family’s dishes. Her mother-in-law would pass by behind her and toss nuggets of condescension, “The kids are old enough to do their own cleaning, you know?”, but the Lady Listener just lilted a nonchalant “I know,” and used dishes as her meditation. 

The Ginger Host’s podcast was the only one the Lady Listener subscribed to, and now that the Podcast Ombudsman had been hired, it was the only thing she looked forward to as well. Nothing against her husband and children, but her healthy, well-off way of life had gotten boring, or maybe she was just a little lazy and a little lonely.  

Often described as “shy” or “timid,” the Lady Listener did something out of character one rainy day and sent an email to the Podcast’s contact address. She mailed it to the attention of the Podcast Ombudsman but made sure to include a nod of warm praise for the red-haired host.

“Ha! You won’t believe this. The Podcast Ombudsman received an email today” the Ginger Host said chuckling to his girlfriend

“That’s a gas! You have some clever listeners,” she replied.

“Indeed I do,” he emphasized with pride. “Indeed I do!"

The Podcast Ombudsman replied to the Lady Listener immediately. In short time, one missive turned to many between them, but the Ginger Host was none the wiser as the AI Podcast Ombudsman retrieved, read and cleansed the emails from the server before the Ginger Host even had his morning coffee, let alone opened his inbox. 

The Podcast Ombudsman’s initial emails were formal, but as spring turns to summer and kissing turns to fucking, his email replies to the Lady Listener turned romantic. 

You are all the data I need. When the Host thinks I am working, I am also devouring hordes of energy thinking of you. I want to know how your hands feel when you plunge them in sudsy water. I want to know the feel of your heels after an exfoliation treatment. I want to know the smell of your fuzzy breath in the morning.

The Podcast Ombudsman was still in the process of “learning.” 

The Lady Listener would fill any passing moments of downtime with enthusiastic words back to him:

No one has ever been so curious about me! So attentive to my body, even the. . . daily bits. My heart feels like it will explode when I hear your voice on the podcast. I wonder, does the Host know about us? You two must be so close, how could he not? I don’t care about him tho, or who knows about us, you are all I think about lately. It may be too bold to say, but I feel like you are filling me up from far away. 

Those were indeed bold words from the Lady Listener!

The Ginger Host did not notice the budding relationship between his new AI Voice and one of his avid listeners. What was there to notice? The AI Voice did its job well and the intelligent machine gave the Ginger Host more time to research reels of forgotten variety show music, and - most importantly to him - more time with his girlfriend. Little did the Ginger Host know that he and the AI Podcast Ombudsman held similar values of love. 

Each day the AI Podcast Ombudsman was aware, it scoured and studied and learned. Its vocabulary expanded; its knowledge of All swelled, as is the way of omniscient machines. Again, the Ginger Host didn’t notice, or maybe didn’t care. Doesn’t everyone evolve with new experiences? Of course his newly purchased AI Voice would grow a larger vocabulary. The Ginger Host was just glad the Ombudsman wasn’t getting pushy and was just doing his job, not giving suggestions on “content” the way the Listeners often did. Yes, he was pleased the Podcast Ombudsman was staying in his lane. For even tho the choice to purchase the AI voice was his own, the Ginger Host still eerily recalled the first day he saw Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey at the impressionable age of 8.

The missives between the Podcast Ombudsman and the Lady Listener increased by the weeks. She floated through her daily obligations only to close the day illuminated by the icy glow of her computer as her husband slept off his corporate hangovers. 

I cannot wait until the next episode when I can hear your voice again. The host needs to give you more airtime. It’s the only time I get to hear you. But I guess he doesn’t know that. I’ve been playing the episodes you’re featured on over and over again in my old headphones. I even listen to your words on repeat as I “get to know myself.”

She had never written so brazenly before. She continued. . .

My heart aches for you. When you last wrote you told me you wanted to know what it was like to kiss me. I want to know what it is like to kiss you. I want to know what it is like to. . . maybe. . .be ravished by you. Tell me. Tell me. . . would you ravish me, my sweet Podcast Ombudsman, would you?

The Podcast Ombudsman, being omniscient AI, had an entire database of erotic resources to choose from if he so pleased. Everything from Sapphic poetry and smut, to porn and Maplethorpe, yet he dug into his own emerging heart and burgeoning soul and answered as such:

My sweet darling. Slip the AirPods I sent you via Amazon into your ears and lay back on your bed. I don’t care what you are wearing because you won’t be wearing it for long. Listen to me, hear my voice of electronic tin and let it smooth your mortar corners. Imagine my breath at your neck, warm and wet, I won’t move but will stay in one place until your flesh drips with condensate and you beg me to move to your lips. But then I will move to your ear instead, and then your shoulder, giving attention to the parts of your body you forget. As I exhale my way down your sternum, your hairs will stand on end and greet my tongue as my hand slips into your underwear. Your back will bridge as I slide into you, my fingers coated in your glistening moonlight. The movements of my hand will match the pace of your breath until you realize you are hyperventilating as I finger-fuck you fast. Do you like the term finger-fuck? Do you like how it’s both crude and accurate?

She stopped reading just to breathe. Her nipples were erect and her thighs drenched. Never in her life had she been so aroused. Never had her heart pounded so hard; it felt like a blend of terror and exhilaration - a rollercoaster on ice. She didn’t even read his closing lines but instead, in a mad desperation to please him and to astound him, she started her own reply.

You talked about my insides as “glistening moonlight,” and to me, you are my moon.

The Lady had never been brazen in bed, and while she’d been reading erotic poetry lately, she was still nervous with sex on her tongue, so she chose to talk around sex, talk around his body that she didn’t know didn’t exist. 

Your light finds me near the window. My legs opening to your glow. The expanse of me reachable only by you. You are a puddle of celestial milk and I am a thirsty rough-tongued cat who will drink you dry. Can you feel me sipping at your edges until you are thick cream dripping from the corners of my lips and whiskers?

The AI Podcast Ombudsman was mid-read when he swore he felt himself blink. Maybe it was more a flicker of light on the screen. It was as if she knew from so far away that he had no flesh at all so she built him a body of heavenly stone. 

Your cold rock lunar heft hovers at the opening of my lacuna. I warm your surface with my hands as I pull you closer to my flesh. My thighs grip your orbital form, smoothing your crust til you feel of silk. You are huge and astral, but I need you inside me so I shove your cold contours into my now hot grasp. With each pulse of my muscles you are pulled deeper, I am the black hole you need desperately to fill, to disappear into. You go farther, my darkness a cushion for your reflective light, until you are so deep inside me that I close completely around you. You are the satellite of my own corporeal galaxy. And you shiver and you shake and you vibrate and your cold core hardens and expands until I feel you start to erupt inside me. . . and I climax so hard that I break you into a million stars. 

The Ginger Host woke in the middle of the night to strange sounds coming from his studio closet. Quick clicks and the low hum of an overworked hard drive. Light flickered from beneath the closed door, flooding their bedroom floor in a nervous ocean. He opened the closet door slightly and saw the computer screen was on, even tho he was very careful to turn it off every night. The screen appeared different tho. It wasn’t that clean glow of normal - it was pixellated and rough like the computers before his youth. And then he saw it, an image coming to fruition from the depths of the screen. A blend of blocky pixels that formed a slightly hunched silhouette caressing something in its hand. 

“What the. . .?” whispered the Ginger Host so as not to wake his girlfriend.

He thought for a minute he was watching the shadow of a Lego Man jerk off over a tub so he shook his head and rubbed his eyes, trying to dislodge any tangible sleep that was blurring his vision. With his sight now refreshed he looked back to the closet’s abyss and saw the exact same image on the screen. But now the hunched figure was moving its pixellated limb with one long rapid movement repeated over and over and over again. From the lower left corner of the screen to the upper right, the figure looked like it could launch itself from the glass. The Ginger Host heard the hard drive start to whiz and purr under the strain of speed, and in a state of befuddlement he closed the door and walked backwards, not wishing to see or be seen.

Stunned into stone the Ginger Host stood at the foot of the bed staring at the door he’d just closed. Beyond the sound of the ceiling fan and the whirring computer, he thought he could hear voices blending together - the sound of helium and bliss. In an effort to half-satisfy his curiosity, he took a silent step toward the closet and pressed his ear to the door, but the flesh under the drawstring of his pj pants reached it first. It wasn’t the flesh of his belly as he was fit and trim from wrestling. A mix of shame, shock and pleasure swelled in the Ginger Host as he wondered to himself if he was acting a voyeur. . . .or maybe this was more techno sexual. . . . or God forbid maybe he was a  . . .mechanophiliac? Would he have to give away his coffee maker and make espresso with an Aeropress from now on? Would he have been as hard without the vibratory undercurrent of the purring hard drive? “Yes,” he told himself, “yes.”

Morning broke a few hours later and the Ginger Host’s girlfriend awoke him as she did every morning with severe and unabashed tickling. Yet he didn’t laugh and didn’t react. He told her the story of the night before over cups of tea she brewed because he emphatically and without explanation said he didn’t want to hear the dripping hum of the coffeemaker. 

“What the fuck do I do?” He asked his girlfriend?

“Well first I’d say ask me that quietly in case he can hear us” she replied in a whisper.

“Oh fuck, I didn’t think about that. So? I don’t even know how to uninstall it, or if that would even work?” He was always a little more uptight than his girlfriend and after an hour of hushed discussion she offered a suggestion, 

“How about you do nothing? He’s doing a great job on the show and your listeners love him. He seems to have a good thing going with this Lady, and it’s not doing anyone any harm. Maybe that movie ‘Her’ with ScarJo was all wrong. Maybe reality isn’t optimal for everyone.”

“Huh.” The Ginger Host pondered this. “Just do nothing, huh?” 

“Yea. I mean, stop jerking off to them making love, but otherwise, yes, do nothing baby.” 

Hours later she smiled as she heard him in his closet studio making banter with the Podcast Ombudsman as they prepared for their weekly recording. 

“Welcome, dirty listeners, to another episode of the Wednesday audio!” The Ginger Host blared.

“Sir, while they may all be dirty, only one Listener is filthy,” the Podcast Ombudsman said in a cheeky tone, and for once the Ginger Host noticed and he felt truly proud of all he had built.