The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

Chapter 1

Silvia had broken the law.

It was something she had never done before, willingly. Sure, she had sped once in a while. In college she had once been offered a hit of a recreational drug that had been making the rounds, but she didn’t like it much. Once she had absent-mindedly walked out of a grocery store without paying for milk, and was embarrassed when caught at the door. But this was unlawful trespassing, almost burglary, and Silvia was a law-abiding young woman, meek and unassuming, who had always insisted on playing by the rules.

Worse, it was unlawful trespassing on the site of the Aphrodite Organization, a big concern, with teams of lawyers capable of inflicting arbitrary punishment upon anyone so disrespectful as to step on their clients’ sacred ground. But there come times when the law obstructs that which is right, and Silvia believed this to be one of those times.

An hour earlier she had seen the note on her kitchen table from her roommate Corinne, a note that asked her not to look for her, a message of farewell. She had acquired employment at the Aphrodite Organization, and they demanded that their employees live on-site. Aphrodite worked on secret projects, Aphrodite hiring was known for asking for extraordinary commitment on the part of their workers, and Aphrodite staff were rarely seen outside the building. But these were not causes for concern for Silvia.

Silvia was concerned because rumors had circulated recently that the Aphrodite organization was, in fact, nothing less than a religious cult masquerading as a corporation, and she feared that Corinne had gotten herself into a dire situation, and was in need of rescue. She would have hoped, were the note found from her, that Corinne would do the same.

She heard reports on the news about such cults every day. Despite the air of rationalism that suffused twenty-second century life, it was still all-too-easy easy for unscrupulous groups to prey upon people’s uncertainty and weakness, to wrap them up in a thick net of lies and propaganda, absorbing their finances and independence into themselves, becoming strong enough to extend further out into the world, growing outward at a slowly accelerating pace until the hit the brick walls of public inquiry.

Silvia’s plan was simple. She had borrowed a spare business suit and skirt from a friend who worked as a secretary, and made herself up as official-looking as she could. She would sneak inside a side entrance and pose as a lost new employee, or a new convert to Aphrodite-ism, or whatever they called it, and just look around. While the building was wide and deep it wasn’t tall, so she probably wouldn’t have to explore more than one floor. If they had a basement level things might take longer, but the longer she thought about it the longer it would take, she reasoned. Although Silvia was quite timid in most respects she had a strong sense of responsibility to her friends, and although Corinne was less of a friend than a roommate, she resolved that something had to be done.

How she actually got into the building, she decided, was simply a fluke. Even the most advanced security systems are vulnerable to electrical faults, human error, and plain bad luck. As it happened, they were having a large number of special visitors, investors among them, and instead of treating each one as a Visitor Case, or feeding their likenesses into the computer individually, they just turned it off temporarily. Silvia slipped in without even realizing she was defeating the most advanced intruder detection system in the world, and she could have walked right in the front door without being challenged.

On the outside, the structure looked very much like a gigantic Parthenon built around a big rectangle of smoked, black glass. Big as Parthenons go perhaps, but not large by the standards of twenty-second century office buildings. But once she was inside the layer of glass that shielded away all sight three inches within the columns, the architecture rapidly became more traditional. There was an inner wall composed of steel beams interspersed with another layer of darkened glass, simultaneously stylish and yet which completely obscured the inside of the building from outside eyes. Silvia was the first uninvited visitor ever to intrude beyond those great stone and steel sentries and enter the structure, and soon after than she first saw the strangest thing she had ever seen in her life.

Chapter 2

Now inside the building, Silvia was at a loss as to how to proceed. The hallway that connected the side entrance through which she had entered opened out to eight other hallways placed evenly along its length, each of them with other intersecting halls in a grid pattern. Except for infrequent lights set into the ceiling at each intersection the building was unlit, casting the stretches of hall between them in deep shadow. She had no clues to Corinne’s whereabouts, and a thorough search could conceivably take hours. So far the place seemed deserted, but security was bound to be heavier deeper inside the building.

Thinking any plan was better than walking aimlessly and opening doors, Silvia headed towards the front of the building. At least it was easy to locate; the hall led right to it, opening into the reception area from the right-hand side. It was also poorly-lit, in the corners by yellow incandescent bulbs, with a larger one placed in the center of the room towards the back. Moonlight streamed in through the glass wall at the front of the room, giving its contents a dim, unearthly aspect. Thus lit were sparse clusters of comfortable armchairs and glass-topped tables, looking something like a waiting room for a upscale doctor’s practice, or a hotel foyer. Overseeing the room, underneath the large central light, was a wooden desk, very much like a school-teacher’s, with a small hand-bell on one corner. An ordinary-seeming chair sat directly behind it in the center. Oddly, the desk held no computer screen or keyboard, or paper or pens, or carried anything on its austere varnished surface except the bell.

She was examining the desk intently, trying to determine the role of the one who sat there, when for the first time she heard the clatter of regimented footsteps, as of fanatically-trained security guards, echo forth against the polished floor of the hallway she had just been through.

Frantic, Silvia’s eyes judged each possible hiding place the room offered. The chairs in the waiting area offered little shelter. The tables were made completely of transparent glass, with only a couple of magazines resting atop it. The approaching clatter got louder, and now she could tell it wasn’t just precisely cadenced, but super-precisely. It wasn’t that the footfalls struck the floor all at exactly the same time, but in a smooth wave, as if a gigantic centipede was approaching down the hall with orderly, yet asynchronous, peddling. Slivia hid behind the desk, ducking down beneath the top and hunching herself up within the leg space, and peeked out just in time to see them coming around the corner. The ordered troop that emerged into the foyer turned out not to be a centipede at all, nor were did they appear to be much like security guards, although they did wear a uniform of a sort. They were human female in appearance, and all in identical clothing, what little there was of it. Half of it was a deep blue cloth that rested casually, yet carefully, upon their breasts, held in place by brass chains which looped loose around the neck, and with dangling ends that bounced against their bare flesh at the side. The rustling of the chains produced a faint shimmering noise, like a softly-played tambourine.

More chains supported two precariously-draped sheets of additional pieces of cloth, also deep blue, one of which rested over the rump and which shifted sinuously as the supporting buttocks alternatingly rose and fell, and one in front that danced around as each upper leg in turn lifted the cloth up then fell back, framing the indentation between them on alternating sides. Their flanks were bare except for the chain that went around their waists and supported the sheets, from which hung bangles of loose tinkling bits that chimed interesting notes of counterpoint with each other. Each of them also wore an ornate brass collar of flowing style, and both their forearms were encircled by similar metal bands. They each had one additional band, a thin circle of yellow-orange metal encircling each perfectly-cadenced left-thigh.

Their ankles were adorned with jingling bangles that hung from a chain wrapped around them in two loops, crossing over at the front. Their shoes were simple sandals with a half-inch heel and a wooden bottom that clattered on the floor. Other than these scanty adornments, the bodies of entering women appeared to be completely bare, though their faces were yet obscured from Silvia’s observant gaze.

They strode into the room perfectly ordered, one would have thought mechanically if it weren’t for their incredibly fluid movements. Silvia herself noted it, that it wasn’t a mechanism as of hammers or pulleys, but like that of counter-weights and fly-wheels, strange twisting machines that did not pound or break, but smoothly twisted and gracefully aligned. They kept perfect time with every step as if coached, though none of them spoke at all. If one could consider them human, then they were all beautiful, and while they were of varying height they were all slim and slightly muscular.

Silvia became so fascinated by their strange attire and flowing, identical, sequential motions that she was startled to realize that they had already reached the center of the room and stopped. They stood wordlessly and at attention, impassive as stone. The moonlight shone in through the big one-way windows at the front of the room, blessing them with its spell, enhancing their air of simultaneous mystery, allure and the monstrous.

Chapter 3

The women were all faced away from her, all still in a line six long and two abreast, the twelve standing completely still and utterly quiet, as if waiting for a signal. Their breathing was a ripple through the line from the front back, giving them an oddly-enticing, pulsing rhythm. Fidgeting, frequently switching sides of the desk to peer out from behind to get better looks, Silvia noticed that many of them had rich, waist-length hair, draping back to just above their barely-shrouded rears, but some had shorter hair. One’s reached barely below her shoulders. The two lead women each had long, brushed hair, bunched together as it came off the scalp, forming it into a long pony tail. The others’ hair just draped, some of them straight down, some in curly cascades down their back. Black, brunette and blonde hair were about equally represented, and two of the girls (including one of the two leaders) had red hair. From her hiding spot, Silvia’s sharp eyes could just catch something silver, like an earpiece from a pair of eyeglasses but more sinewy, around one of their ears. Both the lead women carried a small bag, black, absorbing the moonlight like velvet, with a reflective drawstring.

They stood silently for about a minute, and Silvia was almost ready to emerge from the desk, though she was yet unsure whether to escape or examine them more closely. Then, all at once and with only the noise of their footsteps and the tinkling of their bangles, they scattered about the room. Some roamed singly and some were in pairs. Silvia tentatively stretched her neck out to see what they were doing. One of the leader women with the bag placed it down on one of the tables. Several cycled among the chairs, adjusting cushions, and using small machines on the upholstery that produced a solution that foamed up and then dissipated into nothing. Two pairs worked as teams to clean the glass of the tables and replace their magazines with additional copies from within the bag.

As they moved around Silvia just caught sight on their faces, or what passed for them. They were each wearing a strange, iridescent mask that covered their eyes and most of the rest of their face. But she had no need to stretch forward to get a better look, as with a sudden sound of scraping wood the desk was pulled away, revealing her to the room. Silvia gasped: she was caught!

But the woman, the pony tailed redhead leader girl who had revealed her, seemed as if she had not noticed the still-hunched Silvia at all. Instead, the barely-clothed servitor proceeded to apply one of the cleaning devices to the desk exactly as if no one else were present. Silvia got an odd sensation of invisibility.

Was it possible the woman had not seen her? When the woman came around to clean that side of the desk she seemed careful not to jostle Silvia, as if she dealt with hiding trespassers every day, and put up with them in stoic resignation. Instead of trying to push her out of the way to reach the central drawer, she stooped over her to reach it, being careful not to dislocate the confused intruder. As she diligently worked away at washing the mahogany, the woman’s breasts fell down out of their loose wrapping and rested on Silvia’s head, causing her to feel, among other things, subtly mocked.

Silvia then realized the answer, what these women were, had to be. They were acting very much like androids, ones without programming geared to reacting to unexpected variables. That had to be it, nothing else she could think of could explain their combination of precise movements and indifference to intruders. Silvia had taken a class in robotic systems in college, and although she hadn’t done very well at it, she had gained a little insight into their development.

She was puzzled, however, that while their actions were coordinated and synchronized with precision that almost suggested Swiss workmanship, there was such variety between each example of the hardware. Subtle variations in skin tone, hair color, and bone structure, with much of the variety present in humans, was also present here. Silvia wondered at this. The economics of production would have made it much more cost-efficient to produce identical models, and this variation would require a lot of expensive custom work. If there were any more robots like these on the premises, then the Aphrodite Organization must be very well funded to have constructed them all.

If they were androids, she realized with a horrible jolt, they might have motion sensors tied into the security system, sensors that would miss a still, hunched figure but might catch sudden movement. A frightening vision rose up within her mind, of a team of twelve scantily-clad androids, turning simultaneously as one woman at a careless motion, striding over to her, the tinkling of their garb belying the terrible purpose in their gait, grabing hold with unnaturally strong arms, lifting her up, pulling her away….

Silvia shook her head, dislodging the still-hanging breasts that nestled in her hair. The unreality of the situation was affecting her. She felt like an unheeded observer of some ancient furniture-washing ritual, one the participants were prepared to ignore at any cost. The breasts, trembling somewhat with the circular motion applied by her to the wood of the desk, continued to beat against her skull, flap-flap, flap-flap. Silvia was too terrified of the consequences of being detected to move. The musk of the woman invaded her nostrils, rich in exotic spices, electrifying a portion of her hind-brain that had not been much affected before.

Despite their graceful mechanical motions, Silvia noted, the women displayed a lifelike appearance that she had not known was possible to achieve within the limits of technology. The tradeoff in human-seeming robots, she remembered, was between realism and function. The more human it looked, the less it could do. There were thousands of researchers working on the problem, working towards solving the famous problem of the “uncanny valley,” where up to a certain point androids made to look like human beings were regarded as cute, yet beyond they became progressively creepier, as the eye began to latch onto any tiny differences it could perceive, especially in the area of facial features and expressions.

The close quarters in which the android woman labored, wordlessly, tirelessly, obsessively at length, afforded Silvia a better look at her mask. It seemed similar to the ones worn by her teammates, and was shaped like a very ornate butterfly that completely covered her face. It had an elegant, brass body, two long sphere-tipped antennae sticking up between her eyes, and wings that looked, carried the light, and were colored exactly like stained glass, in a spectrum of hues ranging from reddish purple at the top to indigo at the bottom. But also like stained glass, they were functionally opaque, and they did an efficient job of completely hiding the facial features of the woman—that is, the android—wearing it. The mask was translucent but impossible to see detail through, even from up close, lending credence to the notion that the robot’s visual receptors were carried on it, perhaps within the bulbs at the end of the antennae. The upper wings stuck out from the insect’s torso at diagonal angles upward to cover the eye from the eyebrow down to the top of the cheekbone, and stuck out for some distance beyond the face. Between them only a triangle of forehead could be seen of her face beneath her hairline, and that was slightly obscured by the butterfly’s head, a featureless brass sphere topping the mask’s tiny body, which rested upon the nose. The shorter bottom wings extended downward at the same angle, similarly colored, and effectively hid the woman’s cheeks and framed her mouth and chin.

Silvia then realized the importance of the masks. By hiding faces, these robots could more easily overcome the uncanny valley effect and interact easily with human beings. Faces were hardest to fashion, she remembered, and the hardest part about faces were the eyes, which were often doll-like and dead. Hiding eyes would enable their creators to avoid the problem entirely. But on the other hand, mouths were almost as hard, and they were uncovered. Silvia had yet to see any mouths open, and determined they were probably just purposeless latex detailing over a flat metal frame.

Silvia noticed that the woman was standing bolt upright now, beside her. Her strong thighs were level with her head, and her crotch, draped in blue, was only a little higher. Silvia felt a strange impulse to check if this, too, was formed like a human being’s.

Silvia realized, she was waiting, patiently, wordlessly, politely, for Silvia to move and allow her access to the inside of the desk. Silvia felt an emotion akin to embarrassment, and inched back to allow the statuesque mute to see to her duty. Obviously this android must be able to detect her, and for some reason just didn’t care, so she decided to sit on the chair and observe the strange creature as she continued her work.

Statuesque? Yes, Silvia decided, that was exactly what this was, a statue given life and color. She would not be out of place permanently affixed, transmuted into stone, posing with an arm upraised and displaying her petrified charms forever to the world.

The woman-thing hunched down on the floor where Silvia had been scrunched, and knelt on all fours in reach the underside of the desk. She attended to her labor without any hint of modesty, the front of her loincloth falling down loosely in front of her crotch. Silvia, overcome with curiosity, got off the chair and knelt at her side, craned her head slightly, adjusted her angle… yes, it, too, was simulated accurately. Silvia was more than a little disturbed out by this.

Taking notice of her bold investigation, Silvia blushed and returned to the chair. That spot was no better, giving her an excellent view of the creature’s rear, waggling barely-contained beneath its ruffled blue cover, the sheet draped across its charge almost more as enticement than barrier. Her buttock muscles, impossibly well-simulated, pulsed with the effort she applied to scrubbing the underside of the desk, flowing back and forth in a rhythmic, sensual motion, displayed to Silvia almost as if she were trying to impress.

Silvia realized she was staring, and reflexively looked away. These almost-naked robotic creatures looked like they were dolled up for a very specific purpose, one confirmed by the lewd, inviting motions that ruled their actions, and Silvia squirmed in her seat. She remembered the name of the place, The Temple of Aphrodite. Such a place was named in ancient Greece, a place that maintained a stable of thousands of concubine slaves that attracted both sexes from across the land, bringing great wealth and prominence to Corinth.

Silvia wondered how many of these android women were present here. The building didn’t seem like it was large enough to house thousands of anything, but it was true that androids wouldn’t need much storage space.

The woman finally withdrew from the desk cavity and stood, placing her butt inches away from Silvia’s face, again oblivious to her presence. She stood at attention, facing the room and her laboring associates as if overseeing them. Silvia had to check once more… she reached forward and felt the creature’s right cheek through the cloth. It felt real, warm to the touch, firm but yielding. Muscles tensed beneath her pressing fingertip in a way no amount of workmanship could duplicate. That, along with the unmistakable scent given off by the woman, convinced some ancient, inner portion of her mind, an observer that could not be fooled. Silvia held her other hand to her mouth in shock; this was no android ass-cheek she was pressing. It belonged unmistakably to a human being.

She caught a motion from above out of the corner of her eye. She looked up, and saw that the woman had turned her head around to face her. If she could see through that mask, she’d be staring directly at her over her shoulder. Her lips, visible beneath the bottom wings of the mask, did not move, were the same thin, impassive line as before. The sudden, direct attention sent a pang of fear and shame down Silvia’s spine, and her hand flew back as if burned. As soon as she broke contact the head turned away, and the figure resumed its silent vigil over the others’ labors.

The shock was too much. Silvia pressed her feet against the floor and pushed, backing away from her momentary contact with that alien consciousness. She knocked her chair over with a wooden clatter that could have, should have woken these purposeful beings from their task.

But didn’t. The red-headed worker with the hair band continued standing mute, giving no indication something had occurred, the touch forgotten. Silvia ran from the room, back the way she had entered it, her shoes beating an uneven, frenetic rhythm on the polished floor, and no one turned to watch her leave.

Soon she was in an elevator and confronted by a matrix of buttons, marked 1 through B20. She hit one near the top, and a short ride down and open doors later, Silvia was standing dazed in a large, vaguely-lit square room, containing forty-eight more such-attired, utterly passive people, standing twelve along each wall, all at attention bathed in flickering red light, all completely silent except for the unnaturally regimented, linked sounds of their breathing.

Chapter 4

Silvia stood paralyzed with fear for a moment, then scrambled backwards. But the door had already closed, the elevator abandoning her in favor of a long descent down to the lowest bowels of the basement.

Silvia forced herself to her senses; none of the creatures had yet to do anything to harm her, and though their attire and manner carried a strangely martial air, none of them had yet to make a threatening move toward her. Silvia took in a deep breath, the spiced aroma of the inexplicable mutes infiltrating her nostrils, and most of her fear left her. She decided their scent must be a relaxant, but even were that true it could only blunt the knife of fear that sunk into Silvia’s heart. But it did aid her in acting rationally in this strange place, and Silvia could only be thankful for that.

Unlike the foyer above, this room contained both genders, in equal numbers. The females were similarly attired to the first set, with a little more variety to their bodies, sixteen against the right wall and right against the front. Two of them were obviously of African descent, and one short, raven-haired specimen appeared to be Asian. They all wore masks identical to the ones she saw upstairs, and they all wore the same skimpy attire, which had the advantage of being one-size-barely-conceals-all. Three of them wore hair bands, and one, the one closest to the middle of the front wall, had an unadorned brass tiara in her hair.

The males were likewise arrayed around the left edge of the room, and wore somewhat-like garb. They had no breast-drapes, their chests were broad and thick and untroubled with dangling brass, but like the women they wore ornate brass collars around their neck, and their wrists and one thigh were clasped with wide, intricate bands. Their loincloths, which were slightly larger, also draped in front of their crotches and over their rumps, and were dark brown instead of deep blue.

Their masks were shaped more like moths than butterflies, and while their colors went through a similar range of hue they were closer to earth tones, and more milky than glossy. Their body-shapes had a bit more variety than the women, ranging from only moderately-built to almost muscle-bound, and though none of them looked as if they could compete at Olympic weight-lifting, a quiet air of power exuded from each of them, more of a result of their excellent poise than their actual bodies. Though many of those were impressive in their own way.

Their most frequent hairstyle among the males was shoulder-length tresses that rippled down from the head, but some were cut more closely. The area of their faces that Silvia could see were all smooth-shaven, without even a glimmer of a mustache to be seen peeking out from between a moths’ lower wings. They were matched in number with the females, with two African-fashioned specimens and one Asian. Four of them wore a small brass circlet that was visible around their foreheads, and one of those had a small green jewel set in its middle.

The room itself was quite dark, lit from above with a faint, pale radiance much like the honest moonlight from upstairs. Decor was almost absent, contrasting greatly with the polished corporate office-ways up on ground floor. The walls were dull and metallic, and a cold, brief touch confirmed that they were but bare metal. Towards the bottom of the wall, just before the corners on the sides, were large, semi-circular alcoves from which flickered red light, like torches, that lit the bottom-half of the room much as if by fire. The light accentuated the curves and angles of the assembled bodies, and the flicker patterns tended to distract Silvia like staring into a flame. The light and the living statuary were the room’s only decoration.

Silvia felt as if she had stumbled onto a secret midnight ritual, a full moon hidden behind a cloud somewhere overhead, whose participants were merely waiting for her to leave before engaging in frantic dancing, uncouth chants, diabolic acts. Although Silvia was the product of hundreds of years of technology, her brain was a result of tens of thousands of years of hunting and survival, and as with all humans the ancient patterns of superstition, tribal hierarchy and nature worship lurked deep and profound beneath the shallow, unsteady turbulence of her consciousness. The mad desire to flee once again shot down Silvia’s legs, but was thwarted by the simple fact there was nowhere to flee to.

None of them, the men nor the women, paid Silvia any attention, though their posture gave an impression of being ready to leap to action at any signal, ready to rush forward and capture any helpless intruders, subduing them with strong arms, carrying them off to an unknown fate. But none of them so much as twitched. Despite the loud warning bells sounding in her mind, rung by primal instinct, her better sense (if not her common) convinced her that these people, clones she was starting to consider calling them, were no more threat to her than the set she had encountered out front.

She was careful, however, to avoid brushing up against any of them, especially the numerous attractive male specimens who, she had to admit, were being shown to great effect. She couldn’t help but notice the bulges outlined roundly against their front loincloths. Warning bells weren’t the only noises echoing through the more primitive chambers of Silvia’s brain as, nervously, she edged towards one of the other walls.

Turning her attention towards finding escape, Silvia noticed the drone-people were not standing evenly-spaced around the outside of the room, but seemed to purposely not be blocking one blank expanse of metal along each wall. Silvia reasoned that the gaps must conceal portals, and closer examination revealed a thin metal seam in the wall dead in the center of the closest gap.

She tried pushing and prying with her fingers, but couldn’t open them, and there was no give. Neither moved the set on the right-hand wall, but the ones in the middle slid open with a distinctive pneumatic whsssh noise, drawing back into the wall automatically at Silvia’s approach like on TV spaceships. On the other side lay a long hallway flanked infrequently along its length by other, similar, metal doors. The hallway was lit the same way as the room she had just left, moonlight from above and flickering red from below, and she couldn’t see to its end.

As she began walking down its length, for the first time Silvia thought to check for security cameras, but oddly there were none to be seen. She walked down the hall and picked the first door she encountered on the left, figuring it was as good a way as anyway to begin her search.

She entered the room a wide room, wide yet shallow relative to its width, and she was hit and left still, nose twitching, by a musky odor. It was like a subdued version of a men’s locker room, but with a sweet, spicy musk interspersed. She had to shake her head to clear her thoughts, as the effect, combined with the sensual lighting, was vaguely intoxicating.

It was mostly dark, but a blue, rippling light, like that from a vast body of water, suffused the room from below. Silvia saw that its source was a pair of projection generators set into the corners. Along the back wall, she saw two racks of what looked like shallow, cushioned tubs. Half of them stuck out at regular intervals from the upper-half of the wall, and below each was another that was more at floor level. They were like bunk beds, but they were all sloped slightly, like a mad scientist’s work-table, at about a twenty-degree tilt. They were cushioned tray-like beds, with a thicker cushion near the wall, like a pillow. There was a small ledge at the bottom edge of each platform, presumably to prevent a reclining figure from sliding off. The bunks were all empty, and thankfully the room seemed to be deserted.

Silvia turned around and saw the racks of unworn moth masks resting on the wall behind her. She put her face up to them and noted their unworldly aspect. The simulated glass caught the blue light from the projectors, reflecting back from the milky depths fascinating sparkle patterns and wave effects within the wings of the mask, while the brass of their bodies and antennae caught the light dully and were hard to see. The wings, it seemed, were actually capable of moving on their own, because they fluttered periodically, in an inviting, flowing wave that pulsed across the arrangement on the rack, roughly once a second. They rested on hooks on the wall, Silvia saw, but then revised that. They didn’t rest, but held onto them using two thin, silver appendages. The same ones, she realized, that supported them from the ears of the clones outside, implying flexibility. The wings moved on their own, maybe these polished tendrils were also capable of motion? The fact that the masks could move confused Silvia. What could they be for? She devoted her attention to the cabinets beneath the masks, which were filled with sandals and brass chains, arm and leg bands and small sheets of folded cloth, that if she looked very closely in the dim, shimming blue light of the room, she could determine were dark brown. Piecing it together, Silvia realized she must be in a sleeping area for the male clones. She resolved that she did not want to be in here when they would bustle in the door and begin disrobing, whether they noticed her or not, and went back out into the hallway.

No sooner had the door whssshed behind her, she heard a second, fainter whsssh from further down the hall, and voices, their source distant and invisible in the dim light, breaking up the wordless perfection of the environment. Faint in the distance, she heard a man report, “Completed inspection of barrack 197-F, continuing,” in a casual voice. Yellow circles of electric light danced across the walls between her and their source. Then she heard chaotic, clattering footsteps approach from down the hall!

She turned to run the other way, hoping the mysterious strangers were unable to somehow activate the clones in the elevator vestibule and putting a sudden end to her escape, but as suddenly the steps halted. The voice spoke again, “Beginning inspection of 198-M… yeah, we should be ready to wrap up soon, just this hallway to go, over.” There was a whsssh, some more clatters, another whsssh, then silence.

Silvia wanted to flee, but made herself stand and think through her position. By now she realized what a fluke her entry into this complex must have been. She could only have gotten in because of some colossal security failure. Ordinarily, she surmised, she’d never have gotten this far. The complete lack of security cameras and detectors, at least those that she would have noticed being triggered, seemed to indicate that the outside security must be so good that they simply never expected anyone to get past it. Thus, if she didn’t find Corinne now while she had the chance, she might never get another.

Silvia resolved to hide somewhere while the inspectors passed, then resume her search in peace once they had left. She entered the door across from the one she had entered before, which had a small, luminous marking over it: 200-F.

Chapter 5

This room was lit the same as the other, with a shimmering, aquatic blue light. The odor was more subdued, with a stronger spicy component. At first it seemed deserted, but upon approaching the bunks Silvia saw that the room was occupied. Seventeen of the twenty-four bunks were filled by female clones, again all of differing complexions, builds and races, all apparently inactive and deep in slumber. No two of their bodies were the same, and the sheer variety of apparent origin, history and genetics gave them a powerful aspect of nature, each as different in form as if they all once had human mothers. Only their stiff-legged and straight-armed, sleeping postures, all face-up, and their unnaturally-synchronized breathing, the sound coalescing into each other like surf of the beach, demonstrated identical minds, minds she was sure could only have been grown in vats.

Their breasts ranged the gamut of sizes and shapes, from barely-there to C-cups, with representatives from camps flat, round and pointed, falling forward and splayed out. One common thread between them was that they were all either slender or close to it, and in the three girls who showed slight evidence of weight it was always in a fashion that accentuated their curves. Most of them had long hair. None were excessively styled, though a few showed evidence of a perm. One had a pixie-cut that gave an impression of Peter Pan. One striking specimen was completely bald. Whoever created these drone-women, they showed exquisite attention to detail.

But Silvia couldn’t think of them as human. Their obscured faces made them seem more like made-up dolls than human beings, and she found it difficult to think of them as being alive, even though clones were technically living, despite having brains empty of all knowledge save what was placed within them. She knew there was no difference, biologically, between them and herself. She wondered for a brief moment what it would be like to lay down on those bunks, defacing her birthright humanity with one of those masks, conforming and becoming mindless, submersed beneath the elaborate motions of that purposeful rhythm.

Looking closer, she saw that, in addition to the metal tendrils that wrapped around their ears, a second pair emerged from the underside of each of the worn masks and attached to two tiny receptacles in the side of the bunk. They each made a soft trilling noise and their wings fluttered very slightly. In the dim light, she could just catch multicolored light coming out from underneath the mask, reflected off the skin of the reposed clones. All of the women seemed asleep, although Silvia could see nothing of their eyes. Their breathing was synchronized each with the other, but they all practiced the long drawing of air indicative of slumber.

Silvia was so distracted by her observation of the slumbering drone women that it took an act of will to remember she was soon to be discovered, and that there were no hiding spots in the room that could stand up to a through search. She scanned the room for a place to hide, her eyes consciously avoiding the oddly-inviting pulse of the sleeping drone-women, but most of it was open to the air. The bottom bunks were solid below, and the upper ones jutted out of the back wall stiff and unsupported, an erect, slightly-sloping pallet like shelves. Shelves for human jars.

Silvia stopped and forced the thoughts to come. What did she know about the approaching people? Their footsteps were chaotic and not at all ordered like the drones she had seen before, and they spoke. They likely weren’t drones at all but human guards, but whoever it was coming down the hall, they were inspecting. The clothes cabinet wasn’t large enough to hide in. Maybe she could run further down the hall? But there was probably a control station there of some sort, people who would be a lot more difficult to elude than the drones she got past so far.

Then she received her inspiration. Why not hide in plain sight? If she made herself up like one of the sleeping women using the contents of the dressing cabinet, putting on their costume and one of the waiting masks and laid down on one of the bunks, they might just pass her by. All the means were right here in the room. She was roughly the same age as the others, and they seemed to have a mixture of ethnic groups, so she would be unlikely to stand out. If the inspectors triggered some kind of action from the clones she would just have to play along as best she could, but she knew that she would be unable to keep up that ruse for long. The drones were just too perfectly synchronized. It was a long shot, and she didn’t much like exposing herself to total strangers, but the only chance she had to continue her search for Corinne.

Silvia turned towards the masks resting on the rack. There were seven. She hesitated before their eerily-rhythmic fluttering, like things alive. Their glass-like fronts caught the faint blue light and returned it in deep, rolling bands, and their frames of ornate brass lacing gave them an air of harem finery. The appearance was of an item of potent magic translocated here from some other, younger world, where people lived in huts and towers, wore amulets and talismans, breathed magic, and it affected Silvia greatly. She was surprised to notice that her hands were shaking.

She told herself to get over it and picked it up. It’s just plastic with a little metal, duh. Its tendrils held onto the hook briefly, then released themselves and retracted wholly into the body of the mask. She turned it over in her hands, looked at the inner side of the mask, and saw that it sparkled with television static, that the wings were in fact a pair of shaped view screens. The glass must be a projection system, and before her eyes the static cleared, presumably from sensing her touch, and displayed an image of what was in front of them, exactly as if they were merely tinted glass.

She moved the mask around a bit and the effect was uncanny; she couldn’t detect any lag between the world behind it and the image displayed through it. Through these lenses the world was entirely the same except suffused with a faint, illuminating blue. Surely, this was the very highest of technology she was holding in her hands.

She pulled the mask closer to her face to investigate, triggering the event that filled her next ten seconds. The mask emitted a high-pitched trill, re-extended the metal tendrils it had used to grasp the hook, and shot them forward. Before Silvia could even gasp in surprise, they had extended themselves around her ears and had tied themselves tight, then retracted, pulling the mask smoothly over her nose, over Silvia’s own face!

She recoiled in fear. Suddenly being discovered by the inspectors didn’t seem like such a bad thing after all, and she pulled and pulled at the mask, but it persisted and exhibited an almost muscular strength. The tendrils were strong and wiry, and whenever they seemed like they were going to loose their grip they would shift their pull and throw Silvia off-balance, making her loosen her grip for long enough to settle back into position. It was like wrestling an octopus made of cold metal, though its arms quickly warmed as they caught the heat from Silvia’s ears.

Silvia then remembered that removing the mask wasn’t in her best interest, not if she wanted to find Corinne. Getting this far was a fluke, it must have been. The drones above weren’t expecting an intruder. The place was sure to have a security system, and God only knew how she’d gotten past it. She would have to remain here in this place, until she found Corinne and could get her to leave. She could always get the mask off if she really tried; its power supply could not be limitless, and it was probably drained from hanging on the hook without a recharge. While it was uncomfortably like wearing a translucent, spread-winged sparrow across her face, she realized she’d just have to try to remove it later, the disguise was more important for now. Maybe she could even continue to use it if her search was long, to blend in unobtrusively with these passive creatures.

Reluctantly, she let go of the mask, and it settled smoothly over her nose. The tendrils adjusted themselves for fit, pulled themselves in until they covered the entirety of Silvia’s vision, filling it with a subtle film of swimming-pool blue. The mask uttered another triumphant little trill, then comfortably ensconced, seemed to fall dead except for the steady hold on Silvia’s ears.

So much for the headpiece, thought Silvia, now for the rest. She was no prude, but she had never publicly worn attire as revealing as the drone-women she’d seen earlier, let alone undressed herself completely for the benefit of onlookers. In high school she had always been nervous in the girl’s locker room, and had always found a secluded corner well away from the others when dressing. But she reminded herself, it wasn’t like these drones were people. They were still closer to robots in her estimation, incapable of comprehending what they saw.

She began to disrobe, noting with interest how her body looked through the pale filter of the mask. At last she was down to her underthings, and while she very much wanted to keep them on, they would be obvious beneath the scant wisps of cloth worn by the drone girls. She swallowed once with effort, and removed her bra and panties, standing nude in the heavily-spiced, shimmering air of the room.

She looked down at her body again, and had to admit that it was amazing what a flattering effect the proper lighting can produce. There was a full-length mirror on the wall, and she stopped to admire herself in it. The effect was striking. It was difficult to reconcile the formidable, yet anonymous, masked woman facing her from beneath the reflected surface with what she knew herself to be. She had trouble connecting it with the person who had struggled at her job, wavered unsteadily through college. The shy high school student was gone, this was a creature whose history was incompatible with what she knew of her childhood. This woman was a machine, an oiled cog in a great mechanism, almost an object. A well-built object, in fact. She felt a little pride; she fit in really well with the other women, most of whom were lookers. Her face was unrecognizable behind the mask. The disguise would be perfect.

After staring at her visage for a short time, something strange happened. A thick, white shape appeared, outlining her image in the mirror. It flashed twice, then remained lit for a few seconds. Above the outline appeared the letters “KONKU,” in white with a thin black outline.

At first she thought it was some mirror trickery, like a projection system behind it was displaying images on the glass, but she looked down at her own body and saw that it was outlined there too. Silvia realized the outline was produced by the mask, operating on the image taken in from the surroundings. The effect was uncanny, the mask must be capable of modifying her vision in real time. Then without warning, the outline flashed once more and vanished, the nonsense word disappearing with it, leaving her naked reflection unmolested.

Her unclad visage told her that she had a costume to complete. She opened the cabinets, which here contained both wide strips of cloth for the breasts as well as smaller squares for the lower regions. There were also some of the brass chains that were used to support them, and spare sets of arm and thigh bands, and ankle bracelets.

She took out one of the outfits and tried to put it on, only to discover that she didn’t really know how. No matter how she tried to arrange them, the cloth kept slipping off her bosom and falling to the floor, or the chain would slide down one shoulder, or she’d get them to hang correctly but they wouldn’t properly hide what needed to be hidden, or she’d give herself an unfortunate chafe in an important spot.

Then something in the mask seemed to realize what she was attempting, because her vision flickered for a moment, and there then appeared, laid over her vision in white, step-by-step illustrations for how to put the garment on, captioned by the letters ERANNET. Even more helpfully, now when she looked down to adjust the clothes and herself, she saw the places of her skin that were supposed to be covered, both on the mirror and on her body, were flashing a faintly luminous red. With its help she soon had the deceptively-complex garment fastened in the mandated locations. She got down on all fours, a posture she copied from a recently-seen, similarly-garbed woman, fished around in the cabinet for a pair of sandals to complete the look and put them on. She discovered they were actually bound to her feet and toes by a leathery strap, so a minute or two of wrapping was necessary, along with another page of mask directions. When done, she stepped back to admire herself once more in the mirror.

She was completely unprepared for the sight that greeted her. It was no longer Silvia looking back at her in the mirror but a drone girl, a thrall, faceless and defenseless, bare to the world but possessing deep secrets. The mask’s instructions had aided her well, for she couldn’t spot any mistakes at all. My own mother wouldn’t recognize me, she thought. Even her smile at this realization, showing beneath and framed by the wings, did little to spoil her cover. She was almost anonymous to sight except for her hair. She stood herself erect and set her mouth in a neutral line, aping the look of the clones from upstairs, and checked the mirror again. A perfect fit. The machine-woman had been fitted and slotted into place, its trappings connected with its couplings, ready and prepared to be put into operation. All that remained was to be set into flawless, inexorable motion.

So perfect, in fact, was the visage that Silvia now spied before her that she couldn’t quite believe it. Seeing herself dolled up like this, like some kind of pagan slave goddess in the shimmering water-light of the room, was astonishing. She moved her hand up like she wanted to as a question back in grade school, and the reflection matched her. She had never considered herself as having a good body image until now, but now she saw differently. She resolved, once all this was over, that she would never feel self-conscious about her body again.

Silvia reminded herself that she didn’t have much time to waste. She walked over to an empty bunk over in the corner and lay down, trying her best to imitate the straight, look-ahead posture she saw in the drones. As soon as her head touched the cushioned pallet, her mask gave off a trill, similar in tone to the ones that were being emitted by the masks the drones were wearing but weaker, and two tendrils shot out of the mask’s body and fastened themselves to receptacles in the sides of the bunk. While she knew that she had to fit in to escape detection, she was distraught to notice that she couldn’t lift, or even turn, her head, that it was effectively pinned to the bunk. The trilling sound coming from the mask grew subtly louder, and its wings began to flutter slightly like the other masks. She resolved not to worry about it yet, to wait until the inspectors had passed before she tried to extricate herself from the bunk.

She had nothing to do now but wait until the inspectors passed. As she lay, there before her eyes appeared for a few moments the words JUKULOH IM KAHLA. Her vision began to become unfocused, even though she hadn’t relaxed her eyes. Interesting colored patterns began to swirl around all across her field of vision, pulsing patterns, covering her view of the underside of the upper bunk, blinding her. The shapes thrust into each other, pumping back and forth over and over in a vaguely obscene manner. They swirled around as they did so, their hues blending into each other in a way that made it difficult to tell exactly where one shape began and the next ended. Silvia could have closed her eyes, but the swirls changed colors and pulsed in such a fascinating way that she decided to watch and see what they would do.

As she watched, the patterns became more vivid and intense. They seemed to grow outward, even beyond her vision, like she was being drawn into them, or she was shrinking before their majestic presence. The pulsing became the rhythm of her mind, the beating of her heart. She stared at it, she didn’t know for how long. Time began to lose meaning.

Somewhere in her cerebrum a question posed itself, asked by an insecure, small figure in an office dress: What am I right now? It’s a question that, at some level of our souls, we all ask ourselves, and come up with as many different answers as there are emotions. The figure checked the cabinets of her mind, looking for a self-image to rely upon, but the only one that could be found was a newcomer, weak but strong, passive but confident, body mostly bare, face obliterated beneath a magical insect.

After a while there were other things that flashed before Silvia’s eyes as well, that she couldn’t quite make out, or remember for some reason. The colors swirled, the other things flashed, the pulsing infiltrated her, and she watched and watched. She never did close her eyes, except to blink occasionally, and after each blink she ached with the opportunity squandered, the knowledge lost, the being postponed. All the while the mask sat atop her face, teaching her, trilling rhythmically, fluttering happily.

A few minutes later the inspectors came by the room, performed a cursory examination, and soon left. Silvia was too distracted to pay them much attention.