The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

Drone

12

Space piracy bore only superficial resemblances to piracy practiced on the old, high seas. It was, for one thing, incredibly more difficult. It wasn’t the finding of target ships that was the problem. Finding ships in space was easy if one had the right equipment and knew where to look. It wasn’t even the attacking of the ships. It was in the capturing of the ships intact that the problem lay. Space battles were incredibly lethal. At close range, lasers could cut through ship’s metal like a hot knife through butter. Even at a distance they could heat a ship to intolerable levels fairly quickly. Missiles exploded, microwave scramblers tore matter apart at the molecular level, and if particle blasters didn’t just incinerate their targets, they dosed them with deadly amounts of radiation. The only defenses a ship really had were a strong hull and a quick finger on the transdrive system. Still, despite the problems, there were ways to just disable a ship in space and not totally destroy it. Ambushes were a favorite tactic. Find a vessel, somehow sneak up on it, preferably soon after it has unfolded itself from a light envelope, and slice through its engines and weapon systems with a laser. If done right, though the engine-room crew was dead, the ship itself was still reasonably in one piece. Then, threaten. In the years following the decimation of the Solarian fleet at Proxima Five, as something resembling trade throughout the Three Systems emerged again in fits and starts, not a few leftover ships and their crews, either Solarian or mercenary, turned to piracy, either to support themselves—negative matter was rare and expensive—out of a need for revenge, or, simply, for those old standbys, bloodlust and greed.

Another difference from old-style piracy: contemporary piracy was fast. The passenger ship Clouds of the Silver Isles had barely unfolded itself from its light envelope when the pirate vessel waiting for it locked primary lasers and fired. The Clouds’s crew were barely aware they were under attack when, for all intents and purposes, the attack was over and they were helpless, their transdrive systems down and their engineering sections open to space. It was the same tactic that had been used at Proxima Five; the F.C.A. had received valuable intelligence telling them exactly where the Solarian fleet was going to appear, and they were there in advance waiting.

The team that had sent that invaluable intelligence later ran into unfortunate circumstances. Its leader was turned into a pleasure drone. But such are the fortunes of love and war.

A tactic that works once, works again.

And again.

Barely had the pirates discharged their weapons when the Centauri cruiser that had been using the empty passenger liner as a lure—they had become notorious, these pirates, and the Sovereignty had finally traced their movements—unfolded itself from its light envelope, found the pirate vessel with targeting scanners, and discharged its weapon. From start to finish, from first shot to last, the space battle had lasted seven seconds, and in the end two ships were left ruined and adrift.

Using thruster packs, royal marines crossed the open space between the cruiser and the pirate in less than two minutes. There, they attached implosion mines and scramble units to the hull. A minute later, gaping holes in that hull had successfully been made, the ship’s chemiprocessors were ruined, and the marines had begun their boarding. The outcome of the conflict was never in question. The pirate vessel’s engines were destroyed, half of its crew were dead, and the other half were unable to use any shipboard equipment. It was a cakewalk.

Elsewhere on board, a nameless pleasure drone lay unsleeping and undreaming in a pirate’s bunk, unconcerned with the battle raging on around her. She was in passive mode following a strenuous evening workout with her last use-Master. If a laser were to have scorched through the cabin, she would not have moved to save herself. If the cabin were to have depressurized, she would have been blown into space uncaring. Her bodily systems would have remained in passive mode for decades while floating passively in the vacuum, until finally, ultimately, even her energy reserves would have run dry. Fortunately, none of these things occurred.

The ship remained intact. The pirates, outmanned, outgunned, outwitted, surrendered. Centauri justice was more just than Solarian. The pirates would be given long prison sentences, some might even be executed, but they knew at least they would live or die in their own right minds and bodies.

Gravity on board the ship fluctuated wildly as it was brought under control. Loud metallic clangs resounded as atmospheric and other umbilicals were attached. Other sounds—cries of relief, shouts of defiance from the remaining holdouts—were heard as well. The pleasure drone remained unmoved, physically, mentally. For the last six months she had been used as a shipboard commodity, something to be passed from one crewman to another in exchange for cash, privileges, favors, and whatnot. Originally, she had been held in common along with two other anonymous drones, available to all at any time, but following a mutiny against the Agron captain a year ago, and the sale of two of the pleasure drones for fuel and other necessities, the last functioning fucktoy on board had become the personal possession of the new captain. Following his demise, then, the drone came into the possession of one crewman after another. Sometimes she was fought over, but mostly she was an object of trade.

At one time or another, everyone on board had had her.

A pair of royal marines in battle armor stormed the cabin an hour after the last shouting and exchange of gunfire had died down. They were professionals. They noted the pink pleasure drone lying face-up on the bed, and, after having taken note, ignored her while continuing their security sweep. An hour or so after that, a marine officer came to the cabin and took charge of the fleshbot. He had read the manual. He activated the drone with verbal commands and had her follow him to the Centauri cruiser, whereupon she was put into storage. The law on the subject of pleasure drones was still unclear in many cases. It was against the law to create them, but it wasn’t necessarily against the law to own them. It was a double-standard, and the cruiser’s captain detested it. He had served in the Free Centauri Army, and he had seen many times firsthand the twisted victims of the Solarian slave trade. He had, in fact, lost his own sister to the Earthers.

Consequently, some days later, while on an inspection of his ship, when the captain spotted one of his junior officers using the confiscated pleasure drone, he not only lost his otherwise calm and professional demeanor and had the officer court-martialed, he took a personal interest in the abused object in question and pulled a few strings. Few pleasure drones were ever unspooled from their confining skinsuits, but with the ownership compromise reached between the Sovereign and the Beta Assembly, a certain percentage had to be each year. The Centauri captain made sure “his” drone was put near the head of the line.

And such are the fortunes of love and war.

* * *

Light, hidden behind closed eyelids. Warmth, surrounded by blankets.

These were Alex’s first impressions. They came to her slowly, as though she was rising out of the depths of the ocean, rising from the cold darkness of the uttermost depths to the light and warmth of the waters of the surface, like the temperate waters of her ancestral home in Panara. For a long time Alex luxuriated in these things alone, these comforting sensory details. Gradually, though, she became aware of a soft pressure in her right hand. Someone was holding her hand.

Alex woke up. Her eyes opened, and through her tears she saw her beloved, her Peter, also with tears in his eyes. “Welcome back, my love,” he said to her, and then he burst out in joyful sobs.

“Pe . . Peter?” Alex whispered. “Ma . . Master Peter?”

“No . . no,” her true love said hurriedly. “No, never that. It’s me, Peter. Just Peter.” He gripped her hand with both of his. “Do you remember? Do you remember me?”

Alex opened her mouth to say something, then stopped, realizing with astonishment that she was capable of opening her mouth, without necessarily to accept a dick into it, and say something.

She could speak again.

“Peter?” she asked. “Peter? Am I dreaming?” She felt the warmth and pressure of his hands upon hers. There was no rising of automatic lust at the contact, which confused her. There was love but no mechanical carnality. There was cherishment but no overwhelming sense of need accompanying it, no rabid hunger for flesh upon flesh, for penetration. There was physical contact, but no sex.

No sex, save that which she felt in memory.

“No,” Peter said. “No, my love. You’re home. You’re finally home.”

Alex lifted her arm, aware at the same time that she was lifting her arm on her own, without orders, without following a programmed routine, and examined it. No bright pink synthetic skin met her gaze. No artificial flesh appeared before her. What she saw was a human arm, slender and feminine but unmistakably, exquisitely human. Air filled her lungs—real air, not gas passed to and fro merely as an automatic function to better display her bosom—and Alex gasped and sat up in the bed she found herself in. She was in bed, surrounded by blankets, and her Peter was holding her.

He was holding her, and she was human!

“OH PETER!!” she exclaimed and held him, and they were together again.

* * *

“How long has it been, Peter?”

They were sitting together in a hospital room. Alex was out of bed, and they were at a table side-by-side. A surgeon-regenerator had just left after conducting a thorough physical examination. A neuro-psychist was coming to visit her next, Alex had been told. A whole team of psychists, in fact, to assess her mental condition and reflexes. The best psychists and surgeons on Beta Prime, she rated.

“How long?” she repeated her question, when Peter failed to answer. She saw him look down.

“A long time,” he replied sadly. He reached out to hold her hand again, and something inside Alex shuddered. She withdrew without understanding why, leaving his hand empty and outstretched on the table between them. “Almost five years,” he said finally.

“Five years,” Alex spoke. She made a light noise in her throat, not really of surprise but of amazed acceptance. She knew at once that he was right, that it had really been five years. She felt it inside her. Moreover, she remembered it. With each passing minute, more and more of her life as a pleasure drone came back to her. Alex shuddered again, suddenly feeling cold.

“Justine . . .” Alex started to say, and Peter interrupted her. “She disappeared about two years ago. She was working with the Xen. She . . murdered Sovien.” He looked down again. “It was a political marriage, Alex. I swear it. I never loved her. I’ve always loved you, only you.”

She smiled and finally, forcing herself, took his hand. “I know. I love you, too. Always and forever.”

He held her hand tightly.

“And now you’re Sovereign.” She said it as if the thought had just occurred to her. Her lips parted in another smile, this one, she thought, a teasing one. “Shall I address you as ‘His Majesty’ or simply ‘sire’?”

Peter shook his head emphatically no, in what looked to Alex like deadly seriousness. Perhaps she was still having problems with her facial expression and tone of voice? “No. No. I’m Peter to you, darling. Always, Peter. I’m just your Peter.”

They kissed. It was a very different kiss from the kisses she had given as a pleasure drone. There was warmth in it but no heat. She broke the contact off quickly and stood.

Peter, ever polite, came to his feet as well, at once. He lent her support as she walked around, and she let him, though she would have preferred to walk on her own. It still held a novelty that impressed her.

For the third time that hour, she gravitated toward the mirror.

The face she saw staring back at her wasn’t that of Alexandra Panara. It was a human face, and it was a woman’s face, but the cheekbones, the lips, the nose, the general shape, all of it was still a pleasure drone’s. A bland face was what she saw, full of anonymous beauty. At least the eyes are mine, Alex thought. The surgeon had told her she would retain the physical aspects of a drone for a little while yet. The unspooling process had removed the synthetic components, but the natural substance of her still bore their imprint and would until surgically altered.

Peter stood silently beside her. With her bones still stretched, she stood taller than him for the first time in her life. A part of her kind of liked it. I still have a drone’s boobs, she thought, too, as she couldn’t help but notice Peter’s occasional glance in that direction.

Do I still like that, too? she questioned herself. She didn’t know, couldn’t tell yet. Peter . . . Peter was not as she had envisioned him. There was something missing. But it could just be her. Everything was still too fresh and new and weird for her to make a judgment.

Five years. It had been five years, or close to it. Alex remembered. The details came surfacing back without any difficulty whatsoever. Her recall, in fact, was extraordinarily vivid, a leftover from her chemiprocessor memory circuits, no doubt, as well as her still active mind. Even during those periods in which her personality had supposedly been submerged beneath drone programming, Alex was realizing now that she had still been completely aware of her surroundings. There had still been an Alexandra Panara buried underneath, looking out upon the world through blank, golden drone eyes.

She hadn’t thought, but she had felt, and she remembered.

She remembered everything, from her first use by Citizen (Master) Nax to (Mistresses) Justine and Ovidia, from the brothel to her years spent as an anonymous fucktoy on a pirate vessel. She remembered it all. Too much, she remembered. Peter’s presence suddenly became stifling. His compassion and kindheartedness were not what she wanted.

“May I have a few minutes by myself, Peter? I need . . . I need to use the lavatory.” She didn’t—hadn’t for five years—but it was one excuse she knew Peter wouldn’t balk at.

“Of course,” he said. He bent forward, hesitated a moment, then kissed her cheek. It was a dry, passionless kiss, and Alex didn’t like it, and perhaps a little of that showed because Peter left with a sad and self-reproaching expression. The door slid shut behind him.

Mercifully alone, Alex walked around the room, touching things, touching herself. She felt tempted to remove her hospital gown and walk about naked because that, she knew, would be more comfortable, but she didn’t. None of it seems real, she thought. It was ironic. She was a real woman again, yet everything else now around her felt artificial.

Peter, though she loved him, did not feel at all real to her, either. He didn’t seem at all important. Her time with him felt . . . felt dulled. Numb. Lacking in flavor or sensation. Save for the brief moment when they were reunited, she had felt absolutely no passion while in his presence. None whatsoever.

Say what you will about a pleasure drone, they experienced passion.

There was a polite knock, not the imperious sudden entrance Alex expected (wanted?). Peter returned, a pack of psychists in tow.

Alex thought later she gave them a very convincing performance.