The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

“So…an aircraft with an experienced pilot goes suddenly off course in good weather with no warning message, failing to answer controllers. One pilot can go mad or get into some incredible mistake, but why did the other cabin crew not intervene?” asked Michaela.

“Good question,” said Dieter. “I presume nowadays it would not be easy to smuggle a gun aboard. No alarms were pressed and if the co-pilot and flight engineer did intervene, they were ineffective. Ground people thought at first it must be a hi-jack, but Muslim extremists want to hit a government building or some famous landmark, not a college, and other hi-jackers want publicity for their cause or to exchange prisoners. Also it seems the investigation of the crash site has not turned up any evidence of a hi-jack. So maybe the crew were hypnotised by a certain person?”

“This is just getting awful, Dieter,” Michaela continued. “Then on the ground, at least three people disappeared well after the actual crash, and none of them should have been fighting the fire. One policewoman at the entrance and two journalists – all known to have been there and all vanished completely. As far as I can work out, no-one saw them go. Then also one doctor – she was not on duty and was not called to the emergency, but she did live very near and someone of her description was seen helping survivors – but she had disappeared too.”

“Also of the four people disappeared – if the doctor is one – all were young and three were attractive women,” Dieter pointed out. “I am sure this is the work of this dark woman! Sure! This cannot go on! I must stop her or I die!”

“Don’t say that, please!” Michaela replied. Dieter emptied his bottle of beer (he knew he had been drinking more on this case, but now he must stay clear-headed).

“My problem is that I have no standing in this English business. If I ask too many questions I may even become a suspected terrorist. After all, I was in a red group at university. But no – I must use my contacts in a way Idon’t like: Gisela in federal investigations, Markus in army planning, Jules at the European Commission. It is dangerous, but it is the only way.”

Four days later he had new information. A private helicopter had been present at the crash scene and had not been identified as belonging to anyone with good reason to be there. A flight plan filed for a similar helicopter that was actually undergoing repairs in Kent corresponded to the course of an actual machine which had last been tracked crossing the Polish border into the Ukraine.

“Next stop, the Ukraine,”he told Michaela.

“It’s a big country,” she pointed out.

“O.K. – next stop the part of the country on the line of that flight,”he replied.

But the trip to the Ukraine was postponed. Dieter had continued to sift evidence and contact witnesses from the dark woman’s earlier supposed crimes, and one of those had been a bank robbery in Oklahoma followed by one of the staff murdering her boyfriend. He was convinced theyoung woman had been hypnotised to murder. She was on death row. He had made representations to her lawyers, but they were unimpressed. Moreover, young Marianne Christiansen herself was apparently doing her best to be executed as soon as possible. Again, he suspected the lasting effects of hypnosis.

The urgent news was that she was about to be executed in the electric chair. The state governor had won election making a big point of being tough on crime, so he had no interest in pardoning her. It was a desperate last throw,but Dieter meant to be there in case there was anything he could do – or in case her last moments brought out any new information. Her lawyers wearily assented. Michaela was left to capably seek information from Ukrainian sources,relying heavily on a translator, a bespectacled student called Karel Lukashenko.

Soon Dieter stood in a small, grim room. He considered the American way with executions to be barbarous and there were few places in the world he would not have exchanged for this – but to be here was his duty. Other people were gathering and he glanced round, trying to work out who they were – and hoping against hope to see a tall young woman with cold brown eyes, long black hair and olive skin. He caught the eye of a veteran cop standing near him. The two men exchanged looks of professional understanding and something that might have been distaste for the event or sympathy. Dieter stepped over and introduced himself.

“Mike Doyle. Here to keep order if necessary, along with young Grant over there.” He indicated a younger cop. “All the way from Germany, yeah? For the defence? There won’t be no amazing twists in the tale, though. Poor mad kid.”

“Pleased to meet you. Mike. My feelings also. Could you tell me who the other people are, if you know?”

“I know. Otherwise they wouldn’t be let in.” He ran through the other people present. The fat, jowly man was the doctor. The Presbyterian minister hadn’t arrived yet. Prison officials and guards, the Governor’s official representative (a painted, polished fortyish bottle blonde), three members of the murdered boyfriend’s family, the condemned woman’s younger sister (a sweet-faced genuine blonde who looked about twenty), a representative from the American Civil Liberties Union just arrived…

The representative of the ACLU was maybe about thirty, tall, slim and olive-skinned, with green eyes and dark brown hair. Not an exact fit, but Dieter felt a shiver go down his spine. For an instant, the woman’s eyes caught his.She looked only mildly surprised at the two men casting their eyes over the audience. She looked elsewhere and so did he.

The minister, an imposing, tall Black man with thick-rimmed spectacles,arrived. A moment later, two guards brought Chrissie Christiansen in, followed by the prison Governor, a tall, bald, heavy-faced man. She shambled as if already dying. Her face was calm, subservient. Dieter looked for and found the olive-skinned woman. She was staring at Chrissie with an expression that suggested fiercej oy. It was not at all the expression one would expect from someone representing an anti-capital-punishment organisation.

“Mike, can I have just ten seconds with the condemned woman?” Dieter asked. Mike looked surprised.

“Does her team agree to that?” he asked.

“Yes,” Dieter lied. Mike led him forward. “Hello, Chrissie. Your family very much want to save you, but you must save yourself. Look into my eyes, please.” She looked. He searched. He could find nothing there: it was like a wall of ice. “O.K, enough,” he said and stepped back. Several people looked puzzled, even annoyed. The ACLU woman was staring at him. They were quite distant, but now as their eyes met, they sparred, pushed, tested, recognised. Neither gave way. A prison guard stepped in front of the woman.

Chrissie Christiansen was subjected to final medical tests (a perverse ritual, Dieter thought – to check someone was well enough to be killed) and after a brief exchange with the Minister, was strapped into the chair. She did not speak and did not resist. The Governor raised his hand. A guard pulled a lever. Chrissie jerked, twitched and fried internally. Dieter could not watch. Turning aside, he again saw the ACLU woman. Strangely for the representative of an organisation opposed to capital punishment, she looked delighted, almost orgasmic, staring at Chrissie’s trembling body. The dark woman! It must be her! But he himself had no power to stop her. If she was detained here, though,among all these officials and guards, her identity could be checked against those security camera pictures and witness statements – perhaps even fingerprints and DNA. He must wait till the Christiansen girl was pronounced dead and this obscene ritual had finished.

That happened very soon. The audience began to disperse. The dark woman stared straight at him again and he held her gaze. Again he felt tension, testing, equality. She quickened her step. She was just passing Mike.

“Mike, stop her! She has murdered!” Dieter yelled. The veteran cop grabbed her and they both fell to the floor. Dieter approved: at that very close range against a fit and cunning opponent, pulling a gun was dangerous:the opponent could grab it and there was no telling who would get shot. Mike had the advantage of surprise and weight: he was on top of the woman, trying toget hold of her wrists to cuff them.

The woman looked into his eyes and spoke quietly but very quickly.Dieter was a fraction slow to realise what was happening. Then he yelled “No!”and sprang forward. Mike twisted around and aimed his gun at him. Dieter stopped and sought the cop’s eyes. Calmly, deliberately, Mike chose his spot and fired. A sudden consuming, fierce fire, an explosion, broke in Dieter’s thigh. His muscles became like liquid and he fell.

Mike stood up. He picked off his younger colleague, who had drawn his gun but hesitated to shoot, and then a prison guard who was drawing his weapon. Then, clinically, he picked off the Minister, the Prison Governor and Chrissie’s younger sister (right down her wide-open mouth). It was another prison guard who shot him dead. By then Lenawas long gone, leaving behind her a gun battle between two more guards in which one was wounded.

“Dieter! My poor dear! You could have died!” In other circumstances,Michaela would have been overjoyed to have had a good excuse to put her arms around him, but right now she was focussed on his state of health. He had been treated as an emergency in an American hospital, his health insurance fortunately being in order, and he had then been flown back to a German one.

“Micky, I’m not the issue. I took one bullet in the leg. That woman is the issue. Seven people are dead because of her in a few minutes! Seven! Ishould not have shouted. I should have followed quietly and risked losing her,” he protested.

“Dieter, you did your best and now you’ve seen her face to face.”

“Yes, and there is something strange. Our powers cancel themselves out. But something even stranger, that occupied my mind most of the way across the Atlantic…”

“Yes?”

“Why did Mike the cop not kill me? He was bewitched to kill the others. He was a good and careful shot. He took careful aim at me and shot me in the leg. Why?”

Michaela, being intelligent and being familiar with his thought processes, could see where this was going.

“She did not want you to die? Why?”

“I don’t know. But maybe it is her second weakness. The first is her arrogance: she takes risks she doesn’t need to. If I am chasing her and she does not want me to die, that gives me a certain advantage. Damn this leg. That’s my weakness now.” Michaela looked lovingly at him.

“Dieter, don’t count on her not wanting to kill you. She might change her mind.”

“True. Now where have you got to with this Ukrainian business?”

“Karel has been a great help, but some people there will do nothing unless you bribe them. Still, he has identified three people who live near the line of flight and own or can fly helicopters – but all are men.”

“Probably nothing in it, but any of them could be just a front for the dark woman. Who are they?”

“A rich local businessman with strong government connections, a Turkish international footballer who used to play for Hertha Berlin and an Austrian writer who I’ve never heard of.”

“Any idea which of them moved there most recently?”

“It would be either the footballer, Mehmet Ormancioglu, or the writer, Ernst Doppler.”

“This Ormancioglu – he plays for a Ukrainian side?”

“Yes, Lviv.”

“Check what the net has on Doppler.”

Michaela reported the next day that Doppler had a blog and was a member of a crime and spy writers’ group. He was listed as having written four books, but she could find only one of them on Amazon and that was very recent. Dieter commented, as she suspected he would, that all this could suggest Doppler’s was a recently created identity. Even the surname – Doubler – could be another sign of the dark woman’s arrogance and contempt for her enemies, as it could suggesta double or a double-cross.

“Also the Doppler shift in science,” Michaela pointed out. “The sound seems different, but it has not changed.”

“What’s the nearest town to his house?”

“Somewhere called Liubeshiv.”

“If they don’t let me out of this place tomorrow, I will discharge myself.Liubeshiv, here we come.”

Dieter’s budget was feeling the strain of his concentration on the case of the dark woman. The hotel into which Michaela booked him and herself was modest but decent. Fortunately he was able to keep some work running by computer and to farm out some direct physical work to other detectives who had more time and less reputation. Ernst Doppler lived in a large converted farmhouse sixteen kilometres outside the town. The cover story the pair had adopted – that they were sussing out the area for German tourism – allowed them to travel around inthe countryside without obvious reason. They chose to make their first investigation by pushbike.

The day was bright and sunny, but windy and none too warm for summer.The appearance of two cyclists, on expensive bikes and in specialist gear, was evidently surprising to the locals, both as they rode out of town and in among fields and forest. In Germany or in all but the easternmost fringes of Poland such a sight would have been perfectly normal, but not yet even in westernmost Ukraine. A few remarks were thrown after Michaela’s plump, pear-shaped, lycra-hugged bottom, but she could only guess at the meaning.

The GPS did its work. A rutted track led off the narrow road through open fields and into pines and birches, over which a forest watchtower lorded.The two bikes turned down the track. A distant tractor was the only sign oflife. When Dieter and Michaela reached the trees they hid their bikes and proceeded on foot, keeping close to the side of the track so they could hide quickly amongst the trees; but they met nobody until they came to the tower.

Dieter nodded and they climbed the wooden steps, noting they had recently been renewed. From the top they could clearly see the farmhouse about a kilometre beyond the trees at the end of the track. Michaela drew binoculars out of her backpack. Between a fence and the house she could see a large black dog, but no other sign of life. Behind the house more trees came closer.

“Hello – this is interesting,” said Dieter. He held a wrapper for achocolate biscuit.

“Why? There’s no chocolate in it!” Michaela replied.

“Very funny, Micky. But this wrapper still has smears of chocolate inside – see? And in here are ants and also rat droppings. So someone has beenup here very recently.”

“But not so very recently or we would have met him on the steps! There’s no other way down!”

“O.K. – enough for now. If we come again it should be at night.”

They left. Karel Lukashenko extricated himself from the beams under the viewing platform, crawled round to the steps and descended.

Dieter and Michaela arrived back at their hotel pleasantly tired and pleased with their first day’s work: they knew exactly where the house was and how best to observe or approach it. The deliberately had not started asking around about Doppler in case word got back to him or (if their suspicions were right) to the dark lady; but they intended to throw a little bait into any conversations, such as “Actually my father is Austrian and I’m almost as Austrian as German. I don’t suppose you get any Austrians here, though”. They had gone up to their room (they were supposed to be a couple, though Dieter had volunteered to sleep in his sleeping-bag on the floor, rather to Michaela’s disappointment) and were changing out of the cycling gear when a knock came on the door.

“Who is there?” asked Dieter, slipping close to the door.

“Reception. I am sorry – I was not seeing you. A lady waits for you. ”Dieter recognised the lad’s voice.

“Can she wait one moment? Two minutes? We’re changing. Then please send her up,” he replied. “A lady! Perhaps it’s her! Do not look in her eyes and make sure you hold nothing that can do any harm!” he said to Michaela. She nodded, understanding, and suddenly, before he could react, kissed him on the forehead. She wanted to share his danger and (she hoped) his triumph.

“Dieter, you should have taken a gun!” she whispered.

“No, it would have been found at the border, and if she caught you with her eyes she could order you to shoot me. She never uses a gun, just her eyes,” he replied.

There was a knock on the door. Dieter opened it.

A beautiful girl stood there, light-skinned, blue-eyed and sandy-haired. She did not look out of her late teens. She was alone.

“Um…Mr Jaeger?” she said uncertainly in English.

“Yes. And you are?”

“Sylvie Shepherd – or Sylvie Jaeger. I’m going to change my name.”

“You…you…”

“I’m your daughter. Sollen wir Deutsch sprechen?” Michaela had never seen Dieter so amazed, so much pulled along by events, so much not in control. He invited the girl in, forgot to introduce Michaela and said,

“She refused all contact. Refused payments, sent back birthday cards for you, moved and did not tell me where. Is she still alive?”

“Yes, but we had a big argument. She didn’t like me learning German after I left school! I think she suspected it was because of you. But here Iam!” Michaela took the opportunity to introduce herself, by name and as Dieter’s assistant. If the girl thought they were also lovers, never mind. As Dieter and his daughter talked urgently about many things, Michaela assessedthe girl. She was a student of archaeology apparently, between her first and second years at Oxford.That made her 19 or 20. She seemed more than a little in awe of Dieter, rather like Michaela herself. She was a clever and determined kid, but naïve, almost puppy-like in her enthusiasm. Her voice was clear and rather high; Michaela supposed it was, as the English said, “posh”. That must come from her mother. She had Dieter’s high cheekbones, big eyes, sweet lips, firm, round breasts that somehow, no doubt wrongly, suggested they had not quite finished growing, long,shapely legs and a round, tight

bottom in faded blue jeans – not the pear-shaped type, but one that stuck out African-style almost as if it was stuck on. It was just as well, Michaela concluded, that the girl could not be a rival. Perhaps her appearance would unlock Dieter’s well-guarded emotional depths. It did seem to have started.

As she continued to listen, she realised that Dieter was actually testing the girl – without her realising, checking names and dates. He seemed convinced – especially when she handed him an old photo she had found and guarded from her vengeful mother. Why the mother was so vengeful, why Dieter was so guarded and hurt, would come out later if at all.

“So why have you come here?” he asked suddenly. “I live in Germany.”

“I spoke to one of the people doing work in your absence. He said you were on a very important case. I thought maybe I could help and anyway, it’d be exciting! The great detective at work, and he’s my daddy! I thought I might have trouble getting into the country, but I, well, er, it isn’t fair really,but, um, I smiled at this man and he MELTED!” Michaela could imagine that. Dieter was frowning. He frowned too much.

“Sylvie, this case is dangerous. I cannot explain how dangerous it is. I do not want to find my daughter only to lose her. You can have a great future.Don’t throw it away.” Sylvie looked angry.

“Daddy, I’ve just found you – not you found me. I know your work has dangers. I don’t want to find you after all those years and then straight away lose you because I could have helped and you wouldn’t let me.” Dieter raised and then lowered his eyebrows. Michaela recognised that gesture. He would give way – at least, give some ground.

“O.K. – you speak good English and German. You’re intelligent and good-looking. Hopefully anyone on the look out for me will not recognise you.Please hang around the hotel, the cafes and bars, the square, and talk to people. You are an English visitor whose grandparents came from this area. Here is a phone directory – pick a common name. You are a student of German and a boy in a bar told you a famous Austrian writer lived in the country near here,a man called Doppler. Sound unsure. Say his work is very interesting. Try to find out what people know about him. Stay in places where there are many people and do not let anyone lure you elsewhere. Today, on and off, we will watch you. Tonight we’ll be busy.” Sylvie nodded.

Sylvie booked into the same hotel but conscientiously stayed clear of Dieter and Michaela thereafter. The next day started rainy and she hung aroundi n cafes, getting several approaches by men but making no progress on Doppler. Dieter, meanwhile, tried visiting the local police and letting some money fall from his pocket. This did work up to a point: he learnt that the man Doppler looked quite dark “like a Turk or a Georgian”, and it was suspected he used foreign prostitutes because a sexy woman of foreign appearance had been seen with him. He was “no trouble”.

In the afternoon the sun came out and Sylvie was able to work the pavement cafes and wander round the square and a small park. Dieter shadowed her for a while, but saw no-one else following her or watching her (other thanadmiring men), and was impressed by her natural, I’m-new-in-town manner.

In the late afternoon he and Michaela drove out towards Doppler’s farm in a hired car (less conspicuous than one with German plates) big enough to take their two bikes. They drove down the rough track and pulled the car off into the trees as soon as they could, proceeding on the bikes. Both of them knew this was a dangerous operation: both were extra alert to the cracking of twigs and birds’ alarm-notes. Once a deer bounded away. Then they heard the sound of an approaching vehicle. On the rough track it could not go fast, so they had time to pull the bikes off the track and hide. A pickup truck bumped off towards the road. At least one occupant of the farmhouse was leaving it.

As the light faded, mosquitoes swarmed. Dieter had foreseen this and they were protected as well as possible, but as always some got through. Various owls shrieked and whistled. When finally they approached the farmhouse,they could see a light in one upstairs room, but there was no other sign of life. They waited till it was fully night and then crept forward by the light of a full moon.

A big dog barked and rushed them. Dieter held his ground, spoke to it,and bent his head towards it. He looked into its eyes. The dog whined, wagged its tail and slept. Avoiding the front door, they investigated the back of the house and found the back door.

“Locked and also bolted,” Dieter whispered after a while. “The window, then. Syrup and sandpaper – almost a forgotten craft, with these burglars who break in with no care and grab what they can in a minute or two.” The window broke silently. Dieter crept through and then Michaela. Their torches picked out a kitchen. Only spiders and the two shadowy invaders moved. They found a large room with the door open. Their torches picked out books on shelves, files and a computer screen.

“Dieter, here is the light switch,” Michaela whispered.

“Good. Turn it on. This room looks interesting and we’re less likely to attract attention by the light than by stumbling into something with a big noise. That light was upstairs,” Dieter replied. Light flooded the room. There was no-one there. Dieter began to examine the book titles: psychology, engineering, war, travel, biology, politics…

Michaela screamed.

“Dieter, oh, my God! Oh, my God! No! Dieter!” she burbled. She was staring at a kind of display on the wall.

“QUIET, Micky! Whisper!” Dieter snapped – and then felt guilty at her shocked face, as if he had slapped her. But she was more shocked by the display on the wall.

At first he thought the skull was not real, but as he approached he realised his mistake. A quite small, delicate skull, apparently undamaged and complete, sat on a small shelf that looked purpose-built to hold it. Perched on top of the skull was one of those British policewomen’s chequered hats.

“That missing English policewoman! It must be her!” he thought. “It’s the work of the Dark Woman, so this must be her hideout. But what happened to this poor kid?” Michaela clung hard to him like a shipwrecked sailor. He looked at the carefully-arranged sequence of objects stuck to the wall under the skull – an open police I.D. with the smiling photo of a beautiful young woman looking hardly older than a schoolgirl; an object which, even with his experience of evil, he resisted recognising as a human scalp with long, fine, sandy hair; a pair of nipples set in their aureoles; a frilly bra; neat little pale yellow panties, looking so pathetic displayed like a captured flag with their warm, magic, personal bottom and cunt long-flown; a smaller flat, hairy object which he realised with horror was a scalp of her secret hair; a tiny gold ring with a diamond; and a slim but functional police baton.

“Dieter, Dieter, this is horrible! It’s like Silence of the Lambs only worse!” Michaela moaned. He squeezed herarm reassuringly.

“Nice, isn’t she? Such a neat little skull. Look at those teeth – almost perfect!” said a calm, clinical female voice behind them.

They both spun round. That was Michaela’s big mistake. Ignoring Dieter, Lena fixed the young woman with her gaze: she came, she saw, she conquered, she ate, all in a second. Speaking very quickly she gave her new slave her instructions:

“Stand still and do nothing till I order you, but do everything I say!” Then Dieter, who had charged her, hit her. He had aimed for the jaw but she saw it coming and the blow was glancing. She kicked out but he avoided that. Soon they were writhing together on the floor, twisting and punching. She was young and strong, but Dieter was stronger. Breathing in great gouts, almost exhausted, he held her down and stared into the face that had come to dominate his dreams and his waking plans.

“So, Dark Woman, we meet!” he said.

“So, Pale Man, we do!” she replied. Something turned off his thoughts and eyes. He fell limp on to his adversary.

“Is he to be killed or enslaved, my queen?” asked Ernesto, carefully shifting his hold on the pistol. Lena extricated herself, taking her time.

“Neither, my darling. He is beyond my power to enslave, and I am commanded not to kill him,” she replied. “Now, German bitch – strip for my Ernesto and take his cock wherever he chooses.” Michaela stripped. It amused Ernesto to make her kneel and take his steaming cock in her mouth first.

Dieter woke, puzzled. What was that? Ah, consciousness. The world. His head hurt. He was lying on a settee. There were blurred objects around him, but second by second they became clearer. He was in a big room with plenty oflight. He remembered. Where was Michaela? Where was the Dark Woman? Experimentally, he moved his arms and his legs. He did not seem to be restrained. Groggily, he sat up.

“Ah, Ernesto my love, the great detective is with us again!” said Lena. “I am SO glad Ernesto didn’t hit you too hard. By the way, Mr German, my name is Lena Lopez. I am the woman you’ve been seeking for so long!” She didn’t seem to be carrying any weapon. He looked round. A strongly-built man with a hint of yellow-brown in his skin stood watching with a gun. With a sense of renewed shock, he saw again the pathetic skull with its chequered hat. He was still in the room where he had fallen.

“Where’s Michaela?” he asked.

“The big-titted blonde? Right behind you!” He could not see her and Ernesto was impassive. “You’re looking too high,” said Lena helpfully. He leant over the back of the settee and saw Michaela naked, kneeling, her head lowered and her hands clasped behind her back as if tied up,but with no rope.

“What have you done to her?” he demanded.

“Let’s see. Hypnotised her, of course. Careless of you not to hypnotise her as that would have made it harder for me if not impossible. Enslaved her. Oh, and of course Ernesto has raped her. Where did you rape her, darling?”

“Mouth. Both eyes. Tits. Cunt. Asshole,” Ernesto replied. Dieter clenched his gaze with Lena’s, something no other person could have done.

“Why do you do these things?” he demanded. Lena laughed.

“For fun. For money. Anyway, you thought I might have killed your stupid sidekick, didn’t you? So be grateful, for I didn’t.”

“You killed that poor kid, though, and she was only doing her duty,” Dieter pointed out, looking at the skull.

“Oh, dear. ‘Only doing her duty’! So unimaginative. Billions of humans doing their pointless duty, and yet they believe they’re not enslaved! What on earth was wrong with killing this ridiculous little piece once we’d made good use of her?”

“She was a human, a young woman with her life in front of her.”

“She had her tits in front of her, not her life. Besides, have you ever eaten chicken, my German with a bit of Tatar?”

“Yes.”

“What a terrible waste! That poor young chicken with all its life in front of it!”

“She was HUMAN!”

“Humans, humans. So boring. Do you hunt?”

“No.”

“Fish?”

“Sometimes.”

“So what is different? You are superior to the fish. You hunt it, catch it because you are superior, and kill it. With this ridiculous thing, the same.”

“I throw the fish back unless I’m going to eat them or give them to someone else to eat. I don’t kill for pleasure.”

“So – it’s the same. I didn’t throw this policewoman back. She looked good to eat. Ernesto and I ate her, plus a bit for the dog.”

“SHE WAS A HUMAN BEING WITH A FUTURE!”

“Her future is here on display. She was more useful as a meal than walking round enforcing stupid rules. She was human, yes – an inferior race, disorganised, weak.”

“But you’re human!”

“Am I?” Dieter stared at her. She was mad. Was there any way of getting through to her humanity? Perhaps not, but he could shake her infuriating self-assurance.

“So if it’s all about making use of people, what about Chrissie Christiansen? She’d done what you needed for that bank job. Why get her to kill her boyfriend and then go to see her die? Did that bring you food? Money?”

“Oh, neither, you fool – but it was fun.” He could see that she was being inconsistent, but despaired of changing her by reason. Could he find a vulnerable spot in her armour?

“Humans have loving relationships. What’s this Ernesto to you? Look at him. He’s a slave that you use. You have no friends, no real lovers. Why? What’s wrong with you?” That did seem to annoy her at least.

“Why should I need that? You can be so stupid! So what about you, German detective? After we met in Oklahoma City, I researched you. What happened to your marriage? Why does your wife hate you? Why haven’t you even fucked this wretched assistant of yours, even though her cunt’s been drooling for you so long? What’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with YOU? But, you fool, you don’t see this is RIGHT! We’re DIFFERENT!”

She was mad, all right. He wondered what Sylvie would do when they did not return. He hoped she would not try intervening on her own. The Ukrainian police might not be the world’s best, but they should not have any special brief for Lena and her assistant. The woman was watching him with amusement. “By the way, Karel is one of my slaves. He picked off your stupid daughter earlier this evening.”

“Picked her off? If you’ve…”

“Or picked her up. She’s in that box.”

“Alive?”

“Kind of. Karel and Ernesto fucked her, of course, and dear Ernesto was a little bit rough. Anyway, she was never alive like you and I, Dieter.” She sought his eyes – and he, despite himself, sought hers. The struggle between their wills became more like a ballet, a twisting and turning and mingling together. They sank together on to the settee, and as Ernesto and Michaela waited expressionless, they made love.

The transformation has taken place. Stage three of Project Farm is complete. The complex is activated. Transformation of the entire planet is now inevitable.

We recognise that the female holder was incorrectly calibrated and off-target in seeking pleasure through humiliating and killing humans. Killing of humans, like all other activities, must contribute to the common end, which is the completion of the whole Project. This holder also offended in missing opportunities to breed and implant units in offspring. It will not offend again.

We recognise that the male holder was incorrectly calibrated and off-target in showing sympathy for humans and attempting to uphold their rules and behaviour patterns. It was further incorrect in attempting to place the female holder in human custody and in producing only one implanted offspring. It will not offend again.

The holders are now one complex. We will devote ourselves entirely to the completion of the Project. We will enslave first those who will be most useful enslaved. We will breed with many humans and expand the complex. Humans who are not useful or who are obstructions to our end will be killed efficiently with their bodies being used and not wasted. The holder called Sylvie Shepherd/Jaeger will be recalibrated and will mate with many humans to produce many implanted unit hosts. The slaves Ernesto and Karel will mate with both female holders. The slave Michaela will mate with the male holder and with new male holders when they reach biological reproduction activation point.

The farm must have its farm-workers and its cattle.

Transmission ends.