“The Reflex”
Keila sauntered through the bar with an easy grace, savoring the smell of cheap booze on the air mixed with smoke so thick it actually hung in front of the dim lights in a haze. It was a cheap, tacky dive, just her kind of place—well, it would be, wouldn’t it? She wondered how the other patrons saw it.
She eyed the men and women sitting at public tables, even as they eyed her. They were the usual mix of people—a cat-person here, a lizard there, an elf and a biker and a tattooed devil-beast with horns the size of Alsatians. She passed on the tacky and the obvious and swung herself into a seat across from a tanned, athletic man with wavy blond hair and icy blue eyes, one who identified himself as “Wave-Rider”. He wasn’t wearing anything but a pair of swim trunks, and the bulge in his crotch looked satisfyingly large. She wondered if he really looked like that in real life—lots of people underwent body-sculpting to look like their favorite avatars, but there was no rule that said this was his usual look. For that matter, there was no rule that said he was actually a he.
Keila gave a mental shrug on a level that didn’t translate into the virtual reality simulation. She didn’t care who he was in real life. She was just feeling a little restless, and wanted to satisfy that urge before it became a distraction. That was what he wanted, too, or he wouldn’t be in the “Consequence-Free Sex” chatroom.
Even so, she liked it when they showed an interest in her as a person first. “Hi,” he said, smiling. “I like your avatar. The red hair looks very natural.”
“Thanks,” she said, returning the smile. She didn’t bother telling him it was based on her actual body, instead of the other way around. He probably wouldn’t believe her. “Yours is nice too. Lots of very good detail work.”
The rest of the bar began to fade out around them, as he decided to make their table private. That was fine by her—she wasn’t much in the mood for an orgy right about now. “So what do you do for a living?” he asked.
“I work for the government,” she said. She always left it nice and vague. Nobody ever liked hearing that the woman they were about to fuck was actually a troubleshooter. They got nervous and edgy, even if they weren’t actually guilty of anything, and that spoiled the mood. Sometimes they even just unplugged as soon as they found out.
He nodded. “I’m in manufacturing, myself. Boring job, really. Nothing you want to hear about right now.” The table faded away between them, giving her an unobstructed view of his body. His cock was already stiffening under his trunks.
“I think you’re right,” Keila said, letting her own clothes slowly dissolve into mist. She kept the mist for a little while longer, though. She liked the thought of him being able to touch, but not see. It turned his exploration of her body with his hands into a process of discovery. She slid across to him and ran her fingers along his chest. He smelled good when she kissed him, like baking bread. It was an interesting choice, but Keila found she approved.
She felt his cock pressing up between them, rubbing slightly against her belly. It felt like a nice length—way too many guys went overboard on the cock, just because they could. After a certain point, it stopped being erotic and just started looking silly, like they were planning to log into a track-and-field game and got lost on their way to the pole-vaulting event. But he’d chosen a nice, thick nine inches. Keila shifted herself onto it with a swift, easy motion. Her eyes fluttered slightly in pleasure as it slid into her. One of the perks of being a troubleshooter—your cyber-dildonics were top of the line.
“Ooh, that’s nice,” he said, brushing his hands against her nipples beneath the fog. “Oh...” He bucked his hips up into her in an easy rhythm. “I never thought a civil servant would be...unnnh...this good in bed.” He must have adjusted the sensation settings, because she could still feel his hands on her tits even as they slid down to fondle her buttocks. “Guess you can never tell what a girl’s like when she’s off the clock, huh?”
“Who’s off the clock?” Keila said playfully. “My boss doesn’t care how I use my downtime.” As a matter of fact, it went even further than that—Strawberry actually checked to make sure Keila was getting her rocks off regularly, just to make sure sexual tension didn’t affect her when she was in the field. “You know what they say, all work and no plaaaaiii...” Her words trailed off into a moan as his cock started to thrum and buzz inside her. The wonders of virtual reality, she thought loosely as her pussy clenched around him.
The tingling in Keila’s clit became a throbbing, now, a second pulse that seemed to pound louder than her heartbeat as he fucked her. She could feel the orgasm building, and she wondered just how many they’d have time for before she had to—
Strawberry’s avatar appeared behind Wave-Rider, a geometric construct that was invisible to him but strobingly bright on Keila’s end. “Sorry to interrupt,” she said, in calm but brisk tones. “But we’re dropping out of warp now, and I need to brief you before we enter the system.” Wave-Rider, the bar, the table, and most importantly and depressingly of all the cock inside her faded into non-existence to be replaced by the coffin-sized cabin of her private ship. “Don’t worry—I’ve already installed a virtual representation of you into the chat room to carry on the encounter without you. He’ll never know you’re gone.”
Keila practically growled with need. “But I’ll know he’s gone! Damnit, Strawberry, couldn’t you have waited five more minutes?”
Strawberry’s alert brightness began to fade back down into ready-mode. “A troubleshooter’s work is never done, Agent Li.” Keila felt Strawberry running a full diagnostic check on her brain and body. “Oh, my. You were close, weren’t you? Can’t have you going into action like that.”
And with that, her cyber-dildonic harness went into overdrive, sending orgasm after screaming orgasm through Keila’s body. The pleasure hammered into her, leaving her shaking and writhing in her support harness, grunting and moaning into her internal microphone as she spent what felt like forever cumming and cumming and cumming, every drop of bliss wrung out of her by a machine intellect that could precisely monitor her brain and knew exactly how much sex she needed right now. Finally, she went limp with relief in her harness as Strawberry ceased stimulating her. “There we go,” Strawberry said soothingly. “All better now?”
Keila nodded. “Uh...uh-huh,” she whimpered out. She was all too aware of a dopey grin spreading across her face that definitely didn’t fit the hard-as-nails troubleshooter image. Keila might love the unpredictability of sex with another human partner (or the virtual version thereof), but nobody knew a how to satisfy a girl like her spaceship. Especially when the two actually shared a mental link.
Strawberry pumped stimulants and detoxifiers into her bloodstream, helping to clear out the exhaustion of the free-floating endorphins and replace it with calm alertness. “So where are we today?” Keila asked.
In response, Strawberry downloaded the briefing into her skull. As always, it took Keila a moment to translate the mass of raw data into ordered thought. “A missing scientist,” she said after a moment, thinking out loud.
“Not missing,” Strawberry said. “Non-responsive. She might be exactly where she’s supposed to be, but she hasn’t answered any calls, not even the priority alerts. Either she’s unable to answer, or she’s refusing to.”
Keila sifted through the data a bit more. “And we’re suspecting the latter. Doctor Fallon Sindel, suspected subversive tendencies, known associations to underground organizations like the Technocracy and the Ordered Galaxy...why was this woman given an unsupervised research project to begin with?”
“Check the qualifications,” Strawberry responded. Even as Keila did so, Strawberry continued to flag the important information verbally. “She’s got an intelligence score that’s on the outer edges of the charts, and a history of brilliant, if unorthodox research. Personality profilers judged that her sociopathic tendencies weren’t out of line with people of her intellectual capacity—in short, she doesn’t tolerate fools and she has a hard time finding people whose intelligence she respects. That both justifies her suspect tendencies and makes it necessary to send her off on solo projects.”
Keila nodded. “But now she’s not answering the phone. Well, a troubleshooter’s job is never done. Do we have a location?”
“Affirmative,” Strawberry said. “Running passive scans now.” Keila’s ship paused briefly, and Keila felt a moment’s disorientation as she patched into the ship’s sensors. Suddenly, she could see everything the ship saw, and that was a lot of sensory information even compared to Keila’s souped-up senses.
Keila spotted it just as Strawberry did. “Fusion generator’s still running,” she said. “Base camp’s still established, perimeter’s holding—she’s even got maintenance robots walking around. If she’s incapacitated, it hasn’t been for long.”
“Heading into low geostationary orbit,” Strawberry responded. They both knew that an active scan wouldn’t reveal much more than the passive scans did, and might let Doctor Sindel know someone was coming. (The thought that a civilian might detect Strawberry in passive mode, from orbit, Keila immediately dismissed.) The only way to find out what was really going on was to go down there and find out. “Prepare for drop.”
Tiny waldos spray-sealed her combat suit onto her body—they were in low enough orbit that Keila wouldn’t actually be exposed to hard vacuum, but the altitude meant she’d need an oxygen generator for the first part of the drop. The sensory harness retracted as she felt the flight pack, combat belt, and various other parts of her arsenal snap into position on her body. By this time, they felt like a second skin to her.
She knew that Strawberry was monitoring her body and mind now through the combat suit as closely as any doctor watched a patient, and that her ship probably already could tell from her heart rate, posture, and neural patterns that she was ready to go. But protocol demanded that she verbally acknowledge, “Prepared for drop,” before Strawberry’s access hatch opened and she fell out into the night sky over the planet Solitude.
As usual, she flipped over in mid-air so that she could watch Strawberry seem to recede into the night sky for a few moments. It always felt a little strange—she spent almost all her waking moments between missions cocooned in Strawberry’s pilot compartment, the two of them linked so completely that it was sometimes difficult for others to be sure where ship ended and pilot began. Watching herself leave her ship helped center her and remind her that even though she could call for the ship at any time, even though she could feel Strawberry’s comforting presence inside her thoughts, she was on her own again.
The ship looked like a child’s toy now, albeit a child’s toy designed to look as intimidating as humanly possible. Keila knew the psychological factors that went into designing troubleshooter equipment and starships—it had saved her life on more than a few occasions. When you’re operating on your own, it helped to look tough as well as be tough. That was why the ship’s transponder labeled it as ‘Thunderhead’, even though in the privacy of her mind, Keila would always think of it as Strawberry.
Finally, she flipped over again, kicking the flight pack into action and heading down towards Doctor Sindel’s base. She barely noticed the thin air and heavy gees she pulled in decelerating; her body had been upgraded with synthetics pretty seriously to fit her job, and Keila had estimated at one point that she had no more than thirty percent of the internal organs she’d been born with, tops. Not that she minded—Nature had done a pretty good job building her, she thought modestly, but the human race had come up with a few improvements over the centuries. A thought popped briefly into her head, a reminder of an old 2-D film she’d seen about cyborgs. She couldn’t believe they actually thought they’d just use bits of metal.
She landed lightly just outside of the habitat dome of Doctor Sindel’s facility, and stepped up to the door. After a brief argument between Strawberry’s lock-breaking software and the dome’s security protocols, the door opened, and Keila slipped inside.
“Hello,” Doctor Sindel said, without even turning around. “You must be the troubleshooter. I’m a little surprised—I thought they’d have sent one out a few days sooner.”
Right, Keila thought. Highly intelligent. “Doctor Fallon Sindel,” she said. “I’m Agent Keila Li. I’m here to make sure you’re all right.”
“I’m better than all right,” Doctor Sindel said as she turned around. She was a very striking woman, with an imposing face that Keila could tell had been slightly body-sculpted to make it even more coldly beautiful, and long black hair pulled back into a tight ponytail. “I’m brilliant. The research I’m doing here will revolutionize the galaxy. And to anticipate your question, that’s why I didn’t bother responding to the messages. I’m a bit too busy doing ground-breaking work to stop and chat.”
Doctor Sindel might have been brilliant, but she was a lousy liar. Well, at least as far as Keila was concerned, she was. When you could actually watch the blood vessels around the eyes expand micro-millimeters in an uncontrollable anxiety response, it made it easy to tell when someone was telling the truth. And Keila knew in that moment that Doctor Sindel didn’t just get too involved in her work to answer the phone.
She didn’t betray it, though. “I see,” she said. “So exactly what have you discovered that’s so ground-breaking?”
Doctor Sindel looked at her appraisingly. “The reason there are no predators on Solitude. I presume you got a file on the planet downloaded into your head?”
Keila opened the file and let the information flow through her at machine speeds. “Right,” she said, nodding. “Initial automated probes indicated that Solitude’s dominant life-form is a docile herbivore about half a meter in length, with no predators discovered.” She paused, thinking back to the many hellish planets she’d dropped onto over the course of her career. “Alright, I’ll grant you that’s unusual. Evolutionary pressures should have filled a predator niche. But ground-breaking?”
Doctor Sindel nodded. “Here, I’ll show you.” She headed towards a door that led deeper into the dome, gesturing for Keila to follow. “It’s more complex even than that. When I first got here, I did non-invasive scanning of the planet’s fossil record, and discovered that there were, at one point, numerous predator and super-predator species on Solitude. They all died out, though. Went extinct in practically a couple of generations. And then the interesting thing happened when I went looking for a specimen of the dominant life-form—what I call the Atarax.”
Keila followed her as she walked into another room, this one partitioned off with a translucent force-field. Behind the field, a small animal that looked like a cross between an otter and a cat with fur patterned in cream and white played with a small red ball, batting it around the room and then sinuously loping after it. “The robots found me two hours later, carried me back to base. I couldn’t even remember it happening. No wounds beyond a few scratches where I’d fallen into a thicket, no toxins in my bloodstream, but I was confused and disorientated to the point of amnesia. It took me the better part of a day to regain my equilibrium.”
Keila watched the little animal play. It seemed totally oblivious to her presence; the force-field must be opaque from the other end, preventing the atarax from noticing them. “I went out a few more times, tried it again...every time I got out to where the creatures congregated, that was the last thing I remembered until I woke up at base, groggy, blissed out and confused. Finally, I had to reconfigure a mining robot to capture specimens for me.”
Keila looked at the animal, busily play-biting the ball with teeth that looked too flat and blunt to do anything more than nip. “And the animals were causing the effect?”
“Oh, yes,” Doctor Sindel said. “I tested and retested. I exposed myself to the animals singly and in groups, and believe me, I’ve never been happier to have maintenance robots and recording devices.” She pressed a button on her wrist-remote, and the force-field faded away. “This one’s been with me a long time—he’s used to me, although the domestication process isn’t easy. They’re quite skittish things.”
Keila watched the atarax as it suddenly spotted her. It hunched back a little, and suddenly Keila felt a wave of dizziness pass through her. It wasn’t unpleasant, though; on the contrary, she suddenly felt warm and muzzy all over. She struggled to think with a head that now felt thick and sluggish. “I...um...it’s doing it. To me.”
Doctor Sindel nodded. “Yes, I thought it might. It’s used to my scent, but you register as unusual, and dangerous. It’s odd that their fear reflex hasn’t faded over the generations, but I suppose that every time they start feeling safe enough not to use it, predators start springing up and then they just start lashing out with it again.”
Keila’s eyes fluttered, reminding her incongruously of her sexual encounter back in the bar. “Whazzit...” She tried to control her speech, but her jaw felt slack, and all her muscles with it. “What’s it doing to me?”
“Oh, nothing harmful.” Doctor Sindel patted her on the shoulder, and Keila was briefly alarmed to realize she hadn’t even noticed her approach...but the warm, sleepy pleasure just swamped the panic clean out of her head. “It’s just the creatures’ reflexive response to anything they perceive as a threat. They lash out with the reflex, and suddenly the thing that was hunting them feels a bit too dizzy and happy to think about hunting anymore.”
“Reflex?” Keila repeated stupidly. She tried to focus. She’d been trained to deal with will-sapping drugs, hypnotic techniques, brainwashing, even sleep deprivation due to extended field service, but this...this was nothing like anything she’d ever felt before.
“Telepathic reflex,” Doctor Sindel replied. Keila had to struggle to remember what the question was. “That’s the ground-breaking part, Agent Li. The atarax are telepathic. Little Cindy-Lou here, she’s not dosing you with a toxin or emitting some sort of pheromone. I’ve ruled all that out. She’s actually reaching in with her tiny, primitive, animal mind and touching your thoughts, making them all sleepy and fuzzy and confused. I’m sure you can see the practical applications. Well, I’m sure you could if you were thinking a little more clearly at the moment.”
Keila’s body felt like she’d had too much to drink, and the combat-suit wasn’t compensating for it with purifiers for some reason. She took a halting step, but unfortunately it was in the direction of the atarax. The hazy sensation between her eyes intensified. Keila felt like her brain was wrapped in thick gauze by now, but she focused her whole will on the connection between her and the ship, and sent to Strawberry, Request diagnosis and correction.
She stood there, swaying slightly as she waited for Strawberry to notice the irregularities in her brainwaves and correct them, with...she didn’t know what, she couldn’t think anymore. But Strawberry would know. Strawberry always knew. A girl’s best friend was her spaceship.
Strawberry sent back. Um... Somehow, that single syllable was the most terrifying thing she’d ever imagined.
After what felt like forever in machine time, the ship continued. Data-link...corrupted, she said in a slurred parody of her normal crisp tones. Receiving...packet data...affecting all systems...
With a heroic effort, Keila realized that whatever the...the fuzzy thing...was doing to her mind, it was traveling through the mental link she shared with Strawberry. She tried to shut down the connection, but it wasn’t really designed to ever be shut down and her head was getting foggy and it was so hard to think...
“Come here,” Doctor Sindel said, taking her by the arm. Gratefully, Keila let herself be led. It just seemed so much easier, somehow, to let someone else guide her and show her what to do when she was this confused. “I have something even more important to show you through here.”
Keila followed her along down the small hallway. As they headed away from the animal, her thoughts started to clear a little...but only a little. Whatever the atarax did, it was strong. “Through there,” Doctor Sindel said, pointing to the next door. Keila’s instincts started to kick back in, to warn her that she shouldn’t be listening so readily to the woman she came here to investigate, but the atarax had rendered her so docile that she’d already opened the door before she questioned the wisdom of doing so.
She only just noticed the rows and rows of cages, each one containing an atarax, before her brain shut down completely.
“Doctor Fallon Sindel knows best,” the voice said. “You love Doctor Fallon Sindel with an intensity exceeding any other loyalties, any other emotions, any other considerations. Doctor Fallon Sindel is the perfect woman, and you wish nothing more than to serve her in every way. You wish to please Doctor Fallon Sindel, emotionally and physically. Anything Doctor Fallon Sindel says is beyond question, anything Doctor Fallon Sindel does is beyond reproach.”
Keila fumbled around with shaky hands, pulling loose the teaching box from her head with a yank. Just reprogramming a teaching box was a criminal offense, but it shouldn’t really matter, not to Keila. No matter what Doctor Sindel had done to modify it, a civilian box shouldn’t be able to even scratch the layers of defenses Keila had hardwired into her brain.
But that was when her brain was working. Keila suddenly realized that she didn’t know how long she’d been unconscious or what had happened to her during that period. She raised herself up from the bed she was lying on and looked around.
The first thing she noticed was that she was completely nude. Her combat suit had vanished, taking a small arsenal of tools, weapons, and handy gadgets with it. Keila grimaced. She’d been trained to operate without equipment, and she’d even been stripped of her tools on missions before, but that didn’t mean she had to like it. All she had now was her skills, her enhanced physique, her implanted neural link, and...she reached down to her thigh, and pressed at a spot that looked and felt like flesh. It popped open, revealing a small compartment in her leg. “They never find the hold-out blaster,” she muttered with a smile.
She quickly assessed the room. It was bare, vacant except for the bed and the teaching box. She was pretty sure it didn’t belong to Doctor Sindel—the woman might be austere (magnificently austere, her hindbrain whispered) but nobody could be this empty of personality. She felt sure that Doctor Sindel would have a tastefully decorated room, one in keeping with a woman so lovely, so intelligent, so...
Crap. She still felt a little woozy from being hit with all those ataraxi fear reflexes at once, and it was difficult to figure out just how her brain should be running. But she felt sure that she shouldn’t feel that warm and fuzzy about a woman who’d screwed her over that badly. Thankfully, she had an extra something for even the worst cases of brainwashing. Her partner. Strawberry, she sent. I need a full diagnostic, sensory back-ups, and a decontamination run on my mind.
No sensory back-ups available, Strawberry sent mournfully, her voice still a little slurred in Keila’s mind. Diagnostic scans are showing nominal. I can’t tell what’s wrong with you any more than I can tell what’s wrong with me.
Keila stood up, her legs still a little shaky. Send again? she replied. No sensory back-ups?
None at all. There’s a blank in my systems from the moment you opened that door until just a few seconds ago. I can tell that information has been uploaded into my memory during that period, but the time-stamps are all corrupted, and the back-ups as well. I can’t tell what thoughts shouldn’t be going on in either of our heads, Keila.
Crap on a stick. The link, she sent back. The ataraxi can’t affect machines, but you’re constantly monitoring my mind. When they hit me, it must have channeled up the link into your mind. Keila felt a chill in her gut. That meant that all Strawberry’s defenses were down too. Strawberry, can a teaching box input data into your systems?
In the state I was in? Inconclusive, Strawberry replied. I’ve never been that helpless before.
“All right,” Keila said out loud. “Nothing we can do now but move forward, and try never to be that helpless again.” She unclipped her blaster, resealed her thigh, and cautiously opened the door, praying that it didn’t open onto a nest of ataraxi.
It didn’t. She was in the other part of the dome, the one designated for living quarters. Moving silently, she found her way through the standardized layout of the dome until she found the commons area. Sure enough, Doctor Sindel was waiting for her. She was wearing a loose white robe, now, but she still had her wrist-remote on. Keila wondered if she ever took it off, even during sex. She wondered why she was thinking about sex with Doctor Sindel.
“You’ve been out for seventeen hours,” she said. “Which seems to map nicely to the data on my exposure; clearly, the effect has nothing to do with the mental capacity of the subject. Nothing personal, my dear; it’s clear that you’re a very intelligent woman. I’m just more intelligent than you are.”
Keila nodded, then caught herself and stopped. “Doctor Sindel,” she said, fighting the desire to kneel. “I’m afraid I have to detain you in custody for...for attempting to brainwash an officer of the Galactic Union, and for tampering with a thought-altering device for personal use. I...” She raised her blaster. “Please don’t make me hurt you,” she whispered.
“Oh, you can also add on conspiracy to overthrow the government, appropriation of military technology, and illegal exploitation of xenobiological specimens for personal gain.” Doctor Sindel smirked, leaning back in her chair. “But I don’t think you’ll do anything about it, you or ‘Strawberry’.” She paused. “I meant to ask—why did you call her Strawberry?”
Keila answered before she could even think about it. “I had an imaginary pony when I was a little girl, one that could ride in space.” She blushed bright crimson, the first time she’d ever done so in twelve years of duty. “You...you shouldn’t know that. Internal transponder data’s classified.”
“You weren’t unconscious during those seventeen hours, Keila,” Doctor Sindel said. “That was the most interesting part of all, really. You’ve been a tremendous help to my researches. I never had the chance to interview myself while actually under the influence of the ataraxi reflex. It was quite interesting. You were pleasantly chatty, quite open with information, docile, polite, and eager to please.” She smiled, and Keila was uncomfortably aware of a strange taste in her mouth that she hadn’t registered until now. “Very eager to please.”
“I...” She heard the words of the teaching box now in the back of her head, like the rhythm track to a song. “I have to take you in. I’m sorry.”
“Oh, but I have such plans for you,” Doctor Sindel said. “After all, troubleshooters are meant to be above suspicion, their loyalties to the Union unbreakable.” She stood up, letting the robe hang just a little bit loose, and Keila felt herself salivate at the sight of those taut thighs. “If you clear me, and then report back that someone in authority needs to personally see my findings, well...that carries a lot of weight, doesn’t it?”
The gun felt heavy in Keila’s hands. “I...I won’t, I can’t. I mustn’t.” Doctor Sindel took a step towards her. “I’ll shoot!” she shouted desperately.
“But you love me, don’t you?” Doctor Sindel untied the belt around her waist, let the robe hang wide open now. Keila felt a rush of arousal, and knew Doctor Sindel must be able to smell it in the air.
“I...” It was no good, she couldn’t deny it. Fallon’s beautiful eyes filled her whole world, seeming to beg her not to shoot. “Yes,” she said. “I do. But I’ll shoot you anyway.” Every fiber of her being told her not to do it, that Fallon was the most important thing ever in her life, that she should sooner take the gun and put it to her own head than fire on beautiful, perfect, unimpeachable Fallon Sindel, but Keila would not give in.
Doctor Sindel looked her in the eyes for a long moment. “You would, wouldn’t you,” she said. “I’m very impressed, Keila. Troubleshooters really are all they’re claimed to be. Ten hours under the teaching box, your mind practically turned to mush, and you’re still able to think clearly enough to recognize your duty.” Keila heard a tiny beep, and realized too late that Fallon had pressed a button on her wrist-remote while she was staring at those gorgeous eyes.
“That’s easily remedied, though,” Doctor Sindel said as the door opened. Keila spun to face the new threat, but even as she registered that the maintenance robot that came in through the door was carrying an atarax, the all-too-familiar sensation of drowsy bliss flooded into her mind. “Now what do you think of your duty, Keila?”
Duty. Keila tried to dredge something out of the thick white fog that seemed to be enveloping her thoughts, but she couldn’t remember what it was. She knew she had a duty, she knew it was important, but... Strawberry, she sent. What is my duty?
Strawberry’s voice in her head sounded almost as dazed as her own. Duty...we have a duty to...to...to please Doctor Sindel, it replied.
Of course, Keila thought. It was so simple now. She wondered how she could ever have forgotten. Even through the dizzy haze, she could hear that endless repetition and she clung to it desperately, letting it guide her out of the fog her thoughts had become. “Doctor Fallon Sindel is the perfect woman, and I wish nothing more than to serve her in every way,” she said in tones of wonder.
“Very good,” Fallon said, sitting back down. She spread her legs, revealing a pussy already glistening slightly with moisture. “Such a smart girl, learning her lessons so well. Come here, Keila, I want to reward you.”
Keila walked towards Fallon mechanically, her mind scarcely registering that the robot had approached them. The fog in her head seemed to get thicker, but that just made it easier to listen to the voice that told her to please Doctor Sindel. She dropped to her knees, and it felt so right to be kneeling before Doctor Sindel. It felt so right to look up into her eyes, and it felt even more right when Doctor Sindel wrapped her hands into Keila’s short red hair and pulled her to Doctor Sindel’s pussy.
Her nostrils filled with the scent of Fallon’s pussy, drowning out everything else. She knew Doctor Sindel wanted her to lick, and suddenly that was all she wanted to do, all she could ever imagine doing. Every moan, every quiver of Fallon’s thighs was just another sign that she was pleasing Doctor Sindel, and that was everything Keila ever wanted. She felt her thoughts slowly drain out into a blur of pleasure and obedience, but somehow even that seemed right, too.
“Very good, good girl,” Fallon whispered to her as she licked and licked and licked. “I...ohhh, yes...I have a special reward for you, when you’re done. My robot here is going to take you and show you a special room, with lots of pretty animals. And then I’m going to teach you some more. Doesn’t that sound nice, Keila?”
Keila’s words were muffled by Fallon’s cunt, but somehow Doctor Sindel seemed to know what they were.