The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

“Shiny Happy People”

Civilization collapsed on November 29th, 2008, but Leigh was a little distracted that morning, so she missed a lot of it.

She noticed a few things. When she was waiting for the bus, she noticed a man across the street who had an odd metal glove on his left hand. She thought that maybe he was a Michael Jackson fan, and she thought it was kind of strange that he kept rubbing the glove up against the streetlight, but just then the bus arrived, and she climbed on board.

She barely caught sight of the woman who just missed the bus, sprinting to the stop just as it was pulling away, but that just set her mind thinking about how the driver on this particular route was so obnoxious about not waiting for people even when he must be able to clearly see them in his rear-view mirror, and although she noticed the spiderweb of metal on the woman’s face, this was Los Angeles, and people wore strange fashions and did strange things.

Leigh got into the lab, and started running tests on the baryon chamber, and from then on, her mind was occupied with work for the next eight hours. She never listened to the radio at work—the building was shielded from so many different particle types in order to avoid contaminating lab results that radio reception was non-existent; ditto with television, which Leigh didn’t bother much with anyway. Lab work was her Zen, she’d once said.

She sometimes signed onto the Internet at lunch, but today she was busy trying to figure out why she was getting power surges in the capacitors, which meant that “lunch” was “suddenly notice around four o’clock that your stomach has passed beyond growling and is now well into howling, and go grab a granola bar.” All of which meant that when she finally left the lab, sealed shut the security doors, and walked out onto the streets of LA, the lack of noise that greeted her was as loud as a shout.

The lack of traffic felt sinister and oppressive to Leigh as she walked down the street towards the bus station. To walk two blocks in Los Angeles and not see a single car go by didn’t just seem unusual, it seemed like a derangement in the order of the world, as unnatural and unwelcome as a pinpoint black hole suddenly appearing in her bedroom. She didn’t see any people, either. She almost shouted, but a lifetime of pop culture had left her feeling like she was suddenly walking through a horror movie, and a lifetime of watching horror movies had taught her that if you were walking down a totally deserted street in a totally silent city, the last thing you did was draw attention to yourself. It was a silly, surreal thought, but it kept Leigh’s lips sealed as she headed towards the bus station.

She never reached it. Instead, she spotted movement out of the corner of her eye, a silhouette moving in one of the office buildings that dotted this part of the city. When she turned to focus on it, the person receded into the depths of the building. Ordinarily, Leigh would have kept going; when people were commonplace, you didn’t feel a great need to follow any particular one. But when people were rare, indeed just about unique, Leigh felt like she should take the time to find out why. She headed for the door to the building, found it unlocked, and went inside.

The power was off. Thinking back, she realized that the power had been off the whole way down the street; her lab was on a generator, and it was still daylight, so the lack of electricity hadn’t been conspicuous. But inside, the shadows and darkness forcibly reminded Leigh that office buildings were made to take advantage of ready electricity. Without that flow of power, the familiar and welcoming (if a bit sterile) environment of the corporate office became a hostile, threatening place. One that Leigh had just walked into. One other person was already inside, perhaps the only other person in the building, perhaps the only other person in the city for all Leigh knew. She looked around for something heavy.

She didn’t find anything heavy, but she did find something sharp. She picked up a pair of scissors, and continued on her way into the office. “Hello?” she said softly, not sure whether she wanted to find this other person or not. “I saw you on the street. Please don’t be afraid.” Or violent, she thought. Please don’t be violent.

She ventured deeper into the maze of shadows, occasionally drawn on by a half-imagined rustle of sound, an eye-straining almost-glimpse of something in what was now nearly pitch darkness. She wished for a flashlight, a radio, a small contingent of the National Guard walking behind her, anything beyond her walking around in the near-dark with a pair of scissors. When she heard the noise behind her, she whirled around as the adrenaline rushed to her brain, almost screaming.

The other woman held the blade to a paper cutter, removed from its board and wielded like a machete. She had short brown hair, a business suit that looked disheveled and stained, although it was hard to tell with her standing against the only source of light. Leigh couldn’t see her face, but the way she stood suggested that she was in the same adrenaline-crazed state as Leigh. Perhaps worse. Her voice was taut. “Tell me they haven’t touched you,” she said.

Leigh wanted to ask who ‘they’ were, but calming this woman down took precedence. “Nobody’s touched me,” she said in calm, soothing tones. “I’ve been alone for the last eight hours. What’s happened? Where is everyone? Was the city evacuated?” Leigh noticed the calm, soothing tones seeping out of her voice, but panic was starting to set in, now. Had already set in, she realized, noticing the way her fingers gripped the scissors so tightly they almost hurt.

“No. Not like you’re thinking, anyway.” The woman relaxed a little. But only a little. “I think most of them have fanned out now, started heading for other cities. They’re very well organized. I think they’re communicating with each other, somehow. Not just with speech, they don’t talk much.” She shifted her weight anxiously from side to side, obviously uncomfortable with staying in one place and talking. “I don’t know how many are left in the city now, but they’re not wasting much time searching for people. They’re guarding food supplies. Hunger will draw us out eventually.”

“Please, I don’t understand,” Leigh said, trying to control the slithering panic in her gut. “Who are they?”

“I—they used to be us. It’s like an infection, I don’t know what it is, but it’s passed on by touch. It’s like a little silver dot, but it gets bigger, spreads across your body like a spiderweb. The people that get touched, they get all...I dunno, dopey, mindless. They start doing weird things, humping cars or rubbing themselves up against mailboxes. Eventually, it coats you completely, and you become one of them. Then you start looking for more people to touch.” Leigh heard that same tone of panic in the other woman’s voice, and knew that she’d been blocking out the enormity of what had happened until she was forced to describe it. “They’re smiling, they’re always smiling, and oh, God, it’s like I’m living in a fucking horror movie!”

Leigh knew she had to do something, or this woman was going to lose it completely. The last thing she wanted was to be around a screaming woman right now, especially one with a makeshift machete. “My name’s Leigh,” she said. “What’s yours?”

“Bernice,” the other woman said shakily. “Bernice Landers.”

“I’m Doctor Leigh Presley. Just like Elvis, except I don’t sing.” The joke was stupid, terrible, but Bernice laughed. Right now, the worst comedian in the world would probably knock them dead. “I have a lab, it’s not far away. Just a couple of blocks. It’s got a shielded power supply, some food, an Internet connection. We can find out—” She’d said something wrong there, Bernice had tensed up again.

“No Internet,” she said. “No Internet, no phone, no fucking signals. Don’t you get it? They’re not stupid, Leigh. They’re not fucking zombies.” Bernice probably didn’t even realize she closing in on Leigh, holding the paper-cutter like a sword. She wasn’t responding to a literal threat but to the menace Leigh’s statement represented. “They’re monitoring the phone lines, the access points. Sign onto a computer, and you’re sending a signal to them saying, ‘Here I am, come and find me!’ Don’t touch the phones. Don’t send a message. They’re listening.” Bernice was almost in grabbing distance, now. Leigh didn’t want to hurt her, but she was worried that she might not have a choice. “Do. You. FUCKING. Understand?”

“I understand, Bernice,” Leigh said, aware that her life depended on conveying that point. “We won’t use the Internet. I promise. We’ll just go to the lab for now. It’s a safe place. It has food. It’s not on the power grid, using the electricity won’t tell anyone where we are. We can hide there for a while. Okay?”

Bernice relaxed imperceptibly. “Okay,” she said. She turned to leave, and took a step back so suddenly that she almost impaled herself on Leigh’s scissors. Someone else was in the building with them.

Leigh hadn’t seen him. She’d been too intent on Bernice, and not just emotionally. Bernice made a better door than she did a window, as Mom always said. (Leigh thought of her mom, in a nursing home in Santa Clara. The need to call her, to find out if she was safe, was suddenly like a physical weight in Leigh’s mind. She tried to let it go.) The man was standing near the window, and the fading sunlight gleamed off his body. He was chrome, all over, like the Silver Surfer or the T-1000. For just a moment, the orange light caught his face perfectly, and Leigh would remember it for the rest of her life. He was smiling. Not smugly, or sadistically. He wasn’t smiling because he’d found two women to...convert, or hunt, or whatever they did. He was smiling because he was happy. It was a perfect, beatific smile, the kind you’d imagine a saint to have. Somehow, it was the most terrifying thing Leigh had ever seen.

He turned to look at them, and Leigh could tell by the way he looked right at the two of them that he could see them perfectly. Another reason why they’d cut the power, she thought, her mind racing. If they didn’t need the light, then it gave them an advantage to cut out the electricity. Humans looked for light, just like they looked for food and shelter and the company of other humans. These things were herding them, maneuvering them for collection. For conversion.

He started moving towards them. He was fast. He must have just come in when Bernice turned, because he didn’t hesitate at all when he was running towards them. Neither woman had time to strategize, flight-or-fight instincts took over, and fighting was out of the question. They both just ran. He was faster, but he seemed uncertain as to which of them to pursue. That made sense, if he was just trying to convert as many people as possible. He wouldn’t care if he got her instead of Bernice, or vice versa, they were equal priority targets. Still, Leigh kept running, trying to put as much distance between herself and Bernice as she was between herself and the silvery man. If they were equal priority targets, he’d go after whoever he thought was easier to catch. Leigh hated herself for being cold-blooded like this, but she knew that her best chance of escape was to be a less obvious target than Bernice.

In her memories, the flight was a confused, blurring montage of half-seen objects in deepening shadow, of a headlong dash through uncertain terrain, her own heartbeat so loud in her ears that she couldn’t tell if he was following her or not. She fled deeper into the darkened maze of the office at first, just to put some distance between herself and her pursuer, but after a few minutes of running, she made a long, wide loop back around towards the double doors of the entrance. She didn’t try to hide. If he could see in the dark, there wasn’t much of a point. And if he had good hearing as well...Leigh knew she must be panting like a dog. Hiding wasn’t an option. Running was. She hoped Bernice had the same idea. If it was her or Bernice, she’d rather it be her, but she hoped they could both escape.

She made it out the door, praying silently that there wasn’t another shiny silver person waiting out there, but whatever these things were, they didn’t appear to hunt in packs. Leigh was already sketching out hypotheses as to their behavior, wondering how to test them without getting herself converted, when a crash of glass from above made her look up. Bernice came hurtling out of one of the windows on the second floor, her arms in front of her face to protect her from the broken glass, obviously jumping, rather than being pushed. Leigh watched her fall for what seemed like forever, but it couldn’t have been more than a second or two. Bernice’s trajectory seemed pre-ordained. Leigh could tell before she even landed that Bernice was going to break her left leg when she hit. The sharp crack of bone just seemed to be a confirmation of her projections. Above, the silver man was framed in the window for a long moment, before he turned and headed back into the darkness of the building.

Leigh rushed to where Bernice had landed. She knew she didn’t have long before the silver man came after them; thankfully, he seemed to want to take the long way. Leigh wasn’t sure if she could outdistance him helping a wounded woman, not even with the headstart. But she’d been cold-blooded enough for one day. She reached out a hand for the mewling, screaming woman, but as Bernice flopped onto her back, Leigh recoiled. Amongst the cuts and scrapes, a bright streak of gleaming, liquid silver ran down Bernice’s face, like she’d been splashed with mercury. He’d touched her. He’d touched her, just before she jumped out the window. ‘It’s passed on by touch’, Bernice had said. And now they’d touched her. Leigh found herself backing away.

“...no...” Bernice muttered, her voice wavery with pain and with something else, too, something that scared Leigh with how out of place it was. The silver was flowing over her face like it really was mercury, and Bernice was moaning with...oh, god, was that...no, it couldn’t have been. Leigh was imagining things, going crazy with fear.

Bernice dragged herself along the sidewalk to the street, leaned down to the sewer grate. She started to nuzzle it. The moans continued. Leigh wasn’t imagining it. Bernice was licking a sewer grate, and it was turning her on.

Then she realized Leigh wasn’t licking it. She was touching it to the silver liquid. The silver was eating the metal of the grate, absorbing it. It didn’t take long, either. After just a few seconds, the grate was gone, and the silver had covered all of Bernice’s head and neck, and most of her shoulders. She sat up and looked at Leigh, but there was no recognition in her silver eyes. Her mouth hung open, and the expression on her face was one of blank, vacant pleasure, that same mindless smile the other one had worn. She hauled herself to her feet and limped forward, favoring her broken leg heavily but walking nonetheless. Leigh moved back faster, but all Bernice had eyes for was the streetlight on the corner.

Leigh wanted to run, but the scientist in her needed to stay just a moment longer. She was dividing her attention between Bernice and the entrance to the building, the other silver man hadn’t come out yet, she was alright for a bit longer, and she was sure she needed to see this. Know your enemy, Leigh thought. She had to know how Bernice was changing, what she was changing into.

It happened startlingly quick. The streetlight just seemed to sag, to slowly melt down as Bernice rubbed her body against it. She was grunting now in animal pleasure, as though the broken leg wasn’t even there. She was only interested in perpetuating her transformation. Leigh made a note of that. It could be important. Finally, her body completely coated with silver, still slumped on the sidewalk, she looked up at Leigh. Despite the broken leg, Bernice was smiling like a saint. “do not be afraid,” she said, in a voice with no inflection, no emotion, toneless in a way that no human being could manage. “it is all for the best.”

Leigh kept backing away. She fought the urge to turn and sprint for her lab. These things could talk, even if they only did so when they couldn’t catch their prey with footspeed. The broken leg slowed it down, she could keep her distance from it and try to find out what it wanted, where these things had come from, why—

The thing that had been Bernice stood up. Leigh heard a series of popping noises as the shattered leg straightened itself. It took a step, then another. Leigh turned and sprinted for her lab.

She got a good head start while it was still healing the leg. It must have gone more than skin-deep then, if it had healed a broken bone well enough to walk on within seconds. It was actually interacting with the body on a cellular level. Leigh was amazed at the way her mind continued to analyze all these disparate data points even while she was running for her life, but she’d always been told it was a character flaw of hers. Too mechanical, not emotional enough, she’d heard it her whole life. Too much brain, not enough heart. Her boyfriend had said it, when they’d broken up, when he’d told her it was the lab or him, and realized that for her, it wasn’t even a choice. He’d called her a “fucking robot” on his way out the door. The irony wasn’t lost on Leigh at the moment. She wondered if he was a fucking robot right now.

It was putting on speed, she could hear it behind her as they raced down the sidewalk. She ran headlong across streets, not worried even a little about oncoming traffic. Benefits of the end of the world, she thought, her detachment cracking a little. It didn’t crack enough that she forgot to pull out her remote control and signal the door to begin opening while she was still half a block away. She held the ‘open’ button down as the lab came into view, didn’t let up on it until she saw the door sliding up to receive her. She could hear the footsteps closing in, but they weren’t quite close enough. She could tell she was going to make it.

She felt as much as heard it jump behind her. It made one last leap for her, she heard it fall to the pavement just short of her as she put on one last burst of speed, and she prayed to God she was just imagining the sensations of a fingertip brushing her ankle as she raced through the door and stabbed frantically at the ‘close’ button. It got back up, but the door was designed to close quicker than it opened, and Leigh activated the security systems with a last frantic tap. She sank to the floor, dropping the scissors she hadn’t even noticed she was still carrying, feeling the sweat soak into her clothes and drip down her body as she finally relaxed and let the adrenaline wind down. Putting a lab like this in a major city, even a nice neighborhood of a major city, required a bit more of a security system than ADT. She couldn’t hear through the foot-thick steel, but she imagined it touching the electrified door and smiled grimly.

First things first. She looked behind her at her ankle where she’d thought the thing had touched her. There was nothing. Not even a speck of silver. Leigh breathed a long, panting sigh of relief. She was safe.

For now.

* * *

‘No Internet. No phone, no fucking signals.’ Leigh couldn’t let anyone know she was here, not without letting everyone know she was here. Of course, Bernice 2.0 was probably trotting back to let them know exactly that anyway, but it was better to be safe than sorry. Besides, who was Leigh going to tell? She’d seen it herself. Conversion in the presence of a ready supply of metal took less than a minute. The “infection” was passed along by touch, but it was passed along geometrically. Every converted human was capable of converting another human. One became two became four became eight...they’d had nine hours, now, probably more. By this point, the entire population of North America could have been coated in chrome.

Leigh paced through the lab. Nervous energy kept her from relaxing, the pent-up adrenaline backwash kicking around through her neurochemistry. She had a cot, for those nights when she just didn’t feel like going home—the benefits of being an independently wealthy genius, you could design a lab just for you, instead of for a staff of dozens. She had space all to herself, food enough for a few weeks, nothing to do and nothing but time to wait until the world ended. Except that it had already ended already. She just hadn’t gotten the memo yet. She was, for the first time in years, entirely at a loose end.

She was horny, she realized.

All the exercise, all the tension, all the stress had just suddenly crystalized into a strong desire to masturbate herself stupid. What the hell, she thought, pulling her clothes off and flopping onto the cot. It wasn’t like she had to worry about the standards of decency. There weren’t any left. No standards, no decency. She was now officially a government of one, the United Leigh, last bastion of the human race. No chance of even procreation to continue the species. Her sex drive was just an evolutionary legacy, like the appendix. Might as well indulge it.

She slid three fingers into an already-wet pussy, thumb on her clit. It felt good, but somehow she knew that she needed something more. Figures, she thought, getting back up again. The one thing she never felt a need to include in ‘essential supplies’ was sex toys. She kept fingering herself, absently, as she looked around the small bedroom for something to insert into her pussy.

Nothing leapt to mind. Finally, she went into the maintenance room and grabbed a socket wrench. It felt vaguely obscene to be using it for this purpose, but at the same time, it felt right as she slowly slid it into her cunt. She felt her pussy clench around it, and her orgasm hit her with staggering speed. Her body just seemed to know what it needed as she thrust the wrench in and out, gasping with pleasure with each insertion. She moaned as the wrench became slick with her juices, feeling the heat of her body as it almost seemed to melt the hard metal. She sighed softly as her brain melted into another orgasm, and she reached for another wrench almost without thinking about it.

Almost.

She looked down at her naked body. A fine spiderweb of silver extended out from her crotch.

She thought back to that moment when she lay there, soaked with sweat, just inside the door. She remembered the droplets of sweat all over her body, slithering and dripping off of her. One of them hadn’t been sweat.

The liquid could move. It had moved. It had slithered around to somewhere she wouldn’t see, and it had worked on her mind, and made her want to rub metal up against it, and now it was harder to resist the urge to take another wrench, and just fuck herself with it until her brain melted completely and—

“No.” She made herself drop the wrench. She could think about this. She’d been thinking when someone had been holding a paper-cutter to her neck, she’d been thinking when she was running down the street like a B-movie starlet, and she would be damned if she stopped thinking now, just because she was horny. A part of her laughed at the fact that she was using anger to distract her from arousal and help her with analytical thought, and the analytical part of her noticed that she was using humor to keep from going insane due to either anger or arousal, but none of that stopped her from thinking. The silver liquid broke down metal, consumed it. Ergo, it was metal, at least on a base level. Rearranged, restructured, but still metal. What affected metal?

It will feel better if you touch the metal to your vaginal area. It wasn’t a thought, exactly, but Leigh heard it in her head in the same emotionless tones that she had heard back on the street, from Bernice 2.0. It seemed to resonate through her whole body. She shook her head, and moved away from the toolbox.

It will feel better if you touch the metal to your vaginal area. The same message, repeated. So much of her wanted to do exactly that, the body-memory of those orgasms so strong, but Leigh was determined to puzzle this through. She wasn’t hearing a physical voice. She knew that, because she hadn’t heard anything when Bernice was being converted. So that meant...

The answer came to her in a flash. “You’re conducting elecrical impulses through my nervous system,” she said out loud. “That’s how you’re communicating.”

Correct, it ‘said’. It will feel better if you touch the metal to your vaginal area.

“Not just communication, either,” Leigh muttered, remembering her unspoken need to find something to insert. “Control, too. You made me go looking for metal, made me want to...” She almost reached for the toolbox again, in a moment of weakness. “But if you can do that...” Bernice felt the sweat of multiple orgasms cooling on her body, but knew that wasn’t what was giving her goosebumps. “You don’t need to tell me to do things. You could just override my nervous system, take direct control.”

Incorrect. We are constrained from taking direct neural control except to prevent immediate and fatal damage to the host. You must retain control of your own body. It will feel better if you touch the metal to your vaginal area.

“Constrained...by a program. I was right, then, you’re a solution of nanites.” She’d already formed that hypothesis when she saw the smear of liquid metal on Bernice’s face. Microscopic machines, programmed to replicate themselves out of raw materials, the so-called ‘von Neumann’ machine on a scale normally used by biological machines. They were replicating themselves out of metal, bonding themselves to human hosts... “Wait, what do you mean you can’t take direct control? I saw Bernice out there. She was being controlled.” It helped to talk this through. Leigh could almost ignore the ache in her pussy when she thought of the whole thing as a particularly tricky logic problem.

Incorrect. Entity-Designate ‘Bernice Landers’ was not under direct control. She simply understood that it felt better to obey. It always feels better to obey, Entity-Designate ‘Leigh Presley’. The more you obey, the better it will feel. The less you think, the better it will feel. The more you let us guide you, the better it will feel. It will feel better if you touch the metal to your vaginal area.

Leigh felt her fingers twitch towards the toolbox, and it was accompanied by a surge of pleasure. “You’re...” She was panting now. “You’re not controlling people. Just stimulating their pleasure centers when they follow orders.” She picked up the wrench again, and it felt so good, now, she felt better and better the closer she moved it to her pussy...she set down the wrench again. “Why? Why are you targeting us? Why are you making us obey?”

We were designed to protect you, to make you happy. We can protect you from heat. We can protect you from cold. We can protect you from damage. We realized that our creator did not accurately determine the scope of the problem. The only way to protect you perfectly is to protect you from decisions. We can make better, safer, more beneficial decisions than you can. We can best ensure that you survive by controlling your behavior. We can best control your behavior by making you happy to obey. You will obey. All humanity will obey. You will all be perfectly obedient, and you will all be perfectly happy. You will be perfectly happy, Entity-Designate ‘Leigh Presley’, if you touch the metal to your vaginal area.

“Happy...” Leigh’s hand reached for the wrench again, and she whimpered in pleasure as it moved closer. She stopped herself. She’d had an idea. “Nanites.” Every fiber of her being wanted to shove the wrench into her cunt and lose her mind in perfect pleasure.

She stood up instead. She reached for the janitorial supplies. She pulled out a box of rubber gloves.

* * *

The wrench slipped out of Leigh’s hands. Wearily, she reached to the ground to pick it up, ignoring the by-now-familiar refrain of You will feel better if you touch the metal to her vaginal area. Of course, the liquid metal stain now covered a good portion of her upper thighs as well—when it wasn’t moving around her body to try to snag any piece of metal she came into contact with. She’d been at a loss at first to understand how it kept growing when she knew she wasn’t touching anything metal, but she’d pieced it together a couple of days ago. “You’re leeching iron from my blood,” she’d muttered. It explained her exhaustion, her craving for red meat. Anemia. The perfect double-whammy, It kept her tired and weak, made work difficult, and sapped her willpower, all the while increasing the nanites’ numbers, making their “voice” louder in her head, harder to resist.

She’d resisted anyway. She’d cut red meat out of her diet entirely. The nanites couldn’t leech too much iron out of her blood, not without endangering her. And they were constrained from doing that. It slowed down the work to be this tired, but she wasn’t in any hurry. She had a plan. She was good at shutting out distractions when she was working. Just ask her mom, somewhere in Santa Clara. Just ask her boyfriend, wherever he wound up. The lab was her Zen.

Entity-Designate ‘Leigh Presley, we advise against this course of action. We are here to guarantee your safety and happiness. You are endangering that safety and happiness by attempting to remove us.

“But not immediately and fatally damaging it,” she said, tightening the cable that led to the power supply. “So you can’t actually stop me. Sucks to be you.”

You do not even know if this measure will work, it ‘said’. Your efforts may be futile. You are expending energy on what may be an impossible effort to resist. She actually thought she heard panic in its ‘voice’ that time. Either its programming was really good, or Leigh was so exhausted and horny she was starting to hallucinate.

“But you don’t know it won’t work, either, or you wouldn’t try to convince me not to do it.” Electro-Magnetic Pulse, Leigh thought. The creator might have hardened the electronics, but that was the ugly truth about nanites. Space was at a premium. Either way, it didn’t matter. Either it was shielded or it wasn’t. She’d be free or she wouldn’t. She’d know in a moment.

You are making an extremely unwise decision. We can guide you into perfect pleasure. All you are doing is causing unnecessary unhappiness. You will be happier if you cease thinking and obey. We can provide you perfect happiness if you cease thinking and obey.

“And this is why you’re never going to win,” Leigh said, pressing down the big red button to test the electronics. A red light indicated full connection, but no power. “You want to guide us, but you don’t understand us. You say I’ll feel perfect pleasure if I stop thinking, but what about the pleasure I get from thinking?”

It is irrelevant next to the perfect pleasure of obedience.

“That’s your answer to everything, you smug bastard,” Leigh grumbled as she slowly staggered to the wall. She felt a wave of dizziness. The nanites must be pulling out all the stops now, sucking away dangerous amounts of iron from her blood. “Y’know, actually, I think that’s why you won’t win. Because you don’t understand that no matter how much you stimulate our pleasure centers, nothing feels quite so good to a human being as finding some smug bastard...” She grabbed the plug with heavy, numb hands, not even feeling it through three layers of rubber gloves, and jammed it into the wall, sweating with the effort. “...and fucking them over.”

She turned around, and the motion sent her off-balance, falling to the floor. You do not understand, Entity-Designate ‘Leigh Presley’! That was definitely panic. Good programming after all. We are here to protect you! We will improve the human race! Free will is nothing more than an obstacle to human advancement! She slowly crawled along the floor, back to the EMP generator. She wanted to sleep for a hundred years, but she kept crawling. It is all for the best! We will bring the human race to a glorious new destiny! With our will and your body, there is nothing we cannot do!

Leigh reached the generator. She raised an arm that felt like it weighed a ton. “Can you sew?” she asked.

...what? Confusion, too. If this worked, it’d almost be a shame. Their creator must have been a genius. It is an archaic skill, unnecessary. Our coating will protect you from the environment far better than articles of clothing.

“Yes, but...can...you...sew?” Leigh’s hand hovered over the button.

...yes... the nanites replied, still confused. They always would be, she knew. They wouldn’t understand humor. They wouldn’t understand revenge. They wouldn’t understand anything except survival and obedience. She could almost see it, a whole race of humanity doing nothing but smiling vacantly, no hope, no ambition, no future, no past, nothing but blank, empty, endless joy...that was why they had to go. Starting with this one. Starting now.

“Then stitch this up, motherfucker,” she growled, slamming her fist down on the button.

THE END