The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

The human race was about to become extinct, and it was all my fault.

That’s all I could think of, sitting in my favorite chair in my Sausalito home, staring out at the bay. Sole Survivor was down there, a brown and white dot docked at the Yacht Club. It had all seemed like such a great adventure last June when this all started. It was a battle of the Titans, an epic confrontation between mankind and the evil, oppressive alien conquerors. And of course I was the natural choice to lead the fight—a modern day David taking on the Goliath of the Chrxjthal horde.

My ego had gotten me in trouble before, in both my personal and professional lives, but this time, I’d screwed up on a scale that was only imagined in disaster vids. Real life wasn’t supposed to work this way—one idiot, no matter how well intentioned, should not be able to destroy eight billion people. But that’s what was probably going to happen in the next twenty-four hours.

I took a sip of the scotch that I’d scrounged from a cabinet. I didn’t care any more, about the effects the alcohol might have on my brain or my implants. All I wanted to do was drown myself in anything that could make me forget what I’d done.

I stroked Lani’s silky hair while I stared out the window. Even though there was a perfectly good chair next to mine, she’d chosen to sit on the floor at my feet, her arms wrapped around my legs, and her lovely cheek resting on my knee.

Maybe she was the problem. The first mind-controlled person that I’d taken into my orbit, and she happened to be a young, smart, incredibly beautiful teenager who—through my own fumbling, selfish actions—was hopelessly and irrevocably in love with me. What if the first drone that I’d recruited for the fight hadn’t been a hot young girl? What if it was her father, or her mother? This battle against the aliens had somehow become inextricably entwined with sex and pleasure, but was that Lani’s fault, or mine?

Obviously not Lani’s. I was an adult. A smart, capable, adult that could make my own decisions. Blaming anyone else for the path I’d taken wasn’t really in my nature. So, like I said earlier, humanity was doomed, and it was all my fault.

“Baby,” Lani said, looking up at me with her big brown eyes, so full of adoration, “how long are we staying here? If the ships have arrived like you said, shouldn’t we be doing something about it?” [Please, Alex, stop sitting around. Help us. Tell me what I can do to help you...]

Nothing could help us any more. I’d taken my shot, but it had done nothing to stop the overwhelming juggernaut of the aliens’ technology. From the scattered reports I’d received, almost twelve thousand Sentinels had risen up against their alien masters, killing them in their solitary habitats, and making off with the blue-helmeted Arbiters. It sounded like a great victory for humanity, but in the big picture, it was an empty gesture. It was like killing all the janitors at the Pentagon—the alien wardens were nothing more than caretakers, their only real purpose being to see that the populace didn’t throw off their programming.

The true mission of this invasion had always been to produce soldiers for the aliens’ war back in their home system. They’d accomplished that task with an enviable alacrity. Millions of men had been converted into the red-armored warriors, and soon they would be on their way across the galaxy, regardless of what I’d done.

The question now was, what would the Chrxjthal leave behind? We’d talked plenty of times, among the few Unconverted, about doing nothing to antagonize the aliens, and then picking up the pieces after they left. But there was no guarantee that the aliens would just leave in peace. Sure they’d gotten what they came for, but after they’d gone through all the trouble of invading in the first place, I’d been convinced that they would either stay in control of the population—keeping them as a reserve in case they needed more people—or destroy everything as they left. They would either deny us as a resource for their enemy, or kill us purely out of spite.

I didn’t think they would physically destroy the planet at least. Supposedly there was somewhere between eight and ten million converted soldiers who would be left here because there wasn’t enough room on the transports. But in their self-sustaining cryo-pods, they could be stashed anywhere to await the next alien fleet, and wouldn’t need a live population on Earth to sustain them. The aliens could burn the earth down to a cinder and then line up the pods in the ashes if that fit their plan.

While my desperation attack had killed over eighty percent of the alien population, the survivors were behind the walls of the “factories,” guarded by their own technology, and thousands of armed Sentinels. We had been able to take hold of the command signals for the individual Sentinels assigned to each warden, but the computers that monitored the factories weren’t nearly as easy to crack. Plus we now had the crews of several hundred alien ships to deal with.

There weren’t enough humans capable of committing violence to launch a direct military attack, not to mention a lack of effective weapons. Our only real chance had been to worm our way into their tech, and turn their own assets against them. But we’d needed to accomplish our goal before the fleet arrived, in order to have any chance of fighting them off, and unfortunately, they’d come earlier than expected.

I’d rather be doing something, other than sitting here brooding, but at the moment all I could do was wallow in depression and self-recrimination. Even Lani’s sweet nature and beautiful body hadn’t been able to break me out of my funk.

I’d come back to my old house, thinking that I might hop back on board Survivor with my island girl, and the rest of my “harem,” and just sail away while the planet burned. Maybe we could eke out an existence for a few years, or a few decades, but there was no way to reboot the planet with just a dozen people. Slowly, we’d fade away, or revert to primitivism, where disease and natural disasters would likely finish us off. It had been too depressing a future for me to get off my ass and get started on it, which brought me full circle to staring out the window, wondering what the hell to do next.

“Alex?” [Please don’t yell. I’m sorry I’m disturbing you...]

I felt like shit, as Amber tiptoed into the room. Was I such an ass that my girls were afraid of bothering me? “Yes, Amber?”

“Colonel Freeman is on the vid, from Colorado. He says he needs to talk to you right away.” [Please get up. He’ll yell at me if you don’t get up...]

I sighed and gently moved Lani’s head off my knee. She looked up at me with such sadness that I felt like crying. But I didn’t—I was the rock that everyone held onto in the storm, right? I got out of my chair, and Amber smiled at me. I tried to smile back, but I wasn’t sure how good a job I did.

The vidscreen in the living room had been modified for secure communications, at least that’s what Param had told me. I flopped into a stuffed armchair, and hit the button on the remote.

Colonel Freeman’s face and torso sprang into view. Somehow he’d managed to modify a uniforms to fit over his red armor. Probably just to have somewhere to pin his medals. Not that anyone would be impressed with them.

“Christ, son, you look like hell,” he said. The Sentinel half-mask didn’t show his eyes, but I could imagine them roaming up and down my disheveled form.

“What do you want, Colonel,” I said. We still didn’t get along, but the weeks since he’d gone to Cheyenne Mountain had softened our hatred. He was a decent enough organizer to get the satellite system up and running again. I saw Airman DeVore and Airman Smith, two survivors of Salt Lake City, standing just behind him, and almost smiled, but they’d been converted, and wouldn’t care if I smiled at them or not.

“There’s a shitstorm of alien activity going on in orbit, and I’m wondering what we’re going to do about it.”

I held back a retort, because we’d already gone over this. “There’s nothing we can do, Colonel,” I said. “We don’t have any weapons, or troops, or technology that can touch the aliens at this point. We’re out of ammo.”

“Bullshit,” he said, slamming his armored fist down on the console, making the camera jump. “There’s got to be something. You’ve done a fine job of it so far, Alex, I see that now, but you can’t just give up like this because you don’t have the advantage any more.”

“Advantage? When have we ever had an advantage in this fight? Christ, Colonel, there are billions of dead on this planet. The aliens have tech that we hadn’t even dreamed of yet. And while we may have hit their wardens hard, we’re no closer to stopping the transports from taking millions of your fellow soldiers off-planet.”

“You’re right, Alex. Things aren’t great, but we can’t just crawl into a hole, or into a bottle, and wait to die. Humans don’t fucking do that. We fight until the end.”

“No, Colonel, you’re wrong,” I said. “We don’t always fight until the end. Only if we have something to fight for. Sacrificing everything for the human race should be enough, but it isn’t. The only thing I’ll fight for are my people, and right now anything I could possibly do would just get them killed faster. Crawling into a hole may be my best option for keeping the ones I care about alive.”

“That’s a coward’s way out you—”

Alarms sounded from somewhere behind the Colonel. He spun around and shouted an order, then turned back. “We’ve got multiple, no, make that hundreds, of bogies launching from the transport ships. They’re entering atmo all over the planet.” The display changed to a view from an orbiting satellite. Several large ovoids moved past the camera, and started to glow around the edges as they hit the outer atmosphere.

I looked around for anyone nearby, but it seemed that my dark mood had caused everyone to avoid being in my presence. I shouted toward the kitchen, and Amber poked her head in. “Call everyone,” I said. “Have them be on alert. The aliens are doing something.”

She ducked back through the door, and I turned back to the feed from Cheyenne Mountain. “Any idea what they’re up to, Colonel?”

The red-armored man shook his head. “They’ve split up into small groups. Headed for multiple locations. Looks like they’re going for the population centers.”

“Are any headed here?” I asked. “What about your base?”

“Affirmative,” he said. “I mark four...no, five ships headed your way, and a single bogie headed for me. What do you—”

The signal went dead.

I got up from the chair and headed to the kitchen. Amber and Lani were huddled around a comm unit, but they looked up as I came in.

“Alex, the signal just cut out. We got ahold of Mateo, and Cassie, but the rest...” [What’s happening, baby?]

“The aliens are coming down from the transports,” I said. “Hundreds of ships. Maybe five of them headed for us.”

The panic that came from them almost overwhelmed me, and I cursed at myself for getting them into such a state. If I hadn’t been upsetting them with my moping, they would be better able to handle a crisis like this.

“It’s all right,” I said. “We should be safe here. We’ll just have to hope that everyone else gets the warning.” I took the two of them by the hands and led them to the “basement,” a small underground storage room that was all that the unstable hillside lot could handle. It wasn’t a Faraday cage, so I had the two girls put on their helmets, and got out my own. Their panicked thoughts disappeared from my mind as we settled down on a thin mattress in the corner.

Only ten minutes after we’d closed the door, the room shook, as a dull roar rolled through the ground. I’d lived in California long enough to know what earthquakes felt like, but I’d also been fighting the aliens long enough to know what an explosion felt like. Something very near the house had just blown up.

Lani and Amber clutched at my arms. There were guns racked on one wall, but what good would they do against alien bombs? I put my arms around the girls and squeezed them tight.

Sounds came from the ceiling; the heavy tread of Sentinel boots. I knew it wasn’t Private Wright coming to save us, so I pried the girls’ hands off me and stood up, heading for the gun rack. When I looked back, the fear on their faces made me pause. I’d put them through so much, did I have the right to get them killed in an armed standoff? I didn’t want them to die, no matter how much I’d talked about sacrifice in the past. These two women were the closest thing I’d ever had to a family, and I refused to cause them any more pain. Maybe the aliens would just convert them again, and let them live our their days or years in the artificial bliss of normal behavior.

I turned back around and knelt on the mattress, hugging the two of them to my chest. Amber was crying, but Lani was calm, looking up at me like she knew what I’d just done. The footsteps were on the stairs now. I kissed the top of one blonde head and one dark one.

“I love you,” I said, just as the door burst in.

I was weightless, unable to feel up or down. Was this an artificial reality, like inside the alien network? Or maybe I was dreaming, my mind taking me on a weightless journey through space. Could I be dead, and this was the afterlife? I’d never believed in any kind of consciousness after death, but then again, I hadn’t believed in aliens before last year.

Well, first things first. Was I in the physical world, or just in my head? I strained to move my arm, and after several seconds, I felt my elbow bump against something hard. The tingle up my arm felt real enough, so I would assume that I was alive and awake. I took a deep breath, feeling the air entering my lungs, and my chest expanding. And so far there wasn’t any pain.

“Greetings, Alexdrummond.”

My eyes snapped open. Lani. Where was she? That was her voice, but I soon realized that the cadence and the pronunciation were all wrong. Was someone using her voice, or was she really here and being controlled?

Now that my eyes were open, I could see that I was in a box. Maybe glass, or plex, but it was clear all around, just like the boxes the torsos lived in. I was relieved to see that I still had my arms and legs, and that the box was filled with air, and not the yellow nutritional fluid.

“Hello,” I croaked out. My throat was parched. I swallowed a few times to work up some spit. “Lani? Is that you?”

“Alexdrummond, do not become alarmed. This is the voice of a person you know, so that you do not become alarmed. Are you alarmed?”

So it wasn’t Lani. But it was her voice, which meant they had been in contact with her.

“Who’s there?” I said, louder this time. “Where’s Lani?” I moved my arms, testing the limits of my clear coffin. It was tight around me, with not a lot of space to move. The room outside was completely empty, the grey walls lacking any distinguishing features.

I was sure I was in the hands of the aliens. The Sentinels who’d burst into the basement room had used gas of some kind to knock us out, and once they had us, I doubt they’d let us go. So I had to assume that I was speaking to one of the aliens, through some kind of speech translator that I’d never encountered before.

That was all well and good, but why was I still alive? Or at least, why did I still have my free will? Or did I still have it? How could I be sure? Maybe I was just acting under a program; I had no idea how it would feel to be converted. But I knew how I could test it...

“Fuck you, you little blue fucks. Where’s Lani?” I struggled in the confines of the box, seeing if I could push it open somehow.

“You are demonstrating aggression. That is good,” Lani’s voice said.

“Stop talking like Lani, asshole! Where is she? What did you alien motherfuckers do to her?”

“Aggression is good, Alexdrummond, unless it interferes with progress.” A wave of pain shot through my head, as bad or worse than the pain the Sentinels felt through their helmets. I screamed and thrashed inside my prison.

When the pain stopped, I lay there, gasping for breath, waiting for whatever came next.

“We are going to proceed now, Alexdrummond.”

“Stop talking like Lani,” I said. “It makes me...alarmed. Use another voice.”

“If it will lead to progress, I will use a different modulation to convey these ‘sounds’ that you humans use for communication.” The voice was Param’s now, which was easier to deal with. “It is a strange method, which has taken us quite a bit of research to master. The translation from the advanced thoughts of the Chrxjthal is crude, but it should be sufficient to convey our requirements.”

“What requirements?” I said. “You haven’t told me what you want. And you haven’t said what happened to my friends.”

“This word ‘friends,’ this is a word that appears frequently in your communications, but was not translated completely by our system. Clarify if you are referring to those you commanded during your insurgency?”

“Yes,” I said, “the ones who were with me in San Francisco.”

“If it will lead to progress from you, Alexdrummond, I will tell you that the men we picked up when we policed the rebellion from the planet have all been conditioned, and sent to their appropriate locations.”

Policed the planet? Had that been the hundreds of ships they sent out that night? A sweep of the remaining pockets of rebellion? But how did they know where we were? And why did he say “men?”

“What happened to the women during your police action?” I asked.

“Why would you care about your secondary sex?” the voice said. “Do you have breeding needs that we are not aware of?” A rectangle of light appeared over my head, and images flashed by on its surface. It was a vid projection of some kind, but without the need for a screen. The engineer in me was fascinated for several seconds, before I noticed the images I was being shown.

Sex. Lots of sex. Were they piping in a satporn channel? The colors of the images were off, making it hard to pick out individual people, but the closeups of giant blue cocks thrusting into orange and yellow pussies were unmistakeable. The voice had mentioned breeding needs, but I couldn’t figure out how badly-colored porn fit into what we were talking about.

After a minute though, I saw it: most of the images were of me having sex—with Lani, Amber, Vivian, all of my women, singly and in groups. I saw a couple other guys that I knew from the Plan, but a large percentage of the fornication on display was me. It was like someone had stolen a homemade sex vid that I’d been working on for the last year.

I had no idea how the aliens had gotten footage of me fucking in all of the different places I’d lived and worked since the invasion. I didn’t see any shots of my boat or Kili Island, but there was my Sausalito house, and Rollins-Chiu, and the mansion in the hills. Every scene was shot from overhead, like with a drone camera, but as if the roofs of all the buildings had become transparent. How could they know so much about us? And if they knew where we were, and what we were doing, why hadn’t they swooped in and picked us up sooner?

“I’ve studied your breeding activities, and have come to two conclusions; that your female race doesn’t have a singular breeding season, and that your attempts at producing offspring were not successful.” The images flickered out, leaving me staring at the grey ceiling. “When these two factors are taken into consideration, I fail to see the need for further information about the females. Their disposition should not cause you any alarm.”

That showed me how little he actually knew about humans. The aliens’ own attitude toward their females had obviously colored the way they dealt with human women. But it still got me no closer to an answer. What had happened to Lani, and the other women of the revolution? Had they been re-converted, like the men? Or were they just disposed of, because they weren’t worth the trouble of converting?

I had to find out more about my situation, and my interrogator before I could get any meaningful answers.

“Tell me where I am,” I said. “Who am I communicating with? I want to know your name.”

“My name would be meaningless to you, Alexdrummond. The translation of it into your ‘sounds’ would corrupt it further than I could bear. You may call me by my title of Supreme Expedition Leader.”

Oh, shit. This was the head honcho. Why was he taking the time to talk to me? Didn’t he have an Expedition to get ready for departure?

“As for your location, I have had you brought aboard the orbital monitor, until I can determine how you will be processed.”

So I was in space? Damn. I’d dreamed of taking a trip into orbit, but I’d put my money into Survivor instead. And not even a window, so I could look down on Earth one last time.

“What is there to determine?” I asked. “You won. You obviously had a lot better intel on our activities than we ever suspected, and now there’s no one left to fight you.”

“Is that what you thought you were doing? Fighting us? I’m astounded at your race’s ignorance, Alexdrummond. It’s a good thing that you are adequate warriors, once converted, otherwise this expedition would have been deemed a failure.”

“What are you talking about?” I said. “Of course we were fighting you. What did you think all of the attacks on your facilities were about? We’ve killed over twelve thousands of your kind. I would call that fighting.”

“You seem to really believe that. How odd.” There was a long silence while the Supreme Expedition Leader considered what I’d said. “No matter. Regardless of what you believed, there was no chance that a primitive people like yours could hope to defeat us.”

“Seems to me that we got pretty close,” I said. I wasn’t worried about antagonizing him any more; I couldn’t see any scenario where playing nice got me any advantage. “I killed a lot of your comrades before your ships arrived.”

“You refer to the wardens? They were nothing. The lowest caste of being on my world. The ones you killed were volunteers, mostly incompetent laborers who were promised a chance at advancing beyond their miserable lot. They were attracted by the promise of a few extra females if they survived their trials, but they were not important to the Expedition. In reality they were planted on your planet as a test.”

“A test for what?”

“To find you, Alexdrummond. You are the best tactical mind of your species, demonstrated by the number of wardens you were able to kill. We needed to find the being that will lead our new warriors against the encroaching hoards of the Achssa’adir.”

Of course. My head thunked into the back of the box as the big picture opened up in front of me. All of the odd behavior by the aliens fell into place; fights that had seemed too easy, things that we’d gotten away with even though we knew we shouldn’t have. It was because we were never playing to win. We’d been set up against the lowest of their kind—common thugs recruited as cannon fodder—and then monitored to see how we did against them. And now, because I was the “winner,” they wanted me to lead the converted Sentinels against their enemies.

“Why look for a leader from among our inferior race?” I asked. “Why not use officers from your own species to control the soldiers?”

“Because we do not understand physical violence the way that your race does. The enemy that attacks our home system has won many battles by simply swarming us with their soldiers. There is no strategy, no thought. They attack with mindless numbers, and overwhelm our defenses regardless of the casualties. Our leaders have tried to anticipate their maneuvers, but their brand of violence uses no logic that we can determine. We decided that we needed soldiers of a similar, violent nature, led by one who understands their use in battle.”

“And that would be me, because I killed thousands of your wardens?”

“Because you were able to adapt to the challenges that we placed in front of you. Avoiding the pulses sent by our drones was the first test, and many of your people passed. Each test was progressively harder, until we determined that you were the best candidate. After that it was a matter of studying your tactics and seeing how successful you could be against the wardens.”

“That was a risk though, wasn’t it? What if I’d destroyed the wardens before your ships arrived, and then moved on to the factories?”

“Our conversion facilities were more heavily guarded than you could have expected. Any attack on them would have resulted in your destruction, just like the useless attempt by Joshuatyler, another of the candidates we were evaluating.”

I remembered how “President” Tyler and his rag-tag army had been wiped out in front of Fort Hood. It was one of the reasons I hadn’t been more aggressive against the factories.

“This still doesn’t make sense. Why would you go to all of this trouble, and then keep me with my will intact? Why not just convert me, and then order me to command your army?”

“Because the conversion process diminishes many of the qualities that we require in a strategic leader. For a time, we assumed that the human Anatolykinslov would be the winner of our contest, but you proved that the feral cleverness and spontaneity of your race are critical qualities for the application of violence. Your defeat of Anatolykinslov was the act that placed you above the others in our consideration.”

“But you couldn’t have guaranteed that there would be one unconverted person left at the end of your game. What would have happened if something had gone wrong, and both Anatoly and I were killed or converted?”

“Of course we had an alternate plan—you forget how much more intelligent we are than your kind.” He sounded a little petulant as he said it, as much as a machine-generated voice could have such inflections. “We have the greatest war leaders of your race in storage. They were meant to be your subordinates in controlling the army, but if you had not emerged as the leader, we would have used their combined minds to generate a consensus strategy for the war.”

So they wanted a Napoleon or Alexander to lead the troops, rather than a war by committee? I wondered if that idea came from studying Earth’s military history, or if it was common to their race as well. Somewhere in their dim past had there been a Sdrethtxar the Great who’d conquered all the known world?

“We understand ambition, Alexdrummond,” the voice said, “much better than we understand violence. While you have shown the quality of self-sacrifice in your ascension to the lead role, you have also shown ambition worthy of a Chrxjthal. We have studied your motivations, and are prepared to offer you the thing you value most.”

The mid-air projection flickered on again, but instead of homemade porn, I saw row upon row of naked women, standing at attention inside a cavernous building. Not all were pretty, but they all looked fit and lean.

“Who are they?” I asked.

“They are the females who worked for your warrior class. They are the strongest of their kind, and will be acceptable breeding stock to create strong soldiers in the future. They will be your reward for your service.”

“You’re offering me women for commanding your army?”

“The collecting of females was noted as your greatest motivation,” he said. The image split, one half still showing the female soldiers, the other showing a succession of scenes that included all of the women I’d gathered around me during the fight, starting with Lani, and continuing through Mei and Tammi.

Looking at it from the outside, collecting women did seem to be my biggest motivator, but how would I explain to this alien that there were qualities among these women that I valued more than good breeding stock? There was also the fact that I could free women from the mind control effects, but couldn’t do the same for men. The same disregard that the aliens had for their own second gender had made their control over human females easier to get around.

The images I’d seen of Chrxjthal females told me that they were more like property or currency than companions; accumulated to show the male’s status, and given away as rewards for performing tasks. To this Leader’s mind, one female was as good as another when it came to payment for my services, and offering the strongest of them from around the world was probably his idea of an added bonus.

The display went back to the long lines of naked soldiers, probably meant to entice me. I had no idea how I’d gotten into this mess, but the resolution seemed obvious to me. I wasn’t so self-absorbed that I’d do anything to survive, including acting as their military leader on some distant planet. And in spite of what I’d told Colonel Freeman in the depths of my depression, if there was one thing I’d learned during the past year, it was that I had a fierce loyalty to my planet, and to the human race. If humanity was doomed anyway, why would I want to be the last free man standing? Better to give up all of my worries, and never know the truth about how the Earth died.

I realized in that moment, though, that Mr. Supreme Leader, hadn’t told me what the final disposition of Earth would be. I’d speculated on the possibilities, but the aliens had never given any indication what they would do to the planet when they left.

I was about to ask the question, when a hissing noise came through the speakers. It sounded like air being moved under pressure, and I instinctively held my breath, in case they were pumping some chemical into my coffin. Instead, I saw the atmosphere of the room getting cloudier, and taking on a yellow tinge. They were filling it with the aliens’ preferred mix of gasses.

When the hissing stopped, I heard another sound, of metal on metal. It sounded like a door sliding open and then shutting again. I craned my neck to look toward the direction of the sound, and saw an alien waddling toward me through the yellow mist.

He was the biggest Chrxjthal I’d ever seen—tall for their species, and solid-looking, with an oversized “head,” and more of the triangular projections surrounding his top than any other alien we’d encountered. Then again, after learning that we’d been dealing with the dregs of alien society on the ground, maybe I needed to revise my opinion of the “average” Chrxjthal male. This guy might be huge for his species, which could explain why he’d become the leader, or he might be totally average, and the ones I’d seen in Salt Lake, Fresno, and Alameda had been runts. I’d have to see more of them up close to make a real determination.

With none of the organs that we used to communicate, I wondered how he was “talking” to me, using Param’s artificial voice. When he got closer to my box, I saw several bands wrapped around his head that I’d never seen on another alien. They might be the interface that turned my speech into electromagnetic signals that he could absorb and process, and in turn sent his thoughts to the speaker device behind me.

The Supreme Expedition Leader wore a skin-tight mud-brown bodysuit with squiggly markings down the sides of his body. With no ability to see colors as we did, I assumed fashion wasn’t big with them, so the markings could be signs of rank. They were hard to see with my eyes, but I’d bet they vibrated in a frequency range that other aliens could recognize.

Anatoly and the other scientists had theorized that the aliens used a type of echolocation to move around in space, with EM waves instead of sound. I didn’t hear or feel anything as Supremo approached, but he moved unerringly to the side of the box near my head.

As he loomed over me, rage started to overwhelm my normally rational mind. Here was the architect of everything bad that had happened to my planet. Billions of people were dead, some very close friends among them, and the rest of the planet was on an inevitable spiral toward extinction. I thrashed around in side the box, not expecting to actually break free, but needing the outlet for my frustration. The bruises on my knees and elbows would remind me that I was still alive, but they didn’t diminish the feeling of helplessness.

Supremo hadn’t moved while I struggled inside the box. I wondered if he was watching me, or if he’d been distracted by something else, some EM message that I couldn’t hear or see. When I stopped pounding on the walls of my prison and laid back, exhausted, he turned fractionally toward me, like he was anticipating my next action.

I knew that I could never serve these creatures as their military leader—it would be a betrayal of everyone on the planet—but maybe I could help salvage humanity for the future. “What will happen to the rest of the planet when we leave for your home?” I asked, making it sound like I was already agreeing to go.

The image above my head changed. I was looking down on a huge swath of land, that looked like the Great Plains, but could be anywhere in the world. As it zoomed in, I saw thousands of people at work; buildings were being erected in neat rows, swarms of workers were clearing fields, and several dozen Sentinels were keeping watch over the entire operation.

“Attrition will soon bring your population down to acceptable levels, and the ones who survive will be the hardiest specimens left. They will be cared for and fed in localized centers around the planet, to begin the second phase of the project.”

“Second phase?” I said. “You can’t just take what you need and then leave us alone?”

“That would be foolish. In your inferior race we’ve found a valuable asset, one that can provide not only military protection, but labor and service to the Chrxjthal. When the new biosystem is stabilized, and the population is at equilibrium, the breeding program will start. Your females take an inordinate amount of time in gestating offspring, and surprisingly birth only one child at a time., but our scientists believe they can shorten the time by half, and double the output. This will allow each female to produce four children per year.”

The idea of any of my girls being put through some alien breeding program had me seeing red, but my earlier episode had convinced me that it was useless to struggle.

“After the culling process, males will be adapted to their particular branch of service, whether it is military or domestic. Ships will be sent at intervals to transfer them to Chrxjthal’kli, but we believe that in time, we can shift the entire system to the homeworld, once your biology has been suitably adapted to our environment.”

“You said that the males will be sent to work, what about the excess females that are born from your project?”

“Why would we need to breed extra females? We will only need the number required to keep production at acceptable levels.”

“And all the while, you’re going to rely on your conditioning to keep them docile?”

“Of course not. Within two generations we expect the behavior modification to be merged directly into the genetic structure of your race.”

This was so fucked up. I had imagined all kinds of horrible things happening to the planet, from a huge fireball that destroyed everything, to pockets of survivors, cut off from all technology and reverting to tribal primitives, but I’d never considered such a cold-blooded use of the human race. We would be nothing but raw materials, for the Chrxjthal to modify and use as they needed. And with the modifications built into our genome, there would be no chance at some future rebellion. Humanity was about to be domesticated, and would never advance to fulfill whatever cosmic destiny we’d been headed for.

“Wouldn’t it be a good idea to keep some of the original stock unaltered?” I asked. “As a base for further adaptation in a different direction? As your military advisor, it would seem like the strategic thing to do.” Maybe I could get them to leave some small sliver of humanity free of their control, to give us one last chance at somehow defeating these monsters.

“It’s good that you’re thinking like a military leader, Alexdrummond, but don’t presume to lecture your masters on policy.”

“I’m just saying, I may not be able to accomplish your military goals, unless there is some flexibility in the type of soldiers I can direct. What if the fight moves off your homeworld? If you kept some of the humans free of modification, it would make it easier to adapt them later.”

“I am growing weary of this discussion, Alexdrummond. I am not here to give you lessons, or to negotiate with you. You are a member of a primitive species, and yet you have been elevated above all other humans, and offered rewards beyond anything a low being like you deserves. Any logical creature would have accepted my offer by now, but we know from our years of observation, that the people of your planet are anything but logical. If you cannot decide, then the decision has been made for you. I must attend to my other duties.” He spun about on his round ass, then waddled toward the door.

“Wait, I have my reply.”

He stopped and twisted back to face me. “Tell me, Alexdrummond.”

“Fuck you.”

Supremo stood still for a moment, then inched closer on his stubby legs. “According to our translation, that is not an acceptable reply.”

“Well let me try again. Fuck you and all of your fucking blue-skinned, shit for brains, motherfucking—”

I was slammed into the bottom of the box, like several tons of water had been dumped on me. I couldn’t move my arms and legs, but I also couldn’t get my chest to expand to take a breath. There was plenty of air around me, but the sudden crush of gravity wasn’t letting me take it in. Above my head, a disk made of dull, grey metal settled against the clear front of my coffin. My hair stood up, and I felt a tingle along the implant harness in my brain.

“The conversion will be swift, Alexdrummond. We will speak again when it is done.”

So this was it. After four-hundred days of dodging the bullet of alien mind control, my free will was about to disappear. What would I notice once it was done? I’d still have my memories, that much I knew, but would I think that my old self was evil? That I’d been breaking the rules by resisting? I wasn’t going to have time to contemplate, as I felt the power in the disk ramping up. This would be the EM pulse to rearrange my synapses, to be followed by visual and audio reconditioning. Under the press of the artificial gravity, I couldn’t turn my head, and my vision was beginning to darken from lack of oxygen.

A flash went through my eyes. It wasn’t light; maybe the EM energy had triggered my optic nerve. While I wondered if it was over, the weight came off my chest, and I gulped in the bottled air. Was I converted? My mind didn’t feel different. I tried to think of something subversive, something violent, but all I could think about was Lani. Why was that? Was she my normal behavior? But how could I question my normal behavior if all curiosity had been zapped out of me?

A shadow moved over the front of my box. I looked up, expecting Supremo, but hoping against hope to see Lani. It turned out to be neither, as a red-armored Sentinel tapped at a control on the side of my prison. Something about him triggered a memory. That scrape along the side of his head, just above where his left ear should be—where had he gotten that? Of course, outside the bunker in Alameda, when our puppet Sentinel had taken on Albert’s minion. So this soldier hovering over my box was...Curtis?

The lid of my containment box flickered, and then vanished. Acrid sulfur stung my eyes and burned down my throat. As I squeezed my eyes shut, and started coughing, a rough hand took me by the back of the neck. I was lifted to a sitting position, and a mask was pressed against my face. Sweet, Earthly air filled my lungs, as I coughed up the last of the alien atmosphere.

“Just breathe, sir.” Private Wright’s voice sounded calm, but different somehow. When I blinked my eyes open, I saw him looking down at me through his opaque half-mask, breathing easily in the toxic air. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew that the Sentinels had been adapted for the Chrxjthal homeworld, but this was the first real example I’d seen.

I did what he said, too stunned by events to do much more. I needed to think, to ask questions and take stock of my situation, but instead, I leaned back in Private Wright’s strong grip, and concentrated on breathing.

“Can you stand up, sir?”

I nodded, and gripped the sides of the box, levering myself to my feet. Curtis helped me up, and strapped a metal cylinder to my back, either an air tank, or a rebreather.

Now that I was up, I took stock of the room, while Private Wright moved to the low portal against one blank wall. Above us, the images continued to flicker, the odd colors adding to their surreal nature. In one flash, I saw a cargo bay in a transport ship, with row upon row of cryo-pods. Their lids were springing open by ones and twos. Red-armored figures slowly crawled out of their coffins, and stood immobile in the narrow paths between rows.

“What’s happening, Private?” I said, my voice sounding hollow through the mask. My skin tingled from the chemicals in the air, but I tried to ignore it.

“We are here, Zero-Alex. The individual Curtis-Wright is responding to our signals.” The voice belonged to Curtis, but the inflections had changed. Someone else was using the Sentinel to talk to me.

“Who’s speaking to me?” I asked. Was this an alien trick? Another test to see how I responded to surprises?

“Six-Luke has the neural paths for audible speech, and will be the interface for any communications using that method.”

Holy shit. The Translators. They must have done something to the alien network, to be able to speak through Private Wright up here on the orbital ship. If I believed the images projected above me, it looked like they were doing something with all of the frozen Sentinels.

“Who’s directing the Sentinels on the ships?” I asked.

“The Eights have taken control of several net-states within, including the interface with the Sentinel units.”

“But who is controlling the Eights?”

“Zero-Alex. You are the source of the Alpha imprint that directs the Eights. The timing of our actions is predicated on your program. The program is not complete though. We still need input from the Alpha control—the zero state—to continue.”

“From who?”

“They mean you, sir,” Private Wright said in his normal voice, as he opened the door.