WATERING HOLE
by trilby else (trilelse@mail.anonymizer.com)
Disclaimers (if you scroll past, you’ve still read ‘em—don’t blame me):
- This author is not the same trilby who dwells on AOL; thus, Trilby on AOL should not be held responsible for anything that follows.
- This work is copyright the author, © 1999. Kindly do not repost or otherwise use without permission and credit.
- This is adult fiction with nonconsensual sex, mind control, and other immoral and illegal acts both explicit and implied. In real life this would all be very bad. All characters, events, and places are fictional and any resemblance to actual persons, events or places is coincidental, etc. All characters are of legal age in all jurisdictions, not that it’s done them much good so far. References like “boy” or “girl” are rhetorical, not technical.
- If you’re underage, stop reading and get out. (The average fashion magazine these days is probably enough.) If it’s just flat illegal there, ditto (and I’m very sorry.) If you find this sort of thing offensive in general, ditto (and why are you here?)
- It’s more about mind control than sex. I’m a fetishist: point isn’t using MC to get sex, it’s sex being something interesting to do with MC. So if you only want short zap/long fuckfest . . . see ya. Also, I consider this literature, i.e. with redeeming artistic content, i.e. not “obscene” in the legal definition. (Argue that if you will, but it’s my story, so to speak, and I’m sticking to it.)
- I disparage no lifestyle. If characters are forced into one, it’s the force that degrades, not the lifestyle.
7.
As she checked out the lobby before stepping into Sheila’s building, Joyce smiled to herself. She worried about becoming preoccupied over work and letting her guard down. At Valerie’s group, she taught: never be distracted from what’s going on around you, by thinking about what’s going on anywhere else.
But it was hard not to be preoccupied. Her boss wanted her to go to a out-of-town seminar. Joyce didn’t do seminars now. Her last business trip had been five years ago, but the brochure naturally hadn’t mentioned that it was a hoax, being hosted by slavers. She held the thought and listened for other sounds among the echoes of her boots on the tiles.
She looked into the elevator, using the polished fittings inside to be sure no one was hiding beside the door, and pressed for Sheila’s floor. She breathed in. In the temporary quiet, it was tempting to relax and think, but that risked being caught napping when the doors opened—especially if they opened early. She shuddered: some memories were too strong . . .
There was a long row of cells where they’d been kept after being abducted from the conference center. The slave-guards, women already under control, taut and fluidly robotic in their leotards and boots, were sent in to drag selected women off to brainwashing.
Joyce, and the others that were left alone at first, knew they deliberately took each victim out through the door farthest from her cell, just to bring her past more of her fellow prisoners to wear them down with her screams and pleas, and the sight of her writhing naked between her emotionless guards. It did no good to know. It ate away at the ones left behind, to watch helplessly, able to do nothing but call their names.
Even then, Joyce had stepped fearfully into leadership. “Melanie! Connie! We’re here. Be strong! We love you!“
But it was flatter the second time, and by the eighth, it stopped meaning anything.
When the subjects came back they were listless and remembered little, just flashing lights, pulsing spirals, fragments of the programming being drummed into their minds. More frightening was what they didn’t notice they remembered—new phrases they used without thinking, suddenly staring into space, automatically standing at attention when the guards entered.
The woman in the next cell, whose name Joyce never learned, spent one night reciting “I’m just a whore . . . ohh, yes . . .” for hours in an eager whisper that kept threatening to become an orgasmic scream.
Some women stopped coming back at all after their hypnotic treatments, and Joyce nearly choked, one night, as she found herself whispering to the others—as hope—that Melanie had probably died somehow under the conditioning. The others whispered back how lucky that was for Melanie, and Joyce bit her mattress, trying to keep them from hearing how wretchedly she sobbed, knowing that.
Then, inevitably, Melanie came back, empty-eyed, in leotard and boots, and it was Joyce’s turn to be dragged away. She managed not to scream . . .
Remembering a movie scene she couldn’t quite place, where someone was hypnotized in an elevator using the floor indicator, Joyce avoided looking at it. She let the crying and screams, echoing against the concrete walls, echo again in her mind. So the work problem wasn’t even a decision—it was obvious. No trip, no seminar. Nothing was ever going to take her from Owen and Amanda again. If it was her job at stake, well, then—she’d already lost it.
She exhaled and faced the doors as they opened, peeking into the corridor before heading to Sheila’s door. All clear. She knocked. Please, she thought, smiling and wincing. Don’t say “It’s open.” Then she heard locks going off at several places along the door, and smiled again. Sheila had been where they all had. Each woman in Valerie’s group had as many locks as she could afford. Some gave them as gifts to those who couldn’t.
Sheila peeked her tousled head around the door as she opened it, grinning as if reading her mind. “Hi, Joyce! Come on in.”
“Hi.” Joyce stepped inside away from the door and looked around as Sheila resecured the locks; she heard a barrel bolt slide and the jingle of keys for a deadbolt, contrasting the harsh sound with the graceful furnishings.
“Kit’s in the shower,” said Sheila. “Can I get you something?” Joyce’s answer faltered when Sheila stepped back around her. The other woman was wearing an oversized T-shirt that clung to her waist and barely reached past it, showing off her smooth legs. She looked beautiful, and as if she’d just gotten out of a tangled bed and belonged back in it. Joyce was a bit startled. Was this informality . . . or an invitation?
Sheila leaned forward and they hugged. Joyce smelled the perfume of bed in her hair, musk on her skin. It was intimate, and Joyce felt welcome into it.
“Sorry,” Sheila said. “We haven’t been out for the past couple of days. We knew you were coming over, but we sort of lost track . . .”
Joyce watched her blush, and Sheila looked so pretty when she did that Joyce wondered if Kit was learning to make her blush more often. But Kit wasn’t that calculating. “Um. Well, as I have pointed out, I’m not your mother. Just wanted to make sure. It’s easy to be careless.”
Sheila nodded, suddenly grave. Dressed as she was, it was as charming as her blush. “It’s why we stayed in,” she was saying. “With the locks all done up, we felt safe. Well, safer.“
Picturing the nest they’d made, Joyce smiled. “Not criticizing. But since you did answer when I called, you’re receiving visitors now?”
“Only special ones,” Sheila smiled back.
“Hey, Joyce.” Kit left the bedroom, gleaming from the shower. Her short terrycloth robe had to be Sheila’s, and on the taller girl it was as brief as Sheila’s T. If this was how they’d been trying to get dressed, it was no wonder they hadn’t been able to leave the apartment.
Long enough to buy pledges for each other, though. She saw the choker that Kit wore and realized Sheila had a matching one. They looked like collars. Ironic symbol for two ex-slaves declaring their love, but maybe that was the point.
“We did get something for you,” Sheila announced.
“Elder-sister present,” Kit said, and Joyce almost laughed at her puppyish eagerness. “You’re going to love it.”
“Won’t be able to tear your eyes away,” Sheila agreed, stepping away to a low sideboard set into the wall like a blind windowseat. There was something on a stand sitting there, draped under a green velvet cloth. They ‘d set a chair facing it, and Kit patted the chairback, smiling and bowing. Joyce bowed back and sat, willing to humor them. They were just so cute.
Sheila reached behind the velvet, and an odd, irregular humming began. She started lifting the velvet slowly off.
No, Joyce thought. It couldn’t possibly—oh my God it’s not—
Then she was staring at the spiral as it spun lazily, fast and slow and backwards at once, like a wagon wheel. She tried to turn away, but Kit’s powerful hands held her head forward, and when she tried to stand Kit let her . . . because even as she rose she kept looking at the spiral . . . and when she realized that the gentle pressure on her head was downward now, down into the soft chair again, she couldn’t think clearly of why she should resist it, and settled again. She heard labored breathing, someone desperately struggling, but it was outside the spiral, hard to comprehend. Pointless.
She’d forgotten how pretty spirals were, how they drew her in, how she could never resist them.
By the time the spiral stabilized to a low speed, the lights in the room dimmed, but Joyce was beyond noticing anything but the perfection of the swirling lines. She tried to hold on to things . . . the group . . . her job . . . Valerie . . . but everything slipped past her, shrank and vanished into the swirl. It was as if she tried to grasp everything with numb fingers, nerveless hands . . . so very weak . . .
It was so relaxing . . . to look deeper and deeper. So fulfilling to try to find the center.
Another sound outside the spiral, a faint anguished moan, as she realized that her husband and daughter, her anchors, had just . . . slipped by . . . too . . . Gone.
There was nothing.
She was nothing.
She was hypnotized.
She was nude. Joyce tried to get her bearings; no way to tell how much time she’d spent in trance. At least she was still here, not sleeping in a box on her way to . . . wherever. She tested the awareness she felt. She seemed fully conscious. She seemed to have no ability or desire to rise from the chair, but that might just be the awareness that anywhere she went would have to be through Sheila and Kit (was there anyone else here with them?) and she’d need to consider how to deal with that first.
She sat in the chair, her hands resting on the arms, the embroidered fabric pleasantly itchy against the soft skin of her butt and thighs.
Who’d gotten to Sheila? It had to have been her—setting aside a loyalty to Kit, whom she’d known longer, Joyce found it simple to conclude that this had happened after Sheila had joined them. She’d just been someone’s stalking horse. The implications of that were potentially catastrophic for the group, so she decided to concentrate on the immediate problem.
Joyce told herself not to hate Sheila. She was as much a victim as anyone else, and the woman Joyce had cried with, gotten drunk with, befriended, was too real to have been consciously pretending. Joyce wondered what it had felt like for that woman, when she’d been changed back, returned to her slave identity.
A sob surprised her, coming up from inside. Joyce remembered being in the bar, feeling so sisterly, nudging Sheila and Kit into the relationship they’ d both seemed to want. I sent Kit into this, she thought, and fought the guilt. She couldn’t afford to have that undermining her when whoever it was started brainwashing her in earnest.
Sheila came out of the bedroom, stopping behind her.
“You look uncomfortable, Joyce.” Sheila’s voice was normal. Someone who didn’t know would have said she sounded concerned. When Joyce said nothing, she stepped around so Joyce could see her.
Joyce couldn’t stop the moan that came out of her as her worst nightmare came true.
Her eyes were drawn to Sheila’s face, which wore a smile that was not even cruel; Sheila had the heartbreakingly open happiness of someone doing her job well for someone she wanted to please. She wore her collar with pride.
Joyce looked at Sheila’s collar, at the medallion that now hung from it. It was actually a branding iron, and in the rough black iron the insignia of her Owner stood out against the pale skin at the hollow of Sheila’s throat: the hawk’s talon grasping downward to unseen but doomed prey. It was a real brand; Joyce remembered holding women down as it was burned into their flesh. She knew whose insignia it was.
The mind controller whom she’d fled, whom she’d prayed she would never, ever see again.
Her Mistress.
8.
“Hello, Joyce.”
Mistress’ voice, coming from Sheila’s high-end stereo speakers, was soft, even. No, not “Mistress,” Joyce instructed herself. “The” Mistress. Keep your distance, because when it becomes her name and not just a description, you become her slave again, not just a prisoner. She tried to decide what to do, ignoring for now that she probably had very few choices.
The Mistress left her alone for a few moments. Did Joyce even have choices now? Yes. While she could still think, she could still choose. If it only meant deciding whether to submit to the final hypnotic induction or having them force her to look and listen and sleep, then that was a battle she owed it to her friends, to Owen and Amanda, to herself to fight.
From the corner of her eye she saw Sheila standing at attention, staring, mindless, ready.
“you’re wondering why you can still think. Is Mistress just toying with me, you wonder? Does She just want me to know it’s Her, out of sheer vindictiveness, before She turns my mind off for the last time? Or—could it be that I can now magically resist Her evil hypnotic spells and She can’ t control me anymore?
“They’re both plausible, aren’t they, Joyce? Of course if you really were immune, you wouldn’t be sitting there unable to move your body without orders, just because of how much power the girls’ little present had over you.” Joyce did not look at the spiral device, under its green velvet cover again.
“I love the way you just sit there, Joyce. A nude beauty keeping her secrets. I’ve seen girls I’ve put into deep trance, whose memories I’ve just washed away forever, show more feeling than you do now. Even the body language is a whisper. I can barely see that vein throb in your neck.” Joyce twitched; just as Mistress—the Mistress—intended, she remembered sleeping with Her, the Mistress playing vampiress and worrying that spot on her throat with Her teeth, Her tongue, while Joyce lay thrilled and paralyzed, wishing it wasn’t a game.
“But a nude beauty can’t hide everything, can she? Especially not from someone who owns her. Who’s studied her and trained her. Who taught that body new ways to respond. Just your nipples . . . your Mistress doesn’t just know what makes you tick, Joyce, as an ordinary Domme might. As a hypnotist I can change it.”
And you have ways of making me—tock? Joyce wanted to say, to throw Her off. But to speak was to start to lose.
“Good one, Joyce.” Joyce did jump at that, as much her hypnotic paralysis allowed. “No, you didn’t speak, but it was an obvious one. You would have done the accent perfectly, too.” Joyce was disoriented—the Mistress actually seemed proud of her. A tactic She’d used before.
“I know how frightened you are. And how confused.
“I like you, Joyce. I’m sure that frightens and confuses you even more, but I also think you understand. There’s an old story, ‘Black Thirst,’ by a woman named Catherine Moore—what I would have given to own her . . . she wrote about a controller, of a sort, with a large harem, and of them all, the one he’s obsessed with is not even the prettiest, or the most submissive, but the one who somehow tries to fight him. There’s something fascinating, exquisite, inside her, and he can’t take it if he kills her or flattens her soul, as he could. Perhaps should.”
Joyce listened. Even in her terror she saw how odd this was; she couldn’t remember the Mistress thinking aloud like this, especially about a slave. How oddly human of Her.
“I’m not entirely sure how to deal with you, Joyce. you’re not the ordinary slave, but it isn’t as if you’re a free woman.” The Mistress paused, perhaps to see whether that had stung her. Joyce herself wasn’t sure. She flicked a covert glance at Sheila, but the other slave, of course, did nothing.
“Nor, other than your own delightful services, have you deprived me of anything.
“And we both know you were an experiment, someone I kept on what seems to have been too long a leash, just because I coveted what a mind like yours, almost able to think for itself, could do for me. Like any experiment, it succeeded no matter what the result, because it taught me. About slaves, about the limits of my processes. About my own limits.
“About you, Joyce. Enough that I was willing to spend a lot to retrieve you.” She paused. “Are you waiting to be punished, Joyce?”
Joyce breathed, wondering if her little move toward answering had registered before she swallowed the idea. So tempting, a simple yes/no. But so hard to stop once you started.
“Good girl. Perhaps the only one of them all that has this much self-control. There are other considerations, of course.” Of course. The Mistress was cold-blooded even when she was screaming in orgasm, and she wouldn’t have let herself get obsessed with a slave.
“I’ve spent a lot to get you back. You could work it off on your back, but you’ve already done that.” Another goad, but Joyce let the memories of her long series of tricks in her own bedroom slide by without the barbs sinking in. “And even at the rates we can get for you, it would take too long.
“But imagine learning you’d found refuge in a whole covey of escaped mind-slaves.”
Joyce tried not to react. She’d seen this coming, but hearing the Mistress actually say it felt worse than she’d thought.
“Sluts on the hoof. Some likely have active owners who’d pay value to get them back, with or without reprogramming. Cash, favors, who knows? Naturally I’ll sift them myself, first, for the keepers. I’m sure there are some. Sheila’s reports sounded quite promising.
“But even that’s limited. Hunting the watering hole is to be mired in the present.
“Being more future-oriented, I look at them as bait.” Joyce gripped the arms of the chair. She had not even thought of it, although she wasn’t surprised the Mistress had.
“New runaways don’t all go to your Ms Joplin, but she’s establishing a reputation. I wouldn’t want to tarnish it, because then they’d scatter, and I’d have to do all this over and over. Not if I just take control, keep the herd content and trusting, thin it now and then.
“You’re going to help me, Joyce. They trust you. Joplin trusts you. You can make it easy and relatively painless. Most of them, perhaps all, need never know they’re being reenslaved. Just a sleep, and an awakening. I’m not a sadist.” The Mistress waited. Joyce bleakly wondered if She were disappointed or pleased at the lack of reaction; it was easier than thinking about the others . . .
“Not just them, Joyce. Someone else ‘who is to be loved.’ I’ve seen her, and she’s lovely. Very much to be loved. The question is, by how many?”
Who is to be—? Latin. Amanda. Dear God in heaven.
Now it was shock that kept Joyce sitting quietly, unresponsive. She simply had no idea what to do.
“you’ll tend to that first, Joyce. It may help with your other tasks.
“But I believe you know, now, why I’m letting you think.”
Joyce nodded at last, feeling the tears come up, no longer interested in the consequences of responding. Her illusion of understanding the Mistress was gone. I’m not a sadist. No. Beyond that.
Amanda!
There was a short beep, and Sheila activated. Her eyes focused, she walked to the chair and reached down. Joyce looked up at her, and found her own hand reaching for Sheila’s. The beep had ended her own paralysis, but as Sheila helped her rise she found other movements already happening. She followed the other slave meekly to the desk by the far wall where the computer sat, its screensaver a very unhypnotic-looking fishtank animation.
Thinking was getting harder for Joyce with each step. It was just more effort to try to hold anything in her head but the immediate environment—the warmth of Sheila’s hand, the hardwood under her bare feet. She tried to wonder where Kit was, and that was difficult. She tried to sort out whether this was what they’d put in her mind just now, after the spiral had hypnotized her, or if her old programming, despite what the therapists had said, was still in her and reemerging.
It was so hard to remember the therapists.
Amanda!
“You will sit.” Sheila’s soft words stroked Joyce’s nerves: it was joy to make them true.
The seat was warm; or had Sheila just told her it was? Joyce was a passenger in her body now, and increasingly in her mind. “You will take the mouse. You will right-click now.” As she spoke, Sheila slipped on a headset, and her face went blank as orders came through it. She sank to her knees and crawled under the desk. Light pressure inside Joyce’s knees parted them, but even the arousal of Sheila’s soft hands resting gently on her thighs, the light touch on their inner skin, faded before the hypnotic insistence of the . . . image . . .
Joyce stared into the oversized screen, vaguely remembering this program. She’d installed it . . . office . . . conference? . . . women screaming . . . unpleasant memory, too easily thrust away, but it was all the distraction she’d had . . .
The screen was a dark, shimmering green abstract like the velvet that covered—the spiral. Joyce closed her eyes for a moment, fighting the associations that were dragging her mind inward, but it was easier to open them. To open herself. Spirals seemed to form and spin here and there among the shades of green, ensnaring her eye before popping like bubbles or flattening into nothing, tossing her dazed glance to another one.
There was a pattern to it that she was growing too sleepy to resist following. Left . . . right . . . up . . . down . . .
she felt something. Warmth. Her pussy. Breathing. Sheila. Pretty when she blushed.
Amanda!
Somewhere in the green velvet spirals that played catch with her mind, joyce was remembering how good it had been, how pleasurable, why it made so much sense to submit, to do as she was told.
. . . Tongue? Too light, too soft to tell. Please. Again. More.
Amanda . . . !
Someone was making a sound. Crying? joyce was too lost in the spirals to wonder. It was good to hear women cry: it was the sound of Mistress’ will being done, and that was sweeter than orgasms, and orgasms could make women cry . . .
Amanda . . .
The screen began to show something more clearly, a greater truth than the ones already hypnotizing her. The letters formed, glowed, throbbed.
Aman . . . da . . . ?
The letters pulsed, blinked, thrust. joyce read them. Felt touch. Warm. Lips. Wet.
O B E Y
Aman . . . Am . . . nn . . .
“Obey,” said joyce.
. . . mmnn . . . mmmmmm . . .
“Obey,” said the tongue and lips and breath, hot and cold and humming across her clitoris.
she came.
. . . Mistress!
9.
“The house is secure, Controller.” joyce turned from the bedroom window. slave kit stood in the doorway, ardently beautiful in the high-cut leotard and boots, her conditioned body gleaming like her Mistress’ weapon in its scabbard. While the spirals and slave sheila’s mouth had melted joyce’s will into a puddle of pussy juice, whatever the VCR across the room had burned into kit’s brain had erased the friendly puppyish girl and left a Valkyrie who stared ahead with an almost psychotic intensity. It even stirred a little fear in the corner of joyce’s mind where she still hid, from which Mistress wanted her to watch it all.
Now slave kit and slave sheila were here, under slave joyce’s command, for the next phase of Mistress’ plan. joyce closed her eyes, enduring—no, enjoying—the thrill of knowing that just as she was Mistress’ puppet, these two lovely young women were utterly obedient to her. they would obey her without thought. Mistress was so kind to let slave joyce have a taste of this intoxicating control. Why had she ever wanted to fight this?
At joyce’s nod, kit turned briskly to obey the next command in her implanted queue. joyce watched her stalk back to the landing. she envied the girl her robotic certainty, even as she enjoyed watching her instant compliance.
joyce herself felt almost asleep on her feet, able to act and speak but weary and distracted. she’d felt this lethargy in her body and mind ever since waking from the last hypnotic session in Sheila’s . . . in the apartment where Mistress kept slave sheila . . . when Mistress had programmed her with this mission, and set her over the other two slaves.
she roused herself to look around the room, seeing it with many eyes. There was nothing of value for Mistress. There was no need to prepare it for the operation—that would happen downstairs. she had known, and come to look anyway. It was probably the last time she’d ever stand in her bedroom.
As she turned, movement drew her eye, and she realized she’d seen herself in the mirror. Part of her was afraid (but only part—which made her more afraid) as she realized her old programming was active now and quietly draining her memories again, and even the little details of her room, her life, were leaking away. In a few days at most, if she stood again in this room, she would stare blankly and wonder who lived here.
Wonder what Mistress wanted her to do to them.
But now she lost herself in looking at the woman in the mirror. The willowy body, lithe and balanced, what someone had called a ballerina, though real ballerinas weren’t so frail. What mesmerized joyce about her own reflection were the contrasts—slender bare thighs with dark-sleeved arms, the bodysuit hugging her soft curves with the harsh angularity of the shining black kneeboots. joyce was a soft core of submissive flesh strapped into a framework of her Owner’s hard power.
she stood straighter, more deeply mesmerized as she saw the beautiful robot in the mirror tauten with her, the booted, belted figure binding itself more tightly into Mistress’ control. she looked briefly into her own wide, trance-glazed eyes. Hands by her sides, she turned stiffly and left the room. she was wet.
It didn’t last, and alone in the dark on the landing, she almost cried wanting it back, the bound thrill of knowing herself as Mistress’ automaton. It was the house, doing its own quiet counter-brainwash with the old smells and how the sounds came back from the walls, cutting her total focus on obedience, on the Mistress. Before she could stop herself, she wished it gone.
It was like an orgasm—once started not even regret could hold her at the edge. slave joyce snapped to attention and marched back to lose herself in the mirror, glorying in the slave she saw there, trembling with devotion. she stared hard into the hypnotized eyes again, and let it tear itself from her:
“i must obey! i will obey! i . . . only . . .” The orgasm hit her and she swayed, but like a well-balanced robot she stayed upright, hands flat by her hips. she looked at the beautiful robot in the mirror, saw the sweat gleam off the collarbone, saw the blush on her thighs. Blinked. Saw . . .
. . . in the mirror behind the robot, a bed . . . a man’s shoes lying next to it . . .
The bed where she’d lain back, smiling, under strangers: No, he won’t be home until evening . . . I love when you do that to me . . . he never makes me feel like this . . . may I please swallow? . . .
The bed her . . . husband . . . reclaimed, when they thought she was free and he said it really, ultimately, didn’t matter. That what mattered was—her . . .
Blinked. Kept her eyes closed. No. i . . . I . . . didn’t . . . no . . . she looked again, saw the graceful, shapely robot in the mirror, saw the fog in her eyes clearing before a bright glitter of despair. It drove her to run even as the slave woman in the glass seduced her to stay, gaze, moisten, submit.
Blinked. Stepped away. Tried and failed to keep her steps from falling into a cadence. Let the cadence win. Enjoyed.
she headed downstairs, looking away from the darkened doorway of her daughter’s room. Not thinking of how Amanda had moved back from grad school to help take care of her when she’d been freed, held her after nightmares, been like her own mother, raised her again into a free woman. Not thinking at all, and doing it as hard as she could.
The two other slaves stood rigidly at attention against the wall of the unlit foyer. kit’s eyes glittered wolflike in the dimness. sheila was wearing the headset again: Mistress spoke through her as She saw fit. Depending on the task for a team like this, Mistress might have the controller-slave herself wear the headset, making the woman essentially an extension of Her panel. But this time Mistress didn’t want slave joyce to take refuge in the half-trance it would involve. she was the controller for this task.
Mistress wasn’t a sadist.
The red light on sheila’s headset went on, and she closed her eyes. It went out and she opened them, smiling faintly, looked at joyce and stepped over to her. she put her arm around joyce and pressed gently against her, her breasts against joyce’s ribs, leaning up to kiss her. Feeling passively aroused, joyce held still and opened to her tongue. After exploring her mouth for a few moments, sheila released her, and as her face went blank again she resumed her place by the wall.
joyce tasted her own come, another gift of sheila’s mouth. Mistress had just sent her a message. The red light put sheila to sleep again. When it released her, she murmured, “They’re coming up the street.”
Stepping back, joyce gestured, and the other women positioned themselves on either side of the garage entry while she stood in the shadows of the kitchen. she looked at the glowing panel of the alarm. she waited. she could almost let it all seem abstract, and she felt Mistress might let her, might be grudgingly content if she quietly surrendered and became a willing slave here in the dark.
please just don’t make me feel this
The car pulled in, the garage door closed. Car doors opened and shut. Footsteps on the concrete, and joyce almost absently prayed they’d just stay there, never change to the louder, nearer wooden steps that led up to the door.
They changed. she felt her life shrinking to seconds. The door opened. No more seconds. Owen’s voice: “Your mother left the lights off.” Amanda’ s: “Probably still at what’s-her-name’s. I hope they’re OK—”
Both of them were inside. joyce saw shopping bags, shapes inside the plastic, things to eat, oh god christ don’t please—the door slammed, the light was gone, and the horrible foreign sound of the taser silenced everything else. In the clatter of bags and contents Owen’s fall was an undertone.
joyce heard her daughter whisper “Oh, no“ and then whoop for air as kit knocked it out of her.
she turned the lights on to see sheila and kit looming over her husband’s crumpled form, their gleaming boots rising out of the scattered groceries, Amanda writhing weakly in the tangle of her long coat, blinking in the sudden brightness, breathing in painful wheezes. She looked at the two younger women, then back, looking surprised to find a third enemy. Her eyes rose up from the boots, up the thighs, up the tight fabric to the face. Her mother’s face.
joyce looked her daughter in the eye.
joyce prayed, then, to Something, just to die.
“Mom.” she heard the throttled panic, knew how much it cost Amanda to keep it throttled, felt the love for her daughter burn through her. Thank you, she prayed instead to Something, for letting me know someone like her. “Mom. It’s me. It’s Amanda, Mom. Please.”
She was whispering, afraid the other two would hit her with the taser, stop her from trying to reach joyce. She was trying to make contact while she could, a smart move with many assailants but a useless one when faced with a robot.
A beautiful robot like slave joyce.
joyce tried to speak, failed. tasting her own come from sheila’s kiss again, she quivered with the arousal running up her body. It was too much to resist the pleasure of saying . . .
“Bind the male. Prepare the female to be hypnotized.”
10.
“Mom.” she saw Amanda’s face twist with dismay at the words and the calm tone. “Mom, fight it! Fight the hypnosis! You can! You—” She sputtered as kit reached down and grasped her around the middle, winding her again as she lifted Amanda and half-dragged her into the den. joyce couldn’ t tell if kit were just keeping the female incapacitated or if she were actually enjoying it.
joyce just watched. It only mattered that the female was made ready.
she stepped over her husband, wondering what charge sheila had actually set, whether the headset had put sheila to sleep again and told her to set it higher. she wondered whether it would be better if he were dead.
Mistress wouldn’t think so.
she walked into the den, not seeing the pieces of her life all around her, seeing only her daughter struggling weakly on the sofa as slave kit methodically stripped her. she watched, feeling the horror rise in her even as the sexual heat did, as she saw Amanda—saw another unprocessed slave—exposed to view. sheila came up beside her. “The male is secured, Controller.”
kit stepped away, and Amanda rolled on the shreds of her clothes trying to sit upright. She moved to cover her breasts and crotch, but seemed to see how pointless that was. joyce saw her daughter only through a blur; when she saw clearly it was to assess the girl as a slave: supple thighs and slender arms, still lightly tanned from the summer, her belly slim but not taut, endearingly soft. she could see Amanda get control of herself, forcing away the terror that must be rending her inside. But for a moment all she could do was enjoy the unconsciously sexy way her daughter moved, squirming on the couch, looking at them.
Not crying. Not begging. When Amanda reached stillness again and looked up at her, it steadied joyce again.
My daughter! she said aloud in her mind, the pride flaring up against the dark, moist lust that washed over her. It held—but shame was tied to it. This is how my daughter meets this moment—and I’m what brings it to her. i lost, so she loses. It was almost a relief to think of submitting to the hypnotic fog Mistress offered, just to forget . . .
Amanda spoke, her voice a rasp but not faltering. “All right, then. Maybe I’m just taIking to the fucking bitch who did this.” She didn’t threaten impossible revenge: even now she was a realist. She must be wondering when they’d shut her up, to hurry it or punish the slur to Mistress. She didn’t understand how little Mistress cared for slaves’ opinions—or how much She wanted joyce to endure this.
joyce shuddered. she wondered how bad it was going to feel. she wondered if there were a way, right now, to petition Mistress, to beg on her knees to be put back into the obedient trance she had spurned before, to . . . The world began darkening, taking in a greenish tinge, as if she were awakening to being deep underwater.
What was she thinking? Amanda was spending her last seconds as a thinking being trying to speak to her—she had to listen and bear witness.
“I don’t know if you’re still in there, Mom, or somewhere, but please know I love you. And I’m so, so proud to be your daughter.” Her eyes were dry, and joyce could only stand still and admire her.
“We did win, Mom.” The defiant snap startled joyce. “We did beat them, even just for a while. They can’t take that from us. They’ll make us forget, if they want—but it still happened, Mom, there was a time you were free again, and we were still together. Even if we all forget it, it still happened.”
joyce looked at her, and sheer awe at this woman that she’d raised was overriding even the lethargy. It was Amanda that held her spellbound now. She sensed that her daughter wasn’t even expecting to rouse her from her tranced obedience, might not even know that joyce was still here—she was a free woman meeting her end, choosing proudly what her last free moments would be about.
“Mom, I would not trade any of this away if it meant never knowing you.”
In her mind joyce was screaming, trying to answer. But Mistress’ grip was too strong. her body stood, waiting. Then it all caught up with Amanda, and she was just a miserably scared young woman, about to be enslaved. The sob forced its way out of her, and she held the next one in. In a moment she’d see there was no point anymore. joyce felt almost a hunger at the sound of the girl’s despair, and she began to recognize the green shadow that was settling over her awareness. It was full of throbbing, spinning spirals . . .
Then Amanda looked up, and joyce, momentarily freed from the spinning green, was puzzled to see joy on her face. Not a last-minute rescue: kit would have sprung. No, Amanda’s eyes were locked—on joyce’s, and for some reason they were shimmering. Amanda saw.
joyce was crying.
Mistress ruled joyce’s mind, but her body answered Amanda with its tears, and it was enough for Amanda. She nodded, then turned to look at slave kit. Staring into that pair of unblinking eyes, she hissed, ”Do it.”
joyce turned to sheila, and was surprised to see the other slave looking almost disoriented. And . . . moist-eyed? What could all this have meant to a complete drone like her?
The red light came on, and this time sheila’s eyelids fluttered before settling closed. But her eyes were dry and empty when they opened again, and they focused on joyce’s.
“Mistress speaks. you must obey,” she said.
slave joyce sighed happily, as all the burdens fell from her. “i must obey.” she turned calmly back to the unprocessed slave on the sofa, holding her hand out to sheila. “The inducer.”
“Yes, Controller.” The slave unhooked it from her belt and put it in slave joyce’s hand.
Hefting it, slave joyce turned the bell-shaped end toward the new slave. “You will obey. Look into the inducer and do not try to look away. Surrender your will.” The girl looked up at her, and slave joyce had the oddest impression of eyes looking out of a cockpit at an uprushing battleship. The girl nodded, closed her eyes—then opened them and stared into the flickering light.
“My name is Aman . . .” It caught her mind too quickly. Her eyes started to glaze, and her head began to nod slightly, moving loosely on her neck.
“you are a slave,” slave joyce recited. “you have no will. you must
obey.” she saw slave amanda begin whispering the truths to herself, and set the inducer on the coffee table, seeing the hypnotized girl’s gaze follow it as if attached. slave amanda’s pupils began dilating and contracting in a slow rhythm, visible even against her brown irises in the eerie light of the inducer.
Yes. slave joyce was moving to the couch even before she realized an idea had popped open in the bottom of her mind like a tombflower. Kneeling, she looked closely at her daughter as slave amanda moved gently, her struggles reduced to slow, languid gestures. Even now it was slowing, her last subconscious defenses fading under the rapid flicker of the inducer, her mind busy receiving the new ideas, the better ones, already learning which thoughts to give up to make room for them. her lips stirred. she was learning to say yes all over again.
Inhaling, slave joyce leaned between her daughter’s thighs, savoring the perfume, the sweat, and the spice of arousal that cut through both. When she saw for the first time that slave amanda had shaved herself to a rakish little V, she smiled, wondering if Mistress would have the girl keep it that way. she looked up again, saw a frown settle across slave amanda’s brow and then disappear, like a bird frightened off a branch.
With a deeper smile, slave joyce was able to wonder what thought it had been. Sense of self? Hesitation to obey without question? she stopped thinking and put her mouth to her daughter’s pussy, working her lips past the soft hair, her head spinning with the taste and the quiver of the muscles as she teased it. slave amanda’s thighs shook and tensed, and slave joyce gently guided them onto her shoulders, not taking her mouth away. she closed her eyes for a moment at the cool, silken skin against her cheeks.
It was all coming back to her now, but slave joyce didn’t lose herself too deeply to remember who this new slave was. her mind was buried in the pulsing green spirals now, and their gelatinous motion massaged her thoughts into the placid compliance she was helping her daughter achieve.
First, slave amanda needed to understand that obedience was pleasure, and her stuttering groans were a good sign. As slave joyce coaxed the clit out to meet her tongue, she wondered how new this was to slave amanda, being eaten out by another woman. It tripped another memory, a conversation with her daughter long ago, before Mistress, before the seminar and the cells. As her mouth worked with old skill, slave joyce drifted into the memory, wondering vaguely how it had escaped Mistress’ control in all this.
Another girl had been coming on to Amanda, and she wanted her mother’s advice—on who she was, what her sexuality should become, how she should meet the choices. And no matter what happened, how to keep from hurting the other girl.
slave joyce remembered looking into her daughter’s eyes that day, marveling at the soul she’d been raising.
The soul that was being destroyed right next to her, right now.
slave joyce tried to scream, but with her mouth full of slave amanda it could only come out as a moan, surrounding the girl’s clitoris. It set the girl off.
slave amanda did scream, as she came.
11.
Blinked. slave joyce stood beside slave sheila, licking her lips absently. they looked down at slave amanda, who lay bonelessly on the sofa, still riveted by the lights from the inducer. her own hand worked her pussy now, whenever the hypnotic patterns signaled her to. While she’d writhed in her first slave orgasm, gripping her mother’s head with her spasming thighs, slave sheila had fitted her with headphones, and she was already absorbing the basic commands that would make her easier to transport and condition. Everything was as Mistress willed.
Leaving the other slave to brainwash her daughter, slave joyce walked back out to the hall, where slave kit kept an eye on her—husband. slave joyce blinked, numbly pleased that it did not hurt to think that. It would make her obedience smoother, and thus more useful to Mistress, if she didn’t have those emotional problems, but the sheer ecstasy of having carried out this task was helping her put trivia into perspective.
“ . . . Joyce? . . .” she looked down. The male, Owen, was able to speak now. Had he seen her begin processing the girl? Why did that matter?
“Joyce . . . please don’t . . . just . . . resist it . . .”
she stood straighter, feeling slave kit’s eyes on her. “i am not programmed to resist. i am programmed to obey. i will obey Mistress’ commands without deviation.” she sensed approval from the other slave, and valued it: Mistress had left no splinter of free will in slave kit, and if her completely robotized mind saw slave joyce as performing well, slave joyce need not worry.
“Joyce, please . . . talk to me. Keep talk . . .”
It didn’t annoy her. she felt excited at showing this man how deeply enslaved she was. “you will not cause me to deviate. i worship Mistress and Her Will. She instructed me to take slave amanda. the girl is being hypnotized and will soon be obedient. she will come with us.”
“You’re her mother.” His voice was stronger.
“i am nothing. i am what Mistress tells me. i am Her slave and i obey.” she paused. she was becoming the beautiful robot in the mirror. And now, with worship of Mistress starting to sing in her head, slave joyce began to remember what else Mistress had programmed her to do. Mistress had made each step easier, by letting slave joyce obey more intensely with each subtask. slave joyce did not feel grateful for that—it was for Mistress’ use. she abjectly admired Mistress’ skill at manipulating her, seducing what remained of her mind further and deeper, each delicious step both serving Mistress and taking slave joyce farther from “herself”. This next task would help.
As she focused on it, the sounds the male was making stopped being anything more than an annoying hum of words useless to Mistress. slave joyce turned her head and stared at slave kit, who moved slightly, her approval changing to deference, sensing the Controller’s deeper obedience to their Owner.
Looking into the other slave’s gray eyes, slave joyce commanded, “Get the taser.”
slave kit accepted the stare, nodding. “i obey,” she said, as if to Mistress Herself. slave joyce was getting wet again.
slave joyce was in absolute control, and it made her hot.
slave joyce was under absolute control, and it made her hot.
The male was unable to do more than twitch and beg, and the young woman masturbating on the couch was on her way to mindless submission, already being addicted to obeying orders. The other two slaves were empty of anything but obedience to her commands.
And with all that, slave joyce did all of this at Mistress’ command, as Her will-less pawn, thrilled to obey remembered phrases and unexplained urges. Two edges of the same blade. Mistress’ blade.
i obey. i am a slave. It was a joy thick as syrup. Dark green, swirling, sucking slave joyce down.
she looked down at . . . Owen.
Blinked. No. i’m not. i won’t. Please. i already let my daughter . . . oh my god . . . PLEASE . . . please . . .
Blinked. “Mistress’ plan requires this,” she explained. “i am programmed to carry out the plan.” The beautiful robot’s voice did not shake or fade. But joyce was starting to come out of it again, a passenger again, too horrified to spin the useless wheel as the face she loved loomed in the headlights.
“If you must think, think of how slave amanda can serve,” she heard herself go on. “If she is receptive to conditioning, she is bright enough to become one of Mistress’ personal slaves. But Mistress has many bright pretty slaves, and perhaps slave amanda will be sold as market meat. Mistress will decide.”
she heard the dazed rapture infuse her voice—felt it vibrate undeniably in her belly: “Mistress decides all.”
“As you commanded, Controller.” slave kit was back beside her, offering the taser on her upturned palms.
slave joyce nodded. For a moment she held still, not even trying to lengthen time but hoping just to hide from it. Blinked. The beautiful robot reached over and took the handle, her arm not shaking a bit from the light orgasm that greeted her.
Blinked. joyce looked down at her husband. she thought wildly, prayed, that Mistress had miscalculated, had simply overestimated her capacity to stand this, and that now she would just lose her mind, scream it away and never ever find it again . . .
Blinked. Looked down at the helpless man, who, left to tell it, would have such a counterproductive story about what had happened to his daughter and his wife. Looked down at her Mistress’ prey. Reached down like Mistress’ divine talon, to hurt and destroy.
Blinked. There was no way she could move her body, hit slave kit with the taser, or even use it on herself, spare Owen the final agony of dying at her hands—the hypnosis was too strong, her body too deeply controlled—but she realized that she hadn’t even thought of trying that first. she’d thought of just leaving him to die alone as she fled into madness.
she didn’t deserve him, the man who won her back from slavery. she didn’t deserve the gallant girl who was surrendering her will in the next room. she had failed them, after they had sacrificed themselves for her. For nothing.
Blinked. Please.
Blinked. Suddenly there was clarity. Owen looked up at her, still twitching slightly. He looked at her face, not her hands as they clicked the setting higher. she heard him breathe. she realized he was giving her the only thing he could. He was sparing her the sight and sound of begging as the last thing she ever saw him do. Like the girl in the other room, he had faith that joyce—Joyce—was still in her, somewhere, to see that.
Didn’t he know? Didn’t he realize she was nothing? Didn’t he know this just made it worse?
joyce fled his terrible mercy. slave joyce begged the mercy of Mistress. Mistress let her. she stood.
Blinked. Smiled.
The beautiful robot pointed the taser down.