Drone
14
Acquiring a slaveskin wasn’t easy for Alex, but neither was it an insurmountable chore, considering the means at her disposal. She had contacts within the Betan underworld from her time in the Resistance.
Using protective gloves, she laid the empty film on the anonymous hotel-room bed and smoothed it out. Then she cried for a time, softly. Still later, she sat and composed a letter to Peter, finally speaking it into a recorder.
He deserved to understand.
But will he? she thought. Will anyone? Will anyone ever understand why I did this?
She doubted it. She had tried to express her feelings in the letter, to come up with an adequate explanation for her decision, but what it really came down to was that she was a different person from the Alexandra Panara she had been before Nax captured her. Alex didn’t think she was a “bad” person now, but she was certainly not the same strong woman who had faced down Solarian agents, Xenonic mercenaries, android assassins, and a litany of other threats before that mission to Proxima Five. And no matter how hard she tried, she knew she would never be able to be that strong again.
She couldn’t bear to be that strong again.
Too much had happened. Thanks to Nax and Ovidia, she remembered too much of her time as a drone. She remembered, too much and too well, the Service of Masters.
Alex stood up from her desk and went to the bed. Carefully, she sat beside the seemingly delicate slaveskin. She removed her gloves. She delicately ran a finger over the pink and translucent material.
It was active. It reacted to her female flesh. It tingled. She shuddered and drew back her hand.
“It’s weakness,” she said out loud, to no one, to herself. “It’s my weakness.”
Her decision to become a pleasure drone again had not been a sudden one. Alex had given the matter considerable thought in the days and weeks before making her decision and turning to her contacts. As if she were in the Beta Assembly, she had debated the issue with herself. Her main objection, and the thing she thought her future detractors would most believe of her, was that what she was doing was tantamount to suicide. The transformation this time, she knew, would be complete, in both body and mind. There would be no chemical injected prior, nothing to inhibit the slave film from doing its job and completely overwriting her mind and replacing it with the utter docility of a drone personality. She would not be left with these tormenting thoughts, these awful memories of need that plagued her day and night, that made her life now with Peter so unbearable. But her decision was not motivated by a desire for self-destruction. Alex was morally sure of that. It was not a negative she sought. It was a positive.
Call it weakness if one liked, but she wanted—needed—to feel the pleasure of Service again.
She did not want to die. She wanted to live. But she wanted to live as a pleasure drone.
She had been strong, once. Now, she craved weakness. She yearned for submission. She wanted to obey. She wanted to serve. She wanted to have no choice but to serve, to serve and to bring pleasure to others. Was that wrong? Was that ethically misguided? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Either way, Alex knew she had been ruined for freedom. Other women had been unspooled and gone on to build new lives for themselves, or somehow managed to return to their old ones. They, on the other hand, remembered nothing of their time as pleasure drones, or so they claimed. Alex wondered if that were completely true, or did those once enslaved women sweat at night in their dreams, as she did, always?
Were they haunted, as she was, constantly, by recollections of a need so deeply buried in their subconscious they could not bear to recall it save during the night? Alex thought she knew the answer.
If they remembered even half of what she remembered, she knew what they would do.
Alex stood and went to the window, deliberately putting her back to the bed.
There’ll be no going back this time, she thought, arms across her bosom. There’ll be no hope of rescue. Yet that had been true last time as well. She remembered what Peter had said, before she had left for Proxima Five. This time I can’t be there to bail you out if you get into trouble.
She smiled ironically. You’ll never have to bail me out again, my love. Never again.
This time it would be true. Her preparations would make sure of it. First, she would be no different than any other pleasure drone, finally. She would be picked up by a group of smugglers that operated from the capital. During the war, these men had transferred goods and people beneath the despotic eye of Earth. They did the same now under the restored Sovereignty. Same life, different administration. After that, a tranship she knew that was destined for the Flowerworld of Epsilon Indi, some 9.3 years away in a light envelope. News over a decade old now reported that the Epsilonians too had thrown out the Solarian Empire. Their success had proven an inspiration to the Free Centauri.
As a mere drone once more, she would be presented as a “gift” to one of the Artist-Princes of the Flowerworld, ostensibly from an anonymous Betan aristocrat. In a manner of speaking, this would even be true. Whether she was accepted or not, she was bound to end up serving someone’s pleasure on that faraway planet, though Alex imagined she would be put to her proper use long before their arrival.
She shivered and touched herself. The thought alone of Serving again made her hot and wet.
And after that . . ? Alex had no idea. The possibilities were endless. According to a recent report she had read, there were still over twenty thousand pleasure drones in the Three Systems alone, only half of which were in the hands—more or less—of Beta’s royal government. On Earth, she thought, feeling the chill along her spine, and throughout Sol, they say there are millions in service. Millions. An entire race of submissive, mindlessly fervent slaves. It was not inconceivable she might one day be taken there. Truly, truly that would curtail even the remotest possibility of her rescue and recovery.
Yet, even if that didn’t happen, regardless, the statistics were in her favor. Less than one percent of all pleasure drones were ever unspooled. The process was too expensive, and the drones themselves just too greatly desired. She smiled again. What would I say to Peter? she thought. The odds were long but not impossible, and drones, she knew, did not age. Would Peter still even be alive when or if I were ever unspooled again? She imagined what he would do when she heard her letter to him. He would order every transport from Beta Prime grounded. He would, before his counselors told him it was impossible, order every pleasure drone on the planet be unspooled. He would be hurt so badly by her decision this day. In time, though, she knew—she had faith—that he would survive.
If she too could have survived, if she too could have endured the loneliness, the monstrous memory of need, the unspeakable pleasures she so vividly recalled, she would have liked to have been his queen.
Alex turned from the window. The slavesuit was waiting for her, beckoning with demonic promise.
It was time to be courageous one last time.
Darkening the window, Alex quickly removed her clothes. Then she went to the desk and picked up the recorder. “Don’t search for me, Peter,” she spoke. “Please don’t. And don’t think too badly of me. It’s what I want now. It’s what I need.”
She lowered her head. “As much as I love you, you are too fine a man to make me surrender to you.
“So, I surrender now to myself.”
She switched the recorder off, then hit send. There would be a delay in the delivery. Peter would not receive the message for several hours, until long after his return to the planet from his inspection of the outer colonies. Placing the recorder carefully on the desk, Alex went to the bed and picked up the slaveskin. The electric tingling made her flesh crawl with excitement as she draped it over her skin, as she drew it down her slender arms and up her coltish legs, as she closed the seal in the middle by squeezing the edges shut. She had needed the help of her friends before. Now she did it all herself.
At last she was done. She was enclosed within the skin. There was no way she could escape.
Alex lay back then and closed her eyes, relishing her rediscovered freedom.