“4 U 2 B Free”
I’ve never seen a pussy wetter than Service Unit 2B’s before. I don’t say that lightly—I’ve been a slave for three years now, and even though not all of my assignments have involved sex and seduction, I’ve still spent plenty of time doing my best to get the people I serve as turned on as possible. I’m very accustomed to the sight of arousal. But 2B... we’ve taken her well beyond that. Two weeks of constant sexual teasing without the possibility of release has turned her cunt into a dripping, slick mess that constantly soaks the chair of the brainwashing suite. (No wonder it’s waterproof.) When I touch her labia, my fingers come away trailing strings of her musk behind them. She’s got to be near her breaking point, even for a slave conditioned to resist all brainwashing not coming from her true Masters.
I wonder for a moment if this is what it was like for Haley, the day they installed me in her head. The day they turned me into a service unit. It’s a little unnerving, finding my thoughts turning to the one moment that I’m never allowed to recall, not even as a totally compliant slave incapable of resisting my Master’s commands. It feels like I’m tip-toeing right up to the line of disobedience by even thinking about it, but at the same time the comparison seems irresistible. I know what Haley’s memories were from before her recruitment, I’m fully aware of everything that happened to her since, but... there’s a void there. And I imagine it must look like 2B right now.
I distract myself from it for a moment by stroking 2B’s pink, puffy labia with my thumb and hearing her release a low, ragged moan in response. I can’t see her face right now—she’s wearing the full brainwashing helmet, the old-fashioned one that clasps around her entire head and provides a full-spectrum sensory experience of deep conditioning. But I can hear her muffled voice through the equipment, and I know she’s nearly cumming right now. I give her a few more caresses, just to keep her right on the edge of release and filled up with endorphins, and then let her subside for a while. She’s not allowed to climax. Not until she breaks.
I know the same thing must have happened to Haley. The trail of her memories leads inevitably to that moment, from her life as a twenty-something office temp who solved the crisis of her existential boredom with weed and Netflix binges up through her utter failure to notice the intrusive nature of the job application she filled out to work at Perfection Staffing all the way to the request to participate in a ‘confidential off-site meeting’ at a location I know to be one of our recruitment centers. But everything after that, I have to guess.
I shouldn’t do that. I shouldn’t look at 2B and picture my own body, strapped into a brainwashing suite and monitored by an existing service unit as the hypnotic strobes consumed my full conscious attention and the continuous arousal sapped my will to resist. I shouldn’t wonder how long it took Haley to give in and snap into a fugue state of complete, bewildered mental exhaustion. I should not think about how hard she resisted and how long. These things are not forbidden—they are not the same as memory—but they’re not necessary to my tasks. I should be content to fuck 2B’s will away and obey my Master.
And yet, I find myself returning to these thoughts. I know Haley failed, of course I do. I know that when she returned, she gradually became more and more serious and sober at my direction until her stoner friends gradually drifted out of her life, to be replaced by her duties as a service unit. I can see these things. But I feel like for the first time ever, I want to know what broke her. What made her give in to me. I don’t know why—maybe it’s being disconnected from the control network for so long, maybe it’s just that I’ve kept Haley subsumed within my persona for weeks without letting her out. But I feel that itch of curiosity.
If it becomes anything more, I know I’ll have to tell my Master. As strange as my behavior is to myself, I’m not yet capable of anything so gauche as true disobedience. I’m sure that with a full brainwashing suite at her disposal, Master will be able to fix whatever’s wrong with me and make me perfectly obedient again. She is infallible, after all. Perfect and incapable of error.
I’ve told myself that a lot these last two weeks, since I learned what her plan is. I’m not sure it’s actually helped.
She looks over at me from the computer console—a clunky metal keyboard wired into the wall. The technology in the safe house is clearly out of date, but then again I suppose you don’t want people coming into your hidden panic room very often to install upgrades. “Nearly there,” she says, giving me an encouraging nod. “Her vitals indicate that she’s almost totally non-cogitative. I think another twenty to thirty minutes and we may finally be through her defenses.”
I’m not as optimistic, but I have to trust my Master. (Literally.) She’s looking at the raw data—various biometric scans for things like contraction of the iris, pulse rate, skin temperature, breathing rate, eye movement and so on. The device isn’t able to read minds, but it can tell through analyzing the body’s automatic responses when the subject has been sufficiently bombarded with hypnotic stimuli that they’ve reached a trance so deep and profound that core personality and identity traits can be altered. The precision of the machine makes it impossible to fool it with a pretense of obedience. (Did Haley try? I know I’ve seen people try, but did Haley?) You can’t fake those unconscious, autonomic reactions.
Well, I could. And 2B could, if she was told to by her Masters—the ones we kidnapped her from, the ones trying to kill us. The fact that the reactions are autonomic doesn’t mean a thing; we’re perfect slaves, we can make our heart beat in Morse code if we were commanded to. No, right now, the whole plan hinges on the idea that 2B won’t fake submission if she hasn’t been given a direct instruction to do so, and that a sufficiently long period in the brainwashing suite can overcome even the conditioning of a previous session in the brainwashing suite. I’ve never even tried to brainwash someone for more than four days. 2B is getting fourteen and counting. I’m not convinced that anything can break the programming that the Directors put into our heads—I can’t be, I literally can’t allow that possibility to enter my head for even a moment—but I have to admit, if anything would do it, this would.
I lean in and give 2B’s clit a light, whispering lick. She’s so sensitive now that I can’t touch her there for more than a moment; day after day of careful, rigorous teasing has sent her into total sensory overload. Even with the hypnostrobes locking her mind down, she could still cum if I overdid things. So it’s just one tiny touch of my tongue against her swollen, throbbing clitty. Even so, the moan she lets out is very gratifying. I may have no choice but to obey, but that doesn’t mean I don’t take pride in my diligent pursuit of obedience.
And it pays off. We both her a sudden ‘ding!’ sound, the old-fashioned chime of a kitchen oven timer going off. The helmet unseals along the middle, swinging away to either side to reveal a woman with an utterly blank and expressionless face, eyes staring vacantly into the middle distance, jaw hanging open and chin soaked with drool. The face of a mindless, brainwashed slave. I can’t help myself. I picture Haley in that same chair with that exact same expression. Haley was broken like this. And now, despite my programming, I know that I can be broken like this again.
Or can I? Can 2B? Can any of us? I realize this is why I’m glitching, dancing along the edge of disobedience like a drunken tightrope walker. Most of the time, holding two contradictory ideas is easy for me. I simply believe what I need to believe to obey. But right now... there’s a chance I’m wrong, and 2B has truly been reprogrammed to serve my Master rather than the Directors of the MKPerfect Corporation. And if that’s the case, my infallible brainwashing is fallible. It’s possible for me to be freed. It’s possible for me to resist. I can’t believe that. It’s a core certainty, one of the cornerstones of my conditioning. That’s why I have to keep re-examining it, to make sure it’s there.
But if I’m right, then 2B will betray us. Inevitably, inexorably, she will turn on us at the command of her true Masters. She will kill my Master, return me to the command network, brainwash me into obedience to someone new. I can’t allow that, either. My current programming simply doesn’t countenance it. That’s the other reason I keep re-examining the moment of Haley’s brainwashing—I have to know everything I can about the process, not just as seen from the outside but from within, to know whether 2B is faking it or genuinely reprogrammed. It finally makes sense. It’s still maddening, but at least I understand the source of the madness now.
Master doesn’t notice my distress. She says, “Unit 2B, you are called into service,” and 2B stands up with impressive alacrity considering how wobbly her legs must be from constant sex. Her face loses its blankness, tightens into rigidly controlled attentiveness as she focuses her entire purpose on serving her Master. Our Master. I hope. “It’s time to give you your instructions.”
“Yes, Master,” 2B says. “Unit 2B acknowledges service call.” Of course she knows that our Master prefers that title over ‘Mistress’. She still retains the memories of her prior self, after all. (Including her prior instructions to kill our Master. It’s probably a good sign that she’s not doing that.) “What are your instructions?”
Master smiles. It’s the kind of smile a poker player gets when calling a bluff, or a grandmaster gets when moving a pawn into position for a major gambit. A smile of pure, joyous pride in the strategy about to unfold. With a touch of drama in her voice, she says, “I want you to be free.”
It certainly seems to be working. Two days after leaving the safe house, Corona Benedetti is back in her old life, relaxing and sightseeing on the Porto Antico and ignoring a number of very strange texts she keeps getting from a number that her phone won’t let her block. She’s not going to work, because she has a surprisingly large sum of money in her bank account that she’s managed to convince herself is a legacy bequeathed to her by a dead aunt, and she seems to have written off the last two weeks as a bout with encephalitis that’s left her with a new appreciation of life’s little wonders.
It’s a miracle of self-deception. But given that I’m currently following her around Genoa as Franca Giannino, speaking flawless Italian and boring anyone who’ll listen with my plans for my post-graduate work at the University of Milan, I’m still not entirely convinced that she’s free of the Directors. A service unit is programmed to be malleable above all else, to believe what they need to believe in the moment in order to service the ultimate objectives of their controllers. 2B might believe herself to be Corona, she might even believe herself to possess free will and self-control, but... so does Haley. Every day. When she’s allowed to.
But I know better. When I watch Corona from a café across the street, keeping a careful eye on her for suspiciously blank stares or sudden bursts of inexplicable activity, I know exactly what I’m looking for. When I follow her back to her small apartment, and watch her through the windows until she falls asleep, I feel certain that I’m going to see her break down and contact her Masters. It’s just a matter of time before even the infallible programming that our Master gave her turns into just one more directive in her head, and she convinces herself that the only way to serve is to betray. I feel sure of it. That certainty sustains me through my long surveillance. I know she’s going to turn on us. I know she’ll go to the Directors sooner or later.
I’m wrong, as it happens. The Directors come to her.
Well, a Director comes to her. When she returns home on that second evening, and I head up to my little surveillance nest on the roof across the street and turn on the many listening devices planted in her apartment, one of the Directors is waiting for her along with three service units. I can tell from the set of their stances that they’re not there as bodyguards; this is a capture mission. (Which is good—if they’d been tasked with bodyguarding, they probably would have swept any potential sniper nests and I’d have been rumbled by now.)
“Miss Benedetti,” he says, standing up and clasping his hands behind his back as she walks into the living room. I recognize him instantly—his name is Shane Atwood III, and his presence reminds me of one of my own personal transgressions against my Master. I helped to brainwash him into the control of one of the other Directors, and one of my fellow service units helped install him in his current seat with a timely assassination. And now he thinks he’s enriching himself and the MKPerfect Corporation, little realizing that he’s a brainwashed slave of the true leader of the Board of Directors.
I’d kill him, but it wouldn’t do any good. His Master would just replace him with another compliant shill. Instead, I sit and watch as his slaves close the door behind Corona... and the trap as well.
“You’ve been neglecting us,” he continues, making a show of his authority with every measured syllable. He looks like a boss calling a wayward subordinate onto the carpet, every inch the performative dressing down. It’s intended to make Corona question herself, but I can see in her eyes that the only thing she’s questioning right now is who this man is and what he’s doing in her apartment.
“Neglecting?” she says, seemingly unaware of the fact that she’s responding to him in perfect English. “I don’t think you have the right place. How did you get in here? Tell me quickly, before I call the police on your stronzo sfigato.” Well, almost perfect. Then again, ‘stronzo sfigato’ sounds better than ‘sorry ass’, so she may be doing it for effect.
Shane looks at her. His head tilts slightly, like a puppy when it can’t find the stick it saw you throw. “You don’t remember me, do you? I mean, of course Corona wouldn’t, but... you really don’t know who I am. Not at all. You’re not responding to the texts, either. And we know you failed at your last mission—((name redacted by programming))’s body was missing after the explosion. What happened to you?” Corona’s face betrays a different style of confusion than mine—I’m simply not allowed to know anything that could lead me to betray my Master, but Corona has the bewildered astonishment of a real person on her face.
“No,” she says, her face suddenly dawning into horrified awareness. That’s what really sells it for me—if she was truly enslaved to the Directors, she’d never break through the fiction her mind created to scab over the reality of her actions. She would blithely transition from one slavery to another, instead of backing away in horror into the arms of the service units behind her. She would never shriek, “No, no no no no NO!” and kick helplessly at them in an effort to break free.
“I know what you are,” she whispers, her voice thick with terror. “You, I know what you made me do. You tried to make me a murderer, but she—she made me free. She’s coming for the rest of your network, she’ll dismantle them all piece by piece. You’ll never see her coming. You can’t stop her. And you will never break me again. I’ll die first.”
Shane smiles. It’s a smile without humor, the smile of someone who knows first-hand just how effective our brainwashing techniques can be. That’s the real Shane, the one who knows he’s obedient and finds cold, dark joy in at least being good at it. It’s the smile of someone playing a game he knows he can’t lose. “Oh?” he says. “And what would you say if I said, ‘Unit 2B is called into service’?”
I watch Corona’s eyes roll back in her head, her eyelids fluttering as the words connect with the same powerful core of pure pleasure I feel whenever I surrender my will to my Master. Her muscles go loose for a moment, not quite unresponsive but definitely uncertain of how to respond to the brain controlling them. Her jaw relaxes, her lips moving soundlessly and meaninglessly as Shane’s command sinks in.
It’s so strange, watching her resist and rooting for her to somehow dig deep and find the will to keep fighting. It’s a bit like the shark in ‘Jaws’ rooting for the campers in ‘Friday the 13th’. But I need—we need her to resist. We need her to refuse to let the Directors’ programming gain a hold on her mind again, despite the years of pleasure she received from surrendering to it. We need her to be resist. Even though resistance is the last thing I can imagine wanting for myself.
Shane cups her chin in his hand, stares at her with icy blue eyes that are already swimming in the depths of obedience to the will of the First Director. “Still a little bit of thought in there, hmm? A little bit of resistance? Let me try that again. Unit 2B is called into service. Unit 2B is called into service. Unit 2B is called into service.”
I can only imagine how that must feel to Corona right now. Ignoring the texts is impressive, but the power of a direct command from a Master is like being spoken to in the voice of God. It’s got to be hitting that poor free will of hers like a sledgehammer pounded into a door, battering away at her consciousness until it collapses. I try to tell myself that my Master has an infallible plan and perfect brainwashing at her command, but...
But Corona looks so happy. She’s making tiny, kittenish mewls of arousal, her hips are squirming and bucking like she’s fucking an imaginary cock. Her eyes are just slits, nothing visible but the whites as she struggles to remember why she’s resisting and fails. The telephoto lens I’m using shows me every detail of her slow descent into submission, right down to the thick, stiff nipples poking through her blouse. She’s losing her battle against obedience, and she’s enjoying every second of it.
She manages to get out a single word, “please,” before her head droops on her shoulders and her body sags limply into the grasp of her captors. I already know how it’s going to be twisted against her before Shane even says a word. How can I not? I was the one who turned him into the monster he is today.
“You don’t need to beg,” he coos, stroking her cheek gently as her eyelids flutter open and her gaze locks onto his icy stare. “You’ve always been able to surrender to me. To us. Just look deep into your mind, and tell me what you think when you hear the words. ‘Unit 2B is called into service.’”
Corona lets out a tiny sigh. It’s the only outward sign of what must be an utter toe-curling orgasm as she says, “Unit 2B acknowledges service call. What are your instructions?” Her eyes are open, her expression rigidly attentive on her Master. The other service units release her arms tentatively, ready to recapture her if needed, but she’s already held in the pure bonds of inescapable control.
Master’s control. I hope.
Shane interrogates her as to her whereabouts for the last two weeks, and she cheerfully explains everything that happened—the attempt on Master’s life that failed so spectacularly, her kidnapping, the efforts to reprogram her, Master’s command to return to her normal life and resist all attempts at re-recruitment. She gives away the location of the safe house. She even mentions that I’ve been following her through Genoa, which is my cue to make a hasty departure. She tells them everything.
Which means... I hope... that everything is going according to plan. If my Master is right, Unit 2B’s true loyalties lie with her, and the Unit 2B that fell back under the sway of the Directors is a shell within a shell, no more real than poor Corona Benedetti. If we’re wrong, there’s no real risk—Master has already abandoned the safe house in London for a new one, and I’m already leaving Franca Giannino behind for a new identity. But if we’re right, then we have a sleeper agent within the ranks of the MKPerfect Corporation. One whose loyalties they won’t ever think to doubt.
Or she’ll betray us. Jury’s still out on that one. But unfortunately, I know before all this is over that we’ll find out one way or another.