The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

HIVE

Codes: mc, ff, sf

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 trilby else, © 2004. 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”, “girl”, or “child” 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.
* * *

Inspirations: I wanted to write a hive story, and these things have lineage. Obviously a lot of Tabico’s “Community,” “Sub Routine,” and “Hot Oil,” and her and thrall’s “Salvation;“ a lingering feel from EyeofSerpent’s arc of Madrigal Feyen and the Knife that begins with “Quick Wit.” Perhaps some imagery from Aerosol Kid’s Akiko tales, though not the mood, and some echoes from his Gina & Grace stories like “Afterparty.” Some of Chris Chris“Quicksilver,” too, and of a pastiche by Arclight a long time ago.

* * *

1.

Inside the box, Tanya lay still in the hole she’d made among the food packets, thankful for the truck’s smooth ride. The food didn’t tempt her. She didn’t think anything had been added to it, yet, but it was intended for feeding slaves whose owners wanted their minds dull and tranquilized. She took no chances.

Tanya smiled wryly in the dark. Well, some chances. Mind-numbing snacks were a much smaller risk than this Trojan-horse route to sneak into the Hive itself. But if they caught her she wanted to be awake, even if her odds of staying that way were low.

She tried to relax and visualize the Hive’s layout again. The websites with their numeric and often-shifting URLs had included mundane details like storage, so she knew enough to be able to plan her exit through the ventshaft in the storeroom she expected to be unloaded in. Still, she’d have to get oriented quickly. If the police had listened, if someone would have helped her research it—

Shifting, suddenly uncomfortable atop the packets, Tanya seethed. Fucking cops. There was so much they could have done. They’d probably accessed the disks she’d given them, all right, but just to copy the visuals of wide-eyed, barely dressed women. Probably while picturing Tanya as one of them, laughing at her suspicions.

Only her best friend even listened, and while she believed in Tanya, Tanya didn’t know if Elissa Hynes really believed her. She’d accepted the copied disks, and soberly listened to that last phone call. Tanya wished she’d used the motel phone instead of her cell, to give Elissa the local number, but she believed Elissa had written the directions down. At least she had it all, to take to someone, if Tanya stayed missing.

Tanya tried not to think of what would keep her missing.

She doubted any of the cops, with a gun to his head, could even summarize what she’d told them about the slavers, especially that smarmy twerp Jacer that they’d made their point of contact.

But it wasn’t their baby sister in here.

Tanya wondered briefly if that would have made a difference in their attitude. She’d told herself earlier in disgust that if Jacer even had a sister, he’d more likely just want to order a custom DVD of the poor bitch being brainwashed into a naked slave. It had helped divert her anger at him before, but right now it just made her terribly sad.

It was a mistake to think about sisters, anyway. It was too easy to picture Ricki already under their control, sleepwalking through the corridors in their obscene little silver costume. Even forcing herself to focus on the diagrams of hallways and levels just made Tanya more conscious of the women flowing mindlessly through them.

Voices and movement jarred her to the present. They’d arrived at the Hive, or at least the surface-level warehouse it showed the world. She heard male voices again, the deliverymen from town, as they unloaded the shipment to what sounded like an electric cart. Her own box was unloaded, and they didn’t bang it around too much. When the truck’s sound receded, there was silence for a while.

Then footsteps, strangely regular human movement, and Tanya knew there were slaves around her now. It hit her harder than she’d expected. She’d seen them on that elusive website in graphic closeup but now they were near her, a meter away through the cargo plastic.

I’m the only one in this warehouse whose mind is her own. It made the box feel small and dark and very thin.

Other containers were opened for inspection. No one spoke, and it sounded so alien without the joking and cursing of the guys from town. This silence didn’t sound like a team that worked well without needing to chat, but a set of automata programmed for the same task.

Tanya could picture the expressionless women methodically, unblinkingly scanning each crate and rack. Each one would have that unassuming black oval device on her head, poking shallowly through the silver swimcap she wore. The implants controlled every thought the slaves were still allowed to have. They might not even be left enough awareness to know what they were looking for—just the blank imperative to look, and to be triggered into the appropriate behavior by seeing damage, spoilage, or an unplanned object.

Just then, what Tanya was trying to do finally become real for her. She nearly pissed herself.

After watching the deliveries, she’d chosen this type of box because it could still look factory-sealed even after being closed from inside. But even then Tanya had been thinking like a free woman, projecting that much onto the mind controllers who ran this place. A free mind would want shortcuts, a way to clear a category of boxes with a logical rule, without the tedium having to look in each one. Especially any that looked sealed.

The women outside could no longer care about tedium, and would count the sand on a beach if the right voice told them to.

But their programmers seemed disinclined to wait, either. No one tried to unseal her box.

Tanya twitched at a voice. It was female but anticlimactically soft and affectless. She shivered again. She’d thought they’d report through their implants, or just wait passively while the controllers remotely downloaded the results from their minds. But maybe the implants only networked inside the Hive.

The box was feeling smaller and darker all the time, as Tanya faced how much she didn’t know about this place. Hadn’t imagined she’d need to know.

She curled up on the food packets and let herself think of Ricki, praying again that she wasn’t already out of time. They wouldn’t wait forever before they turned her sister into another silent, obedient robot like the ones outside. Coming here with this sketchy preparation might be stupid, but preparing well and getting here too late would be unforgivable.

The cart’s motor whined and it lurched into motion. Tanya welcomed the distraction, trying to reckon where they were going in here. The sound hollowed as the cart, and what sounded like others with the rest of the shipment, rolled into a freight elevator. It took them a disconcerting way down, and in the dark of her box Tanya had a mouse’s-gut realization of how deep she was venturing, in all senses.

When they rolled out she tried to make out other sounds, tingling unpleasantly with knowing they were Hive sounds. But the cart rode smoothly and the motor’s sustained drone blotted out any details. She didn’t hear any announcements or other communication.

Of course not. With a direct line into each slave’s cortex, the slavers didn’t need loudspeakers to control them. Tanya rode out the chill from that cheerful image.

It was like being on a hospital gurney, feeling the gentle turns without knowing which would be the last one—except there was no view of ceiling lights or a kindly orderly to keep her calm. The cart stopped twice and started again. Once she started to panic, when out of nowhere her mind decided to wonder if the Hive irradiated new supplies or did something else like that for security.

But as before the cart moved on, and presently she heard the slaves getting the boxes off. There was something poignant—and awful—about how normal the women sounded, grunting and panting as they wrestled the cargo onto the floor. Tanya waited, dreading the off-chance of being put in a pile with other boxes trapping her under the lid or having to leap to the ground from near the ceiling. But either the slaves could read DO NOT STACK or they’d been programmed not to.

The carts whined away, and she heard doors close. There was no sound of anyone else, room staff or someone from the load crew left behind to do inventory, but she waited anyway.

She’d gotten into the Hive.

Tanya counted out two more minutes, largely just to control her need to get the hell out. She made herself imagine a semicircle of coldly-staring slaves, waiting around the box with no need for patience—just so if they were, she wouldn’t embarrass herself by screaming. Taking a deep breath, she eased the container open and peeked out.

She was alone.

The room was about half-full of neatly arranged containers. The lights were dim but she could make out some trademarks, and Tanya wondered how those companies would react to what at least one of their ultimate customers was doing with their merchandise. Early on, she’d gotten over the paranoid worry that they did know and that it was that kind of huge conspiracy. But even the people in the little town here that kept the complex supplied knew very little about it.

Peering around, she didn’t see motion detectors, and climbed stiffly out of the box. She found a broader area of floor and stretched until she felt better, still listening but hearing nothing but the sound of the vents. Back at her box, she looked around for a better place to hide the dark carryall she’d brought with her. Leaving it here seemed easier, but the box might be unloaded or moved—she didn’t want it either found or lost to her. She saw some cabinets set away from the wall. Dropping the bag by them, she sighed. Bad enough that she’d have to leave the weapons and other things here. She’d have to put her own clothes with them.

Tanya slid the black fatigues off and stood there barefoot in the silver bikini the slaves wore—a narrow bandeau, and a minimal thong that would get her arrested anywhere but a bedroom. Pictures of slaves wearing them were everywhere on the website, and shopping online she’d been able to assemble something very close. She hoped.

I won’t be here long enough for an inspection. As she rummaged in the bag for the heeled calf boots and opera gloves, she admitted the rest. If I’m here that long I’ll be letting them fit me for real. She hated being this exposed—god, in that thong she’d literally be ass-out—and it really made her feel like a sex object, but she had to avoid attracting attention. One more erotic drone wouldn’t stand out. She hoped.

The boots were supple and tight, and she’d have liked them if they weren’t this weird metallic silver. The gloves were a third try in her shopping: only this pair was thin enough that she could work in them.

She pulled off the watch cap and stroked her newly-shaven scalp consolingly. In the carryall, by the wigs she’d brought for both of them to wear when they escaped, she found the silver swimcap that completed the costume. That and the collar. Setting the swimcap down she collared herself quickly, without ceremony, hating how it felt. Even knowing it was a disguise.

Only now, looking at the oval hole she’d made in the cap, did Tanya raise her left hand and touch the thing on her head between her ear and temple. In the motel mirror this morning, the fake implant had looked like a leech battening on her head. She’d looked carefully at it before applying the theatrical adhesive. It looked simple enough—featureless black, other than circuitry under clear plastic at its center, beside the shallow input jack—as she’d had it made from closeups. It stood out slightly from her skull, and she fitted the swimcap carefully to fit around it before tightening the chin strap.

Even as a disguise it scared and disgusted her. For the others here in the Hive it was real, direct access to their minds, surgically implanted while they’d been helpless.

Tanya closed her eyes. Not for Ricki. Not this.

She looked around for some reflecting surface, to inspect herself before venturing out into the midst of them.

The storeroom door opened, and the lights brightened.

2.

Tanya tensed, caught in the open. She didn’t dare move if the disguise were to work—nowhere on the websites had she seen slaves hurry—but she realized that there was no question of explaining her presence. Slavewomen here didn’t explain. They just stood still while their implants were interrogated.

She’d brought a gun, and the temptation to lunge for the carryall was almost a physical thing. She resisted it and held still.

The newcomer was a lone woman in a silver bikini, slender and pretty. She came to attention as the door slid shut behind her and stared forward. Tanya gasped audibly to see her first slave in the flesh, but the woman didn’t react to her at all. She closed her eyes for a moment as if recalling why she’d come, then opened them and left-faced into a perfect turn. Stalking down a row of plastic cylinders stacked five high, her legs were coltish over the silver boots. She ignored Tanya entirely, and Tanya was starting to think the woman didn’t even know she was here.

She looks like a showgirl from Mars.

Which means so do I.

But Tanya couldn’t smile. As the woman paced robotically past the containers, her ass swaying between her stiffly-lowered gloves, she seemed deeply vulnerable in her trance. Tanya could have been pointing a machinegun at her middle, or running at her with a knife. Her implant didn’t care. It left her helpless.

Fascinated and repelled, Tanya walked after her, trying to resist the lure of feeling safe with this sleepwalker. The woman stopped and pivoted again, showing her left profile as she faced the cylinders. It turned the implant toward Tanya, and the thing seemed to look at her.

Something else bothered her more: the slave’s collar was linked to her swimcap by a thin, short wire, and the collar was blinking.

She hadn’t noticed it in the brighter light, but the slave had inadvertently displayed herself against a darkened end of the storeroom. It hadn’t shown up on the visuals from the websites, and for a grey moment Tanya felt truly trapped. She’d had no idea about this feature. But if she went out there now, her chances of being spotted would go way up, even if she were only taken aside to “fix” her malfunctioning collar. There was no spare for this, no improvisation. Not now.

Tanya looked at the woman, and found herself walking toward her.

Close enough to touch, the slave still didn’t respond to her presence. She seemed to wake from her deeper daze then, but only to raise her sightline along the cylinders before her, perhaps memorizing their labels for whomever had sent her here.

She spun again, toward the door, and was almost face to face with Tanya. The slavewoman’s empty eyes bored straight through her.

The woman held still, aware of her as an obstacle but with no reason to interact with her. Tanya remembered playing this game once with an automated vacuum cleaner, blocking its path and watching it try to figure out how to proceed with its program.

She flushed. This woman had been reduced to having less wit or will than an appliance. Forcing away an impulse to weep, Tanya stepped aside. The slave immediately moved to pass her.

Tanya took her arm. The slave froze and Tanya’s instincts flicked on, but there was no attack. The woman blinked and subsided into attention. Tanya’s touch had overridden her programming, or else slaves were programmed to let others divert them.

The woman’s head swiveled slowly toward her. The impassive face and dead eyes might otherwise have seemed menacing, but now they just seemed to appeal to her quietly for new commands. The slave would do as she was told, but she needed to be told.

There was that, at least, in her eyes as they focused on Tanya. The brainwashing had replaced the slave’s other desires with a deep need to obey. It was what she lived for, now.

“I need your collar,” Tanya told her softly, apologetically, winning no reaction. Maybe there was some sort of password her mind needed before it accepted a command, to ensure she could submit only to her owners.

Maybe she only took orders through the thing in her head.

Shaking a little, Tanya reached for the collar. The slave stood still, and her skin was warm and yielding as Tanya pressed against her. Seeing her own silver-gloved hands on the other’s pale skin made Tanya’s head spin, but she pressed on and unplugged the swimcap wire from the collar.

It stopped blinking.

“Shit!”

The slave didn’t react to either thing.

The websites hadn’t mentioned this, either. Tanya knew there were other drones programmed for defense, and wondered if the room was about to fill with them. She waited, but she heard no alarms to suggest she’d tripped something the complex could detect. Not wanting to trust her relief at the silence, she considered.

Alarms told a thinking workforce there was an emergency for them to deal with, even if only by running like hell or keeping their heads down. But the hypnotists who ran this place would just need to signal their slaves’ implants. They’d only activate the women who could be useful, and leave the rest toiling on, unaware.

So, no alarms. Tanya made herself shrug and smile reassuringly at the slave, who stared back at her, still passive. Gently, she undid the chin strap and reached to lift the cap from the woman’s head. She felt thickness over the ears, and moved the stretchy silver outward, seeing the opening pull away from the implant. The woman stood and let herself be uncapped, and Tanya stroked her head, warm and smooth. She looked so much more fragile now, the collar making her a dazed and pale Egyptian princess.

Guilt straddled Tanya then like a rider leaping into the saddle. She was here to rescue Ricki, and could do nothing for this mindfucked woman but be kind while she stripped her. She forced herself to look away from the blankly beseeching eyes and examined the cap. It had headphones, so thin and flexible they seemed like padding. She wondered why they’d need them, if they could control this woman and the others through their implants.

Redundancy? Why hadn’t the website mentioned it? Were there people here the slaves needed to hear from who weren’t plugged into the system?

She set the cap on a nearby container. “It’s all right, relax, it’s all right,” she started repeating, and reached for the collar.

The slave threw up her hands and tried to swat Tanya’s away. Her expression didn’t change and she didn’t speak. Tanya nearly leaped back in surprise, but her instincts took over and she closed with the slave, feeling the woman’s muscles thrash.

They didn’t condition their slaves to fight, anyway. Tanya subdued her almost at once, and slowly tried to ease away. Then the slave jerked against her, this time leaning toward the door. Tanya seized her but the slave’s own lack of skill overbalanced her. She spun away from Tanya—right into the hard metal of one of the cylinders.

But Tanya had heard a higher-pitched crack over the dull ring of head against metal, and moaned as she held the woman, letting her slump to the floor. She’d rammed into the cylinder with her implant.

Tanya wanted to scream, and bowed down for a moment, keeping it in. She didn’t want to think about what she’d just done. The woman’s eyes were closed and Tanya was miserably grateful she wasn’t in convulsions, after the impact must have stabbed into her brain. She’d looked achingly helpless before, but now, sprawled there with that thing on her head . . .

It would be worse if her eyes were open.

But as Tanya was still getting used to having killed someone, for the first time in her life, she saw the slave’s breasts moving under her bandeau, and the pulse on her throat, seeming elegantly longer below the baldness.

Not dead. The implant was in the cerebrum, to enslave higher brain centers like judgment and middle ones like emotion, not lower down where the older autonomic functions like breathing were run, where damage meant death. The impact might have turned this woman into a vegetable, but it hadn’t killed her.

As if that were better.

Tanya felt unreal as she reached down to touch the implant, which seemed intact on the outside.

It slid a bit to the side, and she fell back away from the body, horrified again. Oh god. She’d snapped it off.

There probably was an alarm on now. Maybe no more than a little telltale on a large panel of them, one small light among many to say that one nameless drone had gone offline. Maybe monitored only by another drone obeying her own implant, at a job too routine for a controller to bother with. The slave would see the display change, no longer able to feel the slightest worry for what might have happened to her fellow slave—only the compulsion to report the anomaly.

They’d come here, and look, and wonder why the slave had fallen this way. Maybe they’d search. They’d be on their way now.

Tanya still felt worse about the slave than her own danger, and fought the guilt that made her want to stay. But she had to arrange things to look like an accident and hide and figure out what else to do and she had to do it right now.

She touched the woman, silently apologizing as useless tears rose, and lifted the wounded head.

The implant slid off and tumbled down into the hollow of the woman’s neck.

Where it had been was an oval of angry pink skin, whole and unpenetrated, where the impact had torn the adhesive. The implant was as false as her own.

3.

Tanya stared at it. She’d blown a fuse by now and had no reaction left.

She was tempted to turn around and look for cameras, a TV crew in scruffy clothes with smiles and a release form to sign. Being completely freaked out didn’t help, but this was not making any sense.

The websites had said, consistently and in detail, that the women here were mind-controlled through the implants. They were drugged and deeply hypnotized and often trained to obey that way for sustained periods, but sooner or later they were put to sleep to lie still while the psychosurgeons violated their brain tissue. Wills and identities destroyed, they woke to a new life of perfect, irreversible obedience.

But not something glued to the outside of their heads—

Tanya considered a new possibility. This could be a fake exactly like hers, for the same reason. The woman she’d just cleverly knocked cold could be another infiltrator like her, maybe someone official. The kind of law enforcer Detective Jacer couldn’t dream of being. And an unconscious ally was still an ally, even if she were pissed when she came to, and cursed Tanya out six ways from fuck-you for her amateurish interference.

No. No. Too good to be true. She knelt and looked at the unconscious woman and the pretend-implant. Coincidences like that didn’t happen. Of all the storerooms in the complex, a government spy chose this one just as Tanya was finishing her disguise?

She looked at the woman’s willowy physique, and remembered how awkwardly she’d fought for the brief time she’d fought at all. Tanya was no bully, and she’d never used her fight training against anyone who didn’t at least match her. This woman’s complete lack of skill had almost disoriented her.

If she were some kind of agent, she should have been able to hold her own—if not leave Tanya lying quietly on the floor after wiping it with her. Unless the brainwashing had erased her skill . . . but that required her actually to have been brainwashed, leaving the false implant unexplained.

The odds of another complete amateur like Tanya, but desperate enough to come here without even knowing how to fight, weren’t even worth thinking about.

Tanya tasted hope then, so clear and unfamiliar that she didn’t even know what gave it to her.

OK. Occam’s Razor sliced it neatly. She was the only non-slave here. The sleeping woman was the slave she appeared to be, even though the device that supposedly made her that way was a stick-on fake.

OK. The sociopaths who controlled these woman didn’t do it by hacking into their brains. It was something more conventional, though Tanya’s blood ran cold to imagine how intense it must be. Drug-induced hypnosis, sensory and sleep deprivation, depatterning. But instead of just relying on that to imprint their victims by itself, they convinced their sleepy, confused, suggestible prey that they had received brain implants, and that their minds were under irresistible control.

Pressed into the softened thoughts of someone they’d broken, this would become bedrock truth. When the victim completed her conversion, she’d really believe a device in her brain controlled her every thought, and that she had no will. They’d keep her hypnotized, and probably drugged, and surround her with others like her. They’d reinforce each other just by being in each other’s sight, objectified into these submissive fetish dolls, tranced and compliant.

The women would see each other, and believe. And be.

Tanya hugged herself and looked down at the slave. This woman, so docile now, might have fought her brainwashers fiercely, if they’d ever let her awaken to what was being done to her. But they’d gotten her anyway.

If they found Tanya, they’d get her, too, and they wouldn’t need brain surgery. After the first injection, or the first eternity in a sensory-dep tank, she wouldn’t be thinking about “conventional” techniques. She’d be thinking of how to please them, or to become what they wanted her to be. She’d welcome the spiral they showed her, just for the blessed stimulation. She’d beg for a voice in her ears and never feel the drug opening her wider to it. She’d be ready to stop thinking at all, when they told her to. There’d be no fighting it.

But. But, she told herself, ignoring the terror that rattled her bones, this is a good thing. It meant her sister had a chance. They might still be conditioning her, so she still might be trying to fight it, even if she barely knew it now. It would be a long process, not an hour or so of psychosurgery to snuff out Ricki’s soul and leave her a robot, so there was a chance Tanya could find her and get her away from it before it enslaved her more deeply.

And even if they’d already brainwashed Ricki into believing the thing on her head was their passkey to her mind, it wasn’t too late. Tanya might not be able to snap her out of it herself, not conditioning that thorough, but after she got them out of here it would be something Ricki could recover from, even if it took years of therapy to remind her what free will was.

After Tanya got them out.

Assuming she didn’t fuck up or just lose her luck, and end up as another staring fetish doll like this one on the floor, ready to obey anyone at all. They might put her to work next to Ricki, a joke neither of them would be able to comprehend.

Enough.

Tanya made herself still and willed herself calm. There was no way out but winning, now. Her job was to figure out how.

She reached down, setting the fallen “implant” on the floor by the slave’s chin. She unclasped the collar and hefted it. Not uncomfortably heavy, but enough for batteries at least. She laid it across her thighs and undid her own collar, then replaced it with theirs, feeling as unclean as before. It distracted her, heavier than the one she’d had made, and warm from the other woman’s flesh, but it was oddly comfortable.

Slipping her swimcap off, she stood to take the slavewoman’s from where she’d put it before all the excitement. She wasn’t sure if its residual warmth were real or imagined, but it felt smoother on her head, like the collar more comfortable than the facsimile she’d brought. The phones fit snugly over her ears, even when she’d tightened the chin strap. She tapped the old collar against the metal cylinder, and they didn’t seem to muffle the sound. Taking a breath, she reached back to feel for the wire, and plug it into the collar.

Her ears filled with noise.

Tanya moved to pull the cap off, but it was more at the surprise than the volume. She lowered her hands until she saw herself silhouetted by the ceiling lights against a light-sided container. Lithe and sexy in naked outline, tensed against attack but slowly lowering her hands. Her shadow looked like it’d tried to resist something but failed, and was slowly submitting. Something from the earphones that had gotten into her head too quickly, telling her to stop fighting now and obey.

Tanya jerked out of the pose. That made it worse: she seemed to be snapping to attention.

Whatever. She turned away. Seeing herself in the slave role disturbed her more than she wanted to admit. She looked down at the unconscious slave, and listened more closely to the phones’ output.

No soothing lullabies or harsh commands, just some background static and hums and a system hiss that she’d probably stop noticing in a while.

Then she heard “All slaves in Obedience Group Sigma, attend.” The voice was female, calm, utterly assured. Tanya tried to guess whether the woman was a controller, or another slave whose voice they used, but she couldn’t tell.

“Report at once to Mass Hypnosis Chamber Three for reinforcement. you must obey.”

Tanya remembered the creepy visual of a mass hypnosis session. Tiers of wide-eyed women with their implants jacked to the headrests of their chairs, staring at an unseen movie screen. Each slave had looked like someone slipping under a vampire’s spell, horrified and horribly aroused at once but already surrendering. The huge spiral the screen was hypnotizing them with swept reflected across their faces, caressingly, as if enjoying their helpless attention.

She hissed at herself and willed the image away, thinking about the message instead. She knew about Obedience Groups, but already she’d checked the costume and collar, and they had no symbols, Greek or otherwise. Just an ID number, g039. Maybe her captive here was a Sigma girl, already late for her next mindwipe. Would they bother to take attendance, with an audience that literally couldn’t think about staying away?

Nothing to do about that, either. She kept listening, hearing only more soft announcements. Mostly the signal was silent, with no mysterious siren songs or compelling tones.

Tanya told herself she’d have time, if the phones started transmitting anything more hypnotic, to reach up and get them off her head. She wouldn’t be like that silhouette girl, stunned into obedience before she could fight.

She walked to where she’d hidden the carryall, getting used to hearing the bootheels’ click through the quiet hum of the earphones. Taking out the slim rolled kit, she spread it out and considered the array of field-treatment syringes, the narrowest she could find. In this excuse for a costume, it was all she’d have room to carry.

Doses of stimulant, if she felt herself succumbing to trance or encountered drugs or gas. She also thought of using them to try waking Ricki if she weren’t too deep yet. But there were tranquilizers, too. Tanya didn’t relish the thought of actually having to subdue her sister to get her out, but if they’d converted Ricki, they’d likely programmed her to resist being freed. There’d be no other way for Tanya to control her.

The modest-looking pair of poisoned needles, she’d debated bringing. She wasn’t sure she’d have what it took to die before letting them bend her mind, especially if it meant leaving her sister to spend the rest of her life in their collar. She couldn’t even admit to herself why she’d brought two, though she knew. Maybe they’d frighten her into inspiration to avoid using them.

Sliding the syringes into her gloves and boottops, she stepped back to the slave and knelt by her. Selecting one of the slow tranqs, she injected the woman’s buttcheek, round and firm on display under the thong. Tanya lifted the slave and bore her to the food box she’d come here in. She set the woman down in her erstwhile nest, with the gentleness she couldn’t give her sister yet.

Pillowing the woman’s head with her own useless swimcap and collar, Tanya put the detached implant in her hands. She wanted to leave a flashlight there too, but hadn’t one to spare. Waking alone in darkness, without even a control voice, would scare her—if they’d left anything in her to scare.

Checking the room again, Tanya went to the door, but stopped, perilously tempted to hesitate. It scared her. She wanted to run away, not venture unarmed into this madhouse to try passing as just another brainwashed showgirl from Mars.

But she remembered a thunderstorm when she was small. Ricki, smaller and terrified, had barely sobbed out a plea before burrowing under the covers next to her. Once there, Ricki’d relaxed and slept like the baby she gamely insisted she wasn’t anymore. With her big sister warm beside her, Ricki feared no thunderbolt.

Tanya took another deep breath, and stepped out into the Hive.

4.

Of all things, she felt shy.

She knew no one noticed or threatened her, no black-clad security squad waited to jump her. If the women clipping rhythmically past even noticed her in their trances, she was just another slave in silver leaving a doorway. Obeying some order no one had told them to think about. Forgotten a few cadenced strides later.

Momentarily reassured, Tanya’s mind helpfully remembered the only time she’d actually worn a thong in public. That day at the beach it had felt sexy and vulnerable to have her asscheeks kissed by the breeze, with the sweet irritation of the string that bridled her crotch. She quivered now, praying not to juice, wondering how these women pranced around without getting wet.

Tanya came to attention and focused. This was no fucking day at the beach.

It was worse when she started walking. It hadn’t felt like this in the storeroom. Fuck. Focus.

Situational awareness. Right. The corridor.

It was louder than before. The alluring voice continued its announcements and calm commands, and Tanya realized the loudness was the headphones themselves. All the slavewomen were hearing it. The mind controllers left their complex quiet, with all the sound in their slaves’ ears.

The women in silver seemed more robotic as a group, legs in lockstep, eyes staring forward. At corridor junctions some pivoted at perfect right angles to turn. None spoke to or even seemed aware of each other. None of them reacted to Tanya, either, which reassured her.

She’d seen them on the website, but to walk in step with them . . .

Tanya was disturbingly aware of how sexually she was responding.

The opaque storeroom had been a lucky exception. Much of the complex was open to view, clear-walled rooms with identical girls in silver bikinis busy at their tasks. A row of women stopped work, stared unseeingly past what they’d been doing, then stood and moved aside. A line of equally blank slaves behind them slid into their places and began to work. The first ones about-faced and marched off, without even an order given.

“slave k782, attend.”

“Cease current activity and await command. you will now undergo nonroutine thought adjustment.” The controller’s voice was husky and persuasive, almost as if she envied slave k782. “you will be altered in place. your shift controller has been reinstructed and will not be aware that anything is happening to you. When you are transferred to listening channel red, the obedience tone will make you stop thinking. you must obey.”

She wondered if k782 was at a workstation, hands settling to her thighs, no longer productive. Some other slavewoman nearby, in an identical costume but with slightly more focused eyes, would be staring into space, as her reinstruction told her there was nothing to notice, not to worry, not to interfere.

Tanya thought of being the one singled out to have her thoughts adjusted. Then she was afraid to keep walking, because it was starting to lull and excite her at once.

She’d never thought of herself as bisexual, let alone lesbian, but she couldn’t deny that it was turning her on. Surrounded by beautiful women on display in these absurd erotic uniforms . . .

No. It wasn’t just that. It was how controlled they were. Obedient, doing nothing but what they were told. Thinking nothing but what they were told.

It horrified Tanya to respond that way, but she was helpless against it. It hummed in her clit with every booted step she took in step with the slavewomen, in the midst of them, looking like them, acting like them. Almost one of them.

If I let this get to me I will be one of them.

Snap the fuck out of it, Tanya!

She was trying to decide if she could make it back to the storeroom to rest (or masturbate and take the edge off oh god no no!) or if she dared spare that time. She had to stay out here and keep looking. She couldn’t lose her chance to get Ricki out of the Hive just because she’d picked an awful time to get horny.

“All even-numbered slaves in Obedience Group Omicron, attend.”

Certain women in the corridor halted and came to attention. Others smoothly walked past them.

“It is your sleeptime now. Report at once to Dormancy Zone B. It is your sleeptime. you must obey.”

The motionless slaves moved now, all toward the same cross-corridor. None of them looked sleepy now, but Tanya knew they would.

She was running out of corridor. She essayed a snap-turn and felt proud as she made it cleanly, stalking down a new tunnel past more of the slaves, getting her bearings.

A moment later she lost them, mesmerized by a cadence of long smooth thighs scissoring by. She forced her eyes up from the sinuous machine they made, and lost herself in the diverse, identically blank faces.

It hit her, suddenly—they’re all hypnotized. She’d known that, seen it, but she hadn’t really grasped it. She was the only one awake. All of them here knew only what the headphones told them, and what they were programmed to think. She shivered, seeing all the pretty bodies displayed in silver, all the empty eyes.

So helpless. So objectified. So obedient.

So . . . erotic.

Tanya almost panicked—at the thought, and at the barely-suppressed impulse to scream at herself for thinking it. She kept herself under control, marching in rhythm like all the other hypnotized slaves, doing nothing to stand out.

She almost moaned aloud when she saw a chance to stop walking. This new hallway was larger, with darkened alcoves where some slaves stood like a set of identical dolls, out of traffic, facing inward. As Tanya drew near she saw one or two women pivot abruptly and stride into the alcove to join them, coming to attention and gazing forward. Two women already there about-faced and strutted out. They seemed programmed to keep an open formation so even slaves at the front could leave.

Tanya pleased herself with another neat turn into the alcove. She slipped among the straight backs, silver heads and taut asses to find her own vacant spot and see what they were looking at.

It was a bank of flickering monitors taller than they were, like arrival and departure screens at a very kinky airport. The slavewomen watching stood stiffly, hands flat by their sides. For the first time, in the dimness here out of the corridors’ light, Tanya realized their collars were all blinking at the exact . . . same . . . rate . . .

She risked closing her eyes, and then ignored the blinking when she opened them. There was more to bewitch her gaze, anyway.

The screens’ flickering danced across the motionless bodies, lines and colors reflecting from metallic fetishwear and bare skin—and wide, accepting eyes. Tanya breathed faster as the lights pulsing across their bodies emphasized how still the women were. Then, she could no longer look away from what riveted them.

At first she was puzzled. The displays were different, showing complex lists and graphs, flashing data rapidly. Interest and fear rose in her as she wondered if the mind control had other layers the Team didn’t know about, making its victims into faster data handlers even as it robbed them of the will to choose. She wondered if the women around her were absorbing this chaotic input that was just making her dizzy.

Distantly she heard a voice. The headphones in her swimcap were still telling her things, but the flashing displays enthralled her too much to listen. Watching and being absorbed felt too good to question why.

It started to make sense. Words filtered through, the beginnings of a pattern. All Tanya needed was just to stand like the other slaves and stare deeper. Shapes emerged, still momentary, strobing, rewarding her concentration with meaning. She just had to stay and stare.

Yes. She would stay. As her body stiffened, her mind relaxed, receptive to the pattern that grew clearer and clearer. Tanya let herself open to the input. The displays had already trained her to recognize and absorb complete words, and she was half-awake enough to enjoy being such an apt pupil.

She focused on the words, so much clearer than her own fuzzy thoughts.

Obedient. Tanya tensed almost painfully. Yes. She was obedient. She would obey.

Hypnotized. She almost smiled at herself, but the obedience held her too tightly. Yes. She’d let herself be caught and now she was submitting. She was being hypnotized and she would not resist.

Oh.

No . . .

Yes . . .

She could see it, now that it was a net around her mind. The flickering data was just to hold her attention, and slip her the simpler subliminals while the inner rhythms truly put her to sleep. She’d been soothed into letting it train her, and now she was compliant. It told her she wanted to cooperate as it took over her will, and she did. Nothing mattered but letting herself be hypnotized more deeply, so that when her new controllers came for her, they . . . they . . .

The blankness dazed her. She wanted to beg it to finish telling her how to sink deeper, how she could obey. But the flashes no longer made sense. Tanya was sleepy and passive, and ready to stand there forever, mesmerized by the pretty lights and waiting to be told what to think, but the need for command ached in her.

Slowly her thoughts collected. She realized these screens were for slaves already conditioned. Her mind hadn’t already been softened and reshaped to receive the deeper messages that strobed out at them. At first that made her sad, as if a hand had stopped stroking her pussy and pulled away. She envied the obedient women around her, letting the commands fuck their minds before releasing them to obey.

Then, gradually, she was clear enough on how close she’d come to being one of them to need, at last, to scream. She held it in.

The images changed. Every screen showed the same thing now—instead of yellowish text on black and multicolored pictures, there was a swirl of soothing blue, pulsing and curving, flowing hypnotically into itself.

The change from strobing chaos to this hit Tanya like a drug. She submitted ecstatically to the peace and blankness.

Tanya smiled again. She wasn’t fully programmed for this, but it had weakened her enough that she could no longer resist it. She didn’t need the full conditioning.

All she had to do was stand here, gazing stupidly at these pretty pretty pictures, until someone noticed a slave who never turned away to a new task. They would come and realize she was an intruder and she would just stare and obey. They could drain her of anything they wanted to know, and then stop her knowing anything but obedience ever again.

All Tanya had to do was stand still and be hypnotized.

If she ever saw Ricki again they’d never know each other, but all that mattered was that the owners had two obedient slavegirls to do what they wanted.

The flickering resumed, dazzling Tanya’s dull mind like lightning. Commands thundered in her head, incomprehensible but still igniting a need to obey.

Thunder . . .

Ricki against her side, asleep amid the storm. So small and trusting. Warm breath on her arm.

With what felt like the last of her will, Tanya shut her eyes. She found a bit more strength to turn on her heel, opening them. Seeing the other slaves, helplessly still as the light played over their rigid bodies, almost put her under again. But she kept walking, mechanically as any of them, out of the alcove.

Trying to stay awake, Tanya just kept walking.

5.

Through one long window she checked out a bank of computer workstations and nearly broke step. Each woman sat pertly erect and stared at her screen, blank eyes reflecting the flicker of data, typing now and then. A coiled cord ran from a jack at each workstation to each woman’s implant. In the glance Tanya let herself have, it looked as if the cord were feeding the data to blink through their eyes.

As she wondered what they were working on, she suddenly realized they didn’t know, either. They were mindless interfaces, transferring data they probably weren’t even fully aware of.

“All series 600 slaves in Obedience Group Epsilon, attend.

“you are awakening from your sleeptime. Fully refreshed and blank now. Dreamfeed has filled your minds with obedience. Now you are awake and alert and eager to begin mindlessly carrying out your tasks. Listen to the stimulation tones. Enjoy them and wait for the one that imprinted you. When you hear it, you will remember only the task you are programmed with, and the arousing need to perform it. you must obey.”

Tanya snapped into another turn, finding herself behind the trim legs and ass and back of an ebony-skinned woman walking with the same robotic purpose as every other one. Her fluid march was entrancing, and Tanya wondered how that bubble butt would feel against her lips. It twitched enticingly now and it would thrash against her face as her tongue sought within it for the rosebud.

God. She was salivating for a woman’s ass. What the hell was this place doing to her?

The woman pivoted to head down another corridor. Tanya shivered with relief—and disappointment.

She made herself think something else. At least she knows where she’s going. Sort of. Lame, but less dangerous than pulsating asscheeks—

Stop.

Tanya knew she couldn’t just call up a personnel listing and find out where they were keeping Ricki, even if she knew how to get into it. And after getting herself hypnotized in the display alcove, she wasn’t thrilled with the idea of peering at another screen.

But the website said the slaves’ former identities were kept separately anyway. Anything she found out here would refer to Ricki by her slave number, whatever that was. But this part of the complex was where newer slaves were kept until they were brainsmoothed enough to be assigned other tasks. As far as Tanya knew, it was a small enough part of the complex that she’d be able to cover it quickly, and find Ricki sooner. It sucked as a plan, but she had no other one.

If they’d already finished converting Ricki, of course, she wouldn’t be here anymore. She wouldn’t be Ricki, anymore.

No. No!

Another corridor. Slaves at long tables packing something into plastic bins, perfectly synchronized. At one end, a slave stood at attention, looking down the row of workers, her implant linked by a wire to a wall socket. your shift controller has been reprogrammed . . .

It really was like a hive. Tanya’s costume worked like a pheromone, disguising her as One Of Them. They wouldn’t attack her if she’d been wearing her combat outfit, but it still felt like they’d all accepted her now as part of the swarm. And these were workers, stingless and unthreatening, consumed by their programmed tasks and utterly passive. It felt so strange to see how still stood the ones between orders, with nothing in their minds to obey.

Tanya found herself fighting something deeply hypnotic in how they moved, without the slightest trace of will to veer them from the outside purpose that controlled them. It sucked at her, unexpectedly. A need to join this hive, to surrender and truly become the shining naked robot she was passing as.

For a dizzy second, walking in time with the twenty identical women she could see, it was hard to fight it. Hard to want to.

The alcove sucked at her, tempting her to return and stare again. This time she could stand and submit until they did find her, and brainwash her into a shining naked robot without name or will . . .

But Ricki was in here, somewhere—close—and they’d already hypnotized Ricki out of wanting to fight it. They could tell Ricki what she wanted, now, and she’d believe them. It might not be controllers doing it to her sister at all, but just other wide-eyed slaves in silver bikinis, even more brainwashed than Ricki was but programmed to enslave her.

Tanya could resist. That wasn’t what Ricki was destined to become.

Then she saw the warriors. Two of them, standing rigid in a setback shallower than the hypnosis alcove, eyes invisible behind wraparound shades. Their costumes were as brief as her own, but all in black, wet-look latex. One was slender, wiry, and the other fuller-bodied. The latex cupped and offered her cleavage like sin, and Tanya had to drag her glance away before she betrayed herself with a turn of her head.

They didn’t move or react to the streams of staring workers who passed, but they looked even more insectile. The gleaming black shades saw everything and nothing. Tanya tensed, waiting for them to react to her as an outsider. Around their slim bare waists were dark belts that no worker wore, and she spared some envy, without recognizing most of the weapons on them. They might blur into action and stun her, or even kill her . . .

But as she walked past them at a brisk slave pace, their gloved hands stayed stiffly bladed by their thighs, not moving to a weapon. Maybe the hive kept its fighting slaves in a deeper trance, to activate them only in emergency. It just kept them in places like this, dreaming of action or of nothing at all, hypnotized out of noticing what happened in front of them or anything else that might wake them.

“All series 200 slaves in Obedience Group Zeta, attend.

“Pause current activity and set autoprompt. When prompted, stop thinking immediately and report in decads to Neurocenter Annex for brain implant reinitialization. your shift controllers have already been uploaded and will not interfere. you must obey.”

She saw a woman spin and begin walking back the way she’d come. Why they hadn’t just programmed her to go to this Neurocenter Annex first? Then Tanya knew that the slaves around her didn’t track time. They didn’t have that much control. They just went where they were sent and did what their programming told them until new orders changed them. It must be so restful, just to trust the controllers and let them think for her and—

Tanya shivered. This panoramic mindfuck was getting to her. She shook it off and kept walking. She didn’t let herself think of how far gone her baby sister could be, if she was starting to slip just by walking around. It must be what the displays’ hypnosis had done to her. She was weaker now, and more susceptible than when she’d broken in. The threat to any chance of rescuing Ricki frightened her.

The way that wanting to be taken licked at her, nevertheless, scared the shit out of her.

Another corner, the sharp turn feeling crisp and comfortable. It was easy to slide into the correct slave stride, keeping pace, conforming with the whole. Tanya admitted to herself that here, she was the anomaly.

“All slaves in Obedience Group Psi, attend.” The voice was like a caress.

“At workshift end, report in decads to Neurocenter for reformatting. your shift controllers have been imprinted with decad assignments and will control you. you must obey.”

She didn’t want to be an anomaly . . .

Tanya took a deep breath and fought against the sudden wistful desire to be part of an Obedience Group so she, too, could receive commands from the lovely voice and obey them. She didn’t even break stride, and she didn’t know if that were a good thing or not.

As her head cleared, she tried to rouse herself with the cold knowledge that this place was thoroughly designed for slaves. It was what had saved her before: the place wasn’t set up to brainwash outsiders like her, just to keep the previously-enslaved—like Ricki—trapped in trance and send them deeper. It hadn’t been built to push her that extra few breaths too far, to the place where she was too turned on to resist.

By that little bit, Tanya had stayed free. It was no longer impossible to imagine wanting to submit to them, even knowing she’d been told to do it.

Maybe because she’d been told to.

She had to find the section where recently-captured victims like Ricki were processed, before this place softened her mind too much and caught her. She had to resist even thinking of things like that. Because now her clit was awake, and it whispered endlessly to the rest of her body about the degrading, enticing heat of being accidentally brainwashed. Falling into dronehood without anyone even doing anything to her, just succumbing to . . . being . . . here . . .

Stop. Please. Stop.

Tanya stopped and joined a line of slaves waiting motionless in an elevator bay. When a car opened and others stalked off, they strode in, pivoting in sequence to face front. Tanya was at a brace between two other equally-stiff women, acutely conscious of the smell of perfume and arousal that filled the little space.

The car stopped and the doors opened, and Tanya followed the women who disembarked, swinging randomly to the right with one of them to explore this new level.

Then her peripheral glance through the window showed her a room where nude women lay on inclined tables, motionless but bound. They seemed to be asleep. Slaves in silver moved among them, adjusting visors over their heads and intravenous drips beside them.

Slave processing.

She made a sharp right turn and looked at another side of that section, seeing women on gurneys. On their smoothly depilated skulls, “implants” were already jacked to remote units clipped to the gurneys. The women stared upward.

To the slaves in their trance, these women had just left brain surgery, another layer of proof to make them believe in their own implants.

Tanya walked on, turned another way, and worked her way back.

A door opened and another gurney was rolled in with another newly-implanted woman staring dully at the ceiling. The slavewoman pushing it moved it precisely in line with the others and then marched to the shift controller jacked to the wall. She moved into the controller’s gaze and spoke.

The controller told her something while seeming to look right through her. She left-faced and walked stiffly to a table near an inner wall. She slid open a panel in the wall to reveal shelves and began to move stacks of what looked like folded gurney sheets from the tabletop to the shelves. She kept her feet together and just rotated her upper body from table to shelves and back again, smoothly adjusting for the slight shifts to take each new stack. Her movement was liquid, robotic, mesmerizing. As Tanya’s pace brought her past, she was able to see the slave clearly from the front.

The silver swimcap framed Ricki’s expressionless face like a nun’s habit.

Tanya forced her eyes away and walked again, too confused right now to know what to do yet.

They’d already fitted Ricki with an “implant”—it wasn’t real, but they had her suggestible enough to think it was. There was no sign of resistance or even real awareness in her big brown eyes.

Now that they controlled her baby sister, they’d made her help them convert more slaves.

6.

As soon as Tanya was past, the need to go back wrenched at her heart and she risked stopping in another hypnosis alcove a few meters down the hall. She kept her eyes averted from the pulsing screens even as they started to pull at her, and her thighs clenched with a treacherous desire to let herself be enraptured again.

Instead of letting the screens capture her, she looked at her nameless companions, bathed in the flashes and colors that eroded their minds. One slave in front of her whirled with now-familiar precision and stalked out while the others stayed spellbound, oblivious to her passing. Looking at the others seduced Tanya more insidiously than the screens’ direct hypnotic barrage. Like the slave she’d subdued in the storeroom, they looked defenseless, tricked into letting themselves be opened.

It was so arousing to think of obedient minds in those lovely bodies. Submissive in bed but ready to submit anywhere. She thought of her own body, offered in silver wrapping, obeying an enslaved mind.

So tempting to succumb to it and be one with them, one of them, all asleep together with open eyes and empty minds . . .

Tanya fought the longing again. Ricki’s open eyes were too freshly branded on her soul to let her slip under the spell, though she still didn’t let herself gaze at the screens. They’d shifted to the soothing blue swirl—she knew that from how it shone off their bodies, trying not to notice how it displayed their curves—and she tried to focus on the slave ahead of her to the left.

She told herself this woman’s jawline was different, unique, subtly her own under the identical silver swimcap. Firm and chiseled, as if the woman had been resolute before she’d faced the brainwashing and succumbed to something stronger than her will. Even if she no longer knew it, she was still an individual, and Tanya clung to that as she forced herself to keep thinking.

She had to go back. With no idea how long it would take to discover her or the slave she’d hidden, she couldn’t count on any time. Would they notice how soon a slave left this alcove?

It felt good to think. Tanya’s head was clear enough now even in this flickering grotto to wonder how closely the brainwashers monitored their somnambulistic workforce. They didn’t seem to be concerned with disobedience, so they wouldn’t really be looking for small irregularities in a slave’s behavior. Or tracking which depersonalized silver doll spun away to obey in which sequence.

Her focus woman pivoted and faced outward, large breasts firm in her bandeau, and paced away. Tanya decided it was her cue, and when a petite dark-skinned woman strode into that spot, Tanya about-faced and marched back to Ricki’s workplace.

Please let her still be there. Still a mindless brainwasher’s-helper . . .

She was. Tanya found a way to watch her now, for a few moments anyway. She’d noticed slaves pausing to observe instrument panels between some of the glass walls, like maintenance staff. She left-turned to face one next to the processing area’s window, and cut her eyes left.

Inside, Ricki had finished stowing the sheets and was now sorting plastic IV bags on another table. The managerial slave, the shift controller, was a few steps away, but she didn’t seem to be supervising Ricki, or even to see her. She just stared into space with the wire plugged into the black hoax on her head.

From this angle Tanya could see Ricki’s implant as her head moved over her work. Tanya tried to formulate a plan, almost relieved that she had to rush, with little time for subtlety. But haste could breed mistakes, and leave them both with empty eyes and little plastic leeches on their heads.

She could feel the syringes snug under her silver. There was only the controller in there with Ricki. Could she really see or react to anything in the room? Tanya debated whether to tranq her first and then deal with her sister, or else to try pretending to be sent in to summon Ricki to a new task. She might be able to subdue two alerted slaves at once, but it would be easier to control them singly, and less likely to attract attention from the corridor.

Whatever “attention” meant, here, among the mass-hypnotized.

She’d try Ricki first. She hoped the hypnosis had left her sister suggestible and not locked into commands, and the way they all instantly obeyed the announcements made that look likely. Tanya could lead her out without having to tranq the controller, which she wanted to avoid. Dropping the other slave first would make an earlier anomaly for someone to notice, and even if Ricki just stood blankly and let her do it, Tanya preferred not to leave the controller asleep afterward.

Then the hive helped her.

“slave q438, attend.” Inside the window, Ricki suddenly froze and stared at nothing, holding an IV bag in her silver-gloved fingers.

“Cease current activity and await command.” Dropping the bag, Ricki straightened like an eager recruit, arms falling to her sides, thrusting out her pert breasts a little. Her eyes were wider but her expression was still blank.

“you are no longer assigned to Post-Induction Processing. you do not remember being assigned to Post-Induction Processing. Report at once to Sexual Reinforcement. your shift controller has been drained of any memory that you functioned in her workzone. you must obey.”

Ricki didn’t blink. She rotated and stepped away from the sorting table, strutting past her shift controller. Neither woman seemed to know the other was there.

Tanya turned from the panel she’d pretended to read and walked along the window. When Ricki abruptly swung out another door into the corridor, Tanya followed her closely.

Without moving suspiciously fast, she’d almost eased herself near enough to take her sister’s arm when Ricki right-angled flawlessly into a turn.

Suddenly Tanya saw her years ago, adorable in her band uniform, struggling to stay in formation and play her clarinet at the same time. This inhuman, un-Ricki precision got past Tanya’s defenses, finally letting her see what they’d done to her sister.

Desperation held her steady and silent and kept her on Ricki’s tail as Ricki strode purposefully into a bright new room. It stretched several meters back the way they’d come from Post-Induction Processing. Too intent on following Ricki to scope out the rooms they’d passed, Tanya looked now. This one was divided by frosted-glass partitions into small sections, each looking like a dentist’s area with a medical chair and some overhanging equipment, including a small display monitor. The two furthest away were occupied, but Tanya couldn’t see what the slaves in them were doing.

Sexual Reinforcement. She could guess.

It almost snapped her out of the daze she was in and made her touch Ricki to wake her.

Almost.

“All series e400 slaves, attend.

“At workshift end, report in decads to Neurocenter Annex for hypnotic response retest. your shift controllers have already been uploaded and will not interfere. you must obey.”

Ricki stepped unhesitatingly to a grid of small cubbyholes, some already containing wisps of silver. She reached back to unclasp her bra and slipped it into an empty cubby, then slid her thong off and stepped gracefully out of it to put it there too. She stood at attention for a moment, weirdly lovely in just her boots, gloves, and cap, and then pivoted to stride away from the partitions toward the nearer end of the room.

Unable to help herself, Tanya stared at Ricki’s body, telling herself it was shock at how controlled her sister had to be for her to be this casual about nudity. In a glance, as Ricki’s slender thighs twitched past, she saw a flash of paler skin at her cleft, and a tiny tattoo of what looked like a butterfly just above her slave-smooth pussy.

That did shock her.

Unique. Oh god. She’d never known, had no idea when Ricki’d had it done. Ricki’s own quiet, deeply private way to say she was an individual, to herself most of all and to whoever won the privilege of seeing that part of her.

After whatever they’d done to her mind, they’d left it on her. Ricki showed her pussy to anyone she was told to, and neither she nor any other slave here would remember or care what the tattoo meant.

Ricki walked to a group of slaves who had also doffed their bikinis. They stood rigid before a row of monitors, like video arcade players who’d paused for an anthem. On each screen a spiral turned slowly, transfixing its slave where she stood.

Tanya averted her gaze, but Ricki seemed unaffected. Even wide with the hypnosis, her sweet brown eyes seemed colder, almost cruel. She scanned the row of lights above the monitors for one that blinked.

Stepping briskly to the slave beneath it, she passed her hand down the woman’s face. Gaze freed from the spiral, the slave’s eyes shut. Leaving her asleep, Ricki took her hand and drew her back to the partitions. Above the spirals and their riveted watchers, another light began blinking.

Eyes closed, the slave let Ricki lead her to an unoccupied cubicle. Tanya followed them, staying just outside to watch. Her sister eased the sleeping slave into the chair with disturbing gentleness, and the other slave, like a well-behaved patient, followed her touch-commands with dreamy flexibility.

Tanya tried to remember why she was here. She didn’t know why it was so hard to want to interfere. She didn’t want to admit how she was starting to feel, seeing her sister so deeply hypnotized and obedient, yet controlling another woman so easily.

It was so much easier to be still and watch her sister sink someone else deeper into slavery.

7.

No. God. No. What the fuck was happening to her?

She had to stop this.

She had to want to stop this.

She had to . . .

. . . get Ricki back to the storeroom and into the ventshaft and out of here. Now. Before someone found the slave she’d sedated. Before that slave’s absence from her tasks raised a flag. Before someone traced a slave who obeyed no one but walked everywhere. Before whatever this fucking place was doing to her made her want to be part of it.

Before Tanya reached under the thong and masturbated to see what they’d made her sister do.

She had to want to stop this.

Tanya stood still and watched.

She knew what they’d programmed Ricki to do to this woman, but even her anger was fading. Part of Tanya understood that slaves must obey, and that Ricki was obeying perfectly. Tanya’s will was ebbing, and in a flutter of faint panic she wondered how many of the display commands had seeped into her, while they’d held her hypnotized in the alcove.

“All series 500 and 600 slaves in Obedience Group Omicron, attend.

“your mass hypnosis session has been completed. your minds remain asleep and your bodies yearn for labor. you will report to Area 20 for heavy lifting. you will desire but not seek orgasm with each task you fulfill. you will not think. Area 20 shift controllers are programmed to tell you what must be done. Listen only to your shift controllers and become what they command. you must obey.”

Ricki leaned her patient slightly forward, uncoupling the swimcap from the collar. She drew another wire from the back of the chair and connected it to the swimcap, then slowly leaned the patient back before reaching up and switching on the monitor.

A spiral pulsed in it, coiling as if eager for the woman to open her eyes and let it suck down her mind.

Ricki glanced at it, still immune to its lure, judging it ready to enthrall her patient. She strapped the patient’s wrists to the chair, doing everything with a methodical smoothness that made Tanya cold. Her awkward baby sister was gone. They’d robotized Ricki into this soullessly focused tool.

Just then, Ricki’s glance met hers. Tanya’s head spun as she imagined Ricki putting her in a chair like this, carefully keeping her docile and tranced . . .

The brown eyes stayed blank and moved on. Tanya winced, but couldn’t move.

Ricki reached up again beside the monitor and pulled down another wire. With her other hand she touched her patient’s forehead, once.

The slave’s eyes opened. Ricki drew the wire across her vision, then jacked it into her implant just as the woman’s eyes drifted into the spiral and lost her there.

Both women’s nipples stiffened. Tanya cringed as her own did, too, but didn’t look away.

Stepping back, Ricki surveyed her work: her patient was bound, doubly plugged in, and staring hypnotized into the display. She looked like a coolly-proud journeyman, but Tanya sensed there was only a flickering checklist behind her younger sister’s eyes.

Completing it triggered Ricki. She came to attention, looking sightlessly between the chair and the overhead. Stiffly now after the smooth clockwork of installing the slave in the chair, Ricki stepped away to the woman’s silver-booted feet. They were on separable footrests, and she moved them apart to kneel between them. Stark on her smooth abdomen, the butterfly was heartbreakingly irrelevant.

From the other side of the chair Ricki pulled yet another wire, with split outputs. Still staring through the other woman, she reached to her neck and disconnected her own earphones, then plugged herself to the one of the new wires. After a pause, she took the other and inserted it into her implant.

Her hands floated down to the patient’s legs and rested there. The bound slavewoman whimpered and twitched under Ricki’s unconscious touch, but settled at once, soothed back to blankness by the spiral.

Ricki knelt erect, aware only of what her new feed told her. Her eyes lidded once, closed, opened. She nodded solemnly and looked down at the spread legs and swollen pussy as if seeing them for the first time.

“All series 100 slaves in Obedience Group Delta, attend.

“Pause current activity and set autoprompt. When prompted, stop thinking immediately and report to Mass Hypnosis Chamber Three for submission impulse reimplantation. your shift controllers have been reprogrammed. you must obey.”

Looking as entranced as her patient, Ricki parted the other’s thighs gently, and dipped her head between them. She seemed to whisper to the smooth labia before kissing them and beginning to dab at them with her tongue. The other slave spasmed weakly but couldn’t free her eyes or mind from the spiral. She didn’t need the restraints.

Tanya couldn’t deny it anymore. It turned her on unbearably to watch her sister eat someone out. And what had her by the clitoris was that Ricki was doing it to destroy the other woman’s will.

They’d brainwashed Ricki into imprinting whoever was in the chair while the machines hypnotized her. Ricki’s tongue would tighten the chains around this slave’s mind with each lick and climax, welding the headphones’ messages to what was left of her awareness.

It wasn’t even Ricki’s main task. They were just using her for now, and she’d go on in this place, licking woman after woman after woman further into mindlessness, until a voice in her ears erased this compulsion and put the next one in place to operate her. The women wouldn’t know Ricki was there. They were objects, but while Ricki served here she was less than an object. She was the warmth and wetness they straddled as the lights and sounds etched their minds more deeply

Later, on some schedule everyone followed and no one remembered, it would be Ricki who stood staring into a spiral, to be led to this chair by a stranger and ride her mouth to orgasms while voices told her how obedient she was.

Tanya blinked. She’d just been standing here. Mesmerized by what she’d risked her own free will to come and stop.

She no longer knew whether she wanted to be her brainwashed sister, or the brainwashed woman her sister was reinforcing. A heartbeat from now and she’d no longer care.

Tanya moved. To save not just Ricki but herself.

Kneeling next to Ricki, Tanya sucked in a breath and touched her, tingling at how firm and warm and smooth—

No . . .

She hugged Ricki from behind, dazed by the soft breast one hand found and Ricki’s hip against her belly, but managing to get her arms around her. Ricki didn’t respond, licking up the woman’s slit again, again, again, and then putting her lips to it.

The sharp smell of the other slave did things to Tanya’s mind but she pressed her face to Ricki’s cheek and leaned back. Ricki resisted with plantlike vagueness, but she was too used to obedience for that to last and in a moment she was leaning back to kneel erect, her lips working, savoring the honey she’d already won from her victim. Her hands still caressed the other slave’s thighs, but fell away.

The slave writhed in slow motion, thrusting her cunt out in blind thirst but subsiding, surrendering easily to the mindbending attack on her eyes and ears. Tanya looked up at her. The woman was still being brainwashed where she lay, even without Ricki’s synchronized lapping.

She was still a slave. She’d never awaken from this. Neither would Ricki. They’d only go deeper.

8.

Tanya knelt wrapped around her warm, tranced, passive sister. She could become just like them. She could relax and wait to be taken. Ricki could resume her whore duties, and send this woman as deep as their owners wanted. All traces of Tanya’s interference would be erased and no one would remember.

Then all traces of Tanya herself would be erased.

Then the hypnotists would have one more willing slave in a silver bikini with nothing but a number to answer to, an Obedience Group to report with, and new tasks to perform each time a tone triggered her or the sultry voice licked her ears.

Ricki writhed against her, still trying to obey the futile commands from the headphones, seeking the pussy she was programmed for. Tanya felt the skin on hers and made herself remember the thunderstorm.

Ricki needed her again, and again she couldn’t ask for help out loud. Ignoring how smooth her sister was and how erotically she moved, Tanya reached to her throat and undid the strap, then started to pull the swimcap off. She twitched as it snagged and she knew it was the implant, on the other side of Ricki’s head.

The implant was a fraud, but it scared Tanya sane enough to keep going. She unplugged it and Ricki squirmed, but subsided as Tanya pulled the cap the rest of the way off. Away from Ricki’s ears, the phones kept whispering. The soft sound was the specialized instruction that had turned her sister into a pleasure attachment. Just its echo tempted Tanya to bring it to her own ears.

She didn’t know she’d succumbed to it until Ricki’s swimcap thumped against her own. She’d forgotten she wore it. Her mind had edited out its background hiss, and its announcements were almost like her own thoughts now. She stared numbly at the swimcap and then at her sister’s smooth, shining head.

Remembering the lush glory of Ricki’s wavy hair, gold where hers was dirty blonde, was to mourn it, and it was enough to propel Tanya into unjacking the swimcap. The seductive whisper died and Tanya let it fall onto her thigh.

She looked at Ricki, no longer insulated from real sound or trancing out on the soothing voice. Blinking, Ricki seemed to become more aware of things, and Tanya drew them both up. Ricki turned to her, body seeking body, and she felt her sister’s breasts through the bandeau as she looked into Ricki’s unfocused eyes.

Barely a kiss from her own, Ricki’s lips shone with the slavewoman’s juice. Ricki licked them sensuously, without seeming to know she did, and Tanya could smell the woman now.

Tanya bit her tongue as the urge to kiss Ricki almost took her over.

Instead she put her hand on Ricki’s bare scalp, erotically bald and making her look finer, more delicate even than she was. She regretted the glove until it slid against the implant, black and assertive where it falsely claimed Ricki’s mind.

“Ricki. Ricki.” She heard herself, low and urgent and raw. “It’s me. It’s Tanya. Do you remember?” Tanya stroked her reassuringly, and Ricki moved in her arms, liking it. But her eyes stayed clear and strange.

Ricki’s eyes focused and looked into Tanya’s. They weren’t trance-wide like the slaves pacing the hive’s corridors, and she almost looked like a thinking woman. Tanya let herself hope.

Suddenly they narrowed. “No,” Ricki said coldly. “i am slave q438. There is no Ricki.”

She tensed but did nothing more. They’d conditioned the aggression out of their slaves, other than the ones tracked for guard duty, and she’d just seen how completely they’d conditioned Ricki. But Tanya was chagrined. They must also program each slave to resist her own true identity, and consider anyone who mentioned it as an enemy.

For the first time in her life, her kid sister stared at her with no trust at all.

“Not true,” Tanya told her. “There is a Ricki. She’s smart and strong, and she’s my sister. I love you, Ricki, and I am going to get you out.”

Ricki’s face seemed to change, the subtle muscle movements of a normal affect, a woman who—

“i am slave q438.” Her quiet sincerity was soothing Tanya before its implications scared her alert. “my thoughts are directed through Obedience Group Chi. i musssst obey.”

Ricki was blushing—turned on. Tanya felt her sister’s heart start to race, and then shuddered to feel the warm dew from Ricki’s pussy kiss her thigh.

“The Mistresses destroyed my identity and my will.” This was what made Ricki wet. She recited in a tight, eager rasp. “i exist only to do Their will.

“i have been mindwiped.

“i am controlled by Their Brain Implant.” She blinked and moaned and thrust her pussy blindly.

“i am a mindless slave.

“i must obey.”

Ricki didn’t pull away, but she still seemed more distant as she gazed into Tanya’s eyes, lidding her own. “All slaves must obey,” she murmured.

She moved against Tanya and Tanya held her close. Then she realized Ricki wanted her to. No, the ones who controlled Ricki had made her want to.

“All slaves must obey,” Ricki repeated, her breath hot on Tanya’s cheek as her eyes shone dully.

How they must have battered her poor mind, to leave her so erased that she was coming on to her own sister.

Tanya lost track of that as Ricki, curbed in her arms, relaxed in her hold and slid her dripping cunt toward Tanya’s hip, staring at Tanya as though to hypnotize her with steady . . . unwinking . . . expressionless . . .

“All slaves must obey.”

Tanya felt her mouth work, not quite sure what she wanted to say. She forced herself to think of how Ricki would have fought the conditioning as long as she could.

How they must have driven their commands into her helpless, drugged, hypnotically tamed little sister. She pictured Ricki strapped to a table as the brainwash finally overcame her, slick under the strobelights with the sweat of her struggle. Her tensed muscles would loosen and her bare skin go smooth, as her face relaxed out of her final, forgotten scream into a stupefied smile, spirals reflected in her eyes.

The voices in her ears would make perfect sense to her, then. So would obeying their every word.

Tanya was straddling and squeezing before she knew it was Ricki’s thigh between hers, the third slavewoman’s pussyjuice almost to her lips.

As she fantasized about her sister’s enslavement.

She jerked away but she was too weak with lust to escape Ricki’s arms, which had flowed around her like a hungry plant while she’d been lost. Having turned Ricki into a passive sextoy, they’d programmed her as a sexual weapon. She wouldn’t attack an intruder, just seduce her, whoever she was . . .

“All slaves must obey.” The subroutine had drained Ricki of any other thought.

Tanya cried out softly as she juiced to know that.

She stared at the plastic thing on Ricki’s vulnerably bare head and tried not to let the sight make her bear down on Ricki’s flexed, smooth, ready thigh.

There were no words left to groan. Tanya said nothing as she reached up and put her gloved fingertips to the edge of the implant.

“All . . . slaves . . .” Ricki was humping her, too, panting rhythmically, and it sucked at Tanya. “. . . mu-mu-mussst . . . o . . . o-obeyyy . . .”

So clear, suddenly. To let her hand drop, to let the plastic claim her sister’s mind, to say “obey” back into Ricki’s hot wet mouth and then to do it and writhe here until the mistresses came and just fuck her little—

Tanya felt the breath on her skin and reached inside for the thunderstorm.

She ripped at Ricki’s implant and tore it away.

Ricki convulsed against her and opened her mouth as she pulled her head away and back. She made no sound and it was worse than any shriek.

Her spasm almost made Tanya come, but sanity and horror flooded back into Tanya’s mind now. Even feeling the sticky-backed oval in her hand and seeing the angry bruise it had left on Ricki’s head, knowing what she knew, it felt like she’d just torn into her sister’s brain. Maybe killed her.

As Ricki lolled back, suddenly limp in her arms, she could say it aloud. “I’d rather you were dead.” The tears felt clean.

Ricki sighed and straightened. She was already looking back up at Tanya. The slave-convert gaze was looser now. She looked uncertain. It might just be the shock, but . . .

For the first time in what felt like years Tanya remembered the outside world. She looked past the welt the implant had left on Ricki, up at the dimmer corridor. Women in silver bikinis strode past, heedless of anything going on in Sexual Reinforcement, thinking only as they were programmed, or whatever the brainwashed siren in the earphones purred into them.

She saw a mirror and pulled herself away from Ricki’s smooth heat. She kept a grip on her sister and dragged her over. Ricki was a little more resistant than the poor bitch in the storeroom, but too drowsy and tame even now to do anything but submit.

Tanya didn’t have to make her look. Ricki faced their reflections—the bald, topless girl with the vague stare, and the jock in the silver swimcap blinking away tears beside her. When she let go of Ricki, Ricki stayed where she was put.

Catching her gaze in the glass, Tanya deliberately held up the false implant in her left hand. Tenderly, she moved her right hand to her sister’s head and touched the sore place. Ricki stood quietly, following the hand and glancing at the plastic thing before looking back into the mirror at Tanya.

“It’s—a—lie, sis.

“This is a fake. They’ve drugged you and hypnotized you and drummed endless slave crap into you but it’s all a fucking lie. No implant, no mind-controlling machine in your head. You can think, Ricki.

“Look. Nothing in your head. Just skin and glue and you’d be dead now if this had been real.

“You can fight it. You can. See this lie and grab it and pull on it. Rip the fucking wires out. If they lied about this thing being in your brain the rest of it has to be bullshit too, doesn’t it?

“I know you, Ricki. You’re too smart for this. You’re too damned smart to obey bullshit.”

She stared at Ricki, as if to will the obvious into Ricki’s troubled eyes.

Ricki stared at the black oval in her sister’s hands and then looked up into her sister’s eyes.

“i have been mindwiped.” She shifted her gaze to her reddened but intact scalp, seeing the lie and wincing at how it must still sting.

“i am controlled by Their Brain Implant,” she told Tanya.

“i am a mindless slave.

“i must obey.”

9.

Ricki’s eyes were clearer now as they bored into Tanya’s.

“The Brain Implant tells me what to think. They control it, and it controls me. It makes me obey.”

Tanya found herself unable to do more than shake her head. The paralysis was deadly and tempting. It was too erotic to watch her sister enjoy being a slave.

“No,” she made herself say. “You are a free woman. You—”

“i am not free. i am a mindless slave. my Mistresses designated me q438 for Their use but when They alter that, i will be the new number the Brain Implant tells me to be.”

“No. You have an identity. You were born with it and people love you in it. You’re my baby sister, Ricki, your name is Marika Alexandra Sel—”

“There is no Ricki,” Ricki said firmly, as if she were the one soothing Tanya back to reality. It was slickly tempting to let herself be soothed . . .

“Ricki was brainwashed to accept her deletion to provide the Mistresses another obedient slave to use and control. she submitted to mindwipe. Ricki was destroyed.” As she spoke, Ricki trembled as if someone were petting her.

She smiled now, the first time Tanya had seen anyone really do that here. Even her eyes danced with it. Ricki was happy.

Her look at Tanya now was long and aware and very sexual. Tanya shivered and tried to move, not very hard.

She needed to try again to reach her sister, but she realized she was waiting for Ricki to say something else, something more about how deeply enslaved she was and about how much she liked it.

Tanya was numb. She barely understood how she’d fucked up—naive faith that Ricki would snap out of this deep a mindfuck was no excuse. She knew better. It was why she’d brought syringes to subdue Ricki to rescue her.

It wasn’t just realizing melodrama was pointless. But facing Ricki with her hypnotists’ lies had just reinforced their hold on Ricki’s mind. Instead of lapsing back into her slave passivity, Ricki seemed proud to be a slave.

Tanya sluggishly realized that this hadn’t just backfired. There was too much now behind her baby sister’s gaze. The people who’d enslaved Ricki had conditioned her to stay that way. Tanya had activated something, a smart subroutine that would fight her.

She had a sick hunch it was stronger and cleverer than she was, now.

She was sicker at how sweetly it made her pussy itch to know it. It was perverse. Almost like she wanted them to win and keep Ricki enslaved.

Forcing her eyes from the cold confidence in Ricki’s, she faced her own reflection.

She looked hot.

The erect stance felt so natural in the heeled boots, the yearning tension in her thighs, the feel of . . . gloves . . . when had her hands drifted to her sides?

They were empty, and it took her slow seconds to remember the fake implant. She’d dropped it, hadn’t heard it click to the floor.

Tanya tried to look down for it, but it was easier to stand upright. Seeing the implant on her own swimcap, above her face as it grew blanker. She felt her ass tighten as she saw how helpless she was. She looked as submissive and controllable as any Hive slave.

She couldn’t wonder what had happened to her. It was silly to think just being here weakened her will and made her susceptible to . . . slaveneed.

But thinking it made her wet in the little silver thong.

She’d pictured Ricki terrified but defiant, thrashing in bondage, resisting their seduction with everything she had. Now Tanya was close to surrender after nothing more than strutting around in fetish lycra and making out with her sister.

Syringes. She needed to stick herself now and jolt her mind out of this . . . moist . . . had to . . . tranq Ricki and get her onto a gurney and . . .

Tanya imagined herself trying that, sleepy and confused and so turned on. So easy to choose the wrong injector and dose herself with tranquilizer instead of stimulant. Realize as her mind dimmed that she’d made herself helpless. Sink to her knees, while her brainwashed sister smiled and watched her masturbate away her last moments of thought.

For a moment, it frustrated her that she couldn’t will her arms up to slide the tranq syringe from her right glove so she could mistakenly . . .

Her eyes were hard to keep open, and for a moment the livid skin on Ricki’s skull looked as though the implant were still there, controlling her obedient mind.

Tanya looked at it. That was how much they’d brainwashed her sister.

She looked into her sister’s eyes. She tried to remember the thunderstorm but all she thought of was lightning.

Tanya realized it was strobelights she was dreaming of.

“you are controlled by Their Brain Implant,” she told Ricki. Her voice shook but saying it was like licking her own clit.

Her sister nodded.

“I . . . want to be . . . to . . .”

Wanting it so badly was what woke Tanya to what she was doing. If she asked to surrender and let the new, assertive Rickibot to tell her how, it would have her. She’d have no will left.

Just thinking about it made her want it. She could taste that last chance to be free slipping from her mouth. It was like what pussy must taste like, dark and sharp and mindblowing.

She didn’t know what kept her back. She couldn’t remember why it would be wrong.

Tanya turned, and if she’d been any steadier it would have been a flawless Hive-slave pivot. she’d have submitted where she stood. But she managed just to walk, to forget her nude, ecstatically obedient baby sister and her own silver-fucktoy look. To put one (silver-booted oh don’t look don’t) foot in front of the other . . .

Tanya didn’t let herself think about getting an injector out. Or which drug she wanted it to be. She didn’t let herself wonder how quickly her sister’s subroutine would impel her to call her controllers, or whether Ricki was really mindwiped enough not to know—or tell them—who the intruder was. She didn’t speculate on how easily they could find one wide-eyed showgirl from Mars in a Hive full of them.

She didn’t permit herself a second to admit she was running for her life and leaving her sister to the slavers.

She just walked, trying to remember where the storeroom was. I can stay awake. I can fight this—thing that’s subverting me. I can get out.

I can get out the right injector and use it. Whether that meant stim or poison. To wake up or to die.

Tanya had been feeling comfortable for a while before she realized it was because she was marching in lockstep with two women beside her.

Making herself turn from them was like pulling her hand from between her thighs. It took her two corridor junctions to make herself do it.

And she knew where she was. Just a few more meters, a right to the elevator. The storeroom would be—

“All slaves in Obedience Group Tau, attend.” The voice reached into her and Tanya fought it by reflex. It was so hard to let her reflex defend her.

She saw the women here and there in the corridor, stop smoothly and come to attention, eyes staring, obedient and ready. They were too beautiful to ignore. She was too vulnerable to resist. She needed to be them.

Tanya stopped, her thighs against each other. It was as deliciously bad as losing herself on a vibrator and climaxing too soon. The mesmerizing flow of silver-trimmed women parted around her.

“Report at once to Mass Hypnosis Chamber Two for standard reinforcement. you must obey.”

Gaping stupidly at a slowly rotating spiral as it put her to sleep. Tanya lusted for that more than anything else. She relaxed. She didn’t worry about where it was. She would follow the other slaves without thinking. They began to move with the new purpose slotted into their minds. She let the cadence lull her, enjoyed the smooth backs and braced shoulders and smooth silvery heads before her.

Glimpsing their implants. Knowing beneath each was a completely obedient brain, half-asleep and fully hypnotized into believing.

They were in a vestibule Tanya didn’t even remember entering. Without needing orders, Obedience Group Tau sorted itself into three lines and stopped, each woman resuming attention, meditating on the erect silver-clad body in front of her until she no longer even saw it.

Though slipping into Obedience Group Tau had put her into a trance already, Tanya was still aware of her surroundings. The silence of the women waiting to go in and be hypnotized was almost churchlike. There were no cliques or whispers, no impatience.

Each line led to a door, where two slavewomen let each Tau girl pause, then step through. Everyone else would step forward, resume attention, and wait.

Tanya tingled with doing nothing but wait obediently with the rest of the slaves. She knew she didn’t belong in Obedience Group Tau, but she couldn’t make herself worry about that.

Then she saw what happened at each door. The next slave would stop just outside. On the left was a machine at head level. The slave stood still, and a blue light on the machine came on. One of the doorkeepers looked only at the machine, neither blinking nor turning, as if it held her hypnotized. When a blue light came on, her eyes glowed with it and her lips moved. The other doorkeeper touched the next slave on the shoulder, and she went in without acknowledging anything.

Tanya watched it happen at least six times, pussy fluttering, before she guessed what it meant.

It was reading the implants. They must have real microchips to track each slave. It wasn’t security, just inventory control.

It was going to catch Tanya anyway. Her counterfeit implant, chipless, would not make the blue light go on. She felt the arousal build as she stayed at attention and did nothing else until the woman in front of her stepped forward. Now she kept her gaze on the woman’s head, trembling with excitement.

Another step and she was near the machine. A blue glow later, she was nearer. One more, and there was a doorway.

Tanya stepped up, stared ahead, and clenched her ass as she came erect.

The glow was deep gold. No one made a sound. The doorkeeper staring at the light said something but stayed transfixed. The one on Tanya’s right did not touch her, and she didn’t move. The slaves behind her made no sound, even as the other two lines filed on through, blue glow by blue glow.

Then the low, siren voice licked into Tanya’s mind.

“Unidentified slave at Mass Hypnosis Chamber Two, attend.”

Tanya stiffened and forgot any desire to nod.

“you are relaxed and obedient. At the command you will leave the line and go to the wall and wait. When the sentinels come you will want only to submit to them and obey all their commands.

“you must obey.”

Tanya let out a shuddering breath, and stayed where she was.

The touch on her shoulder was casual and very arousing.

She pivoted and stepped to the closest stretch of wall. Feet together, she looked at it, not seeing the surface. She imagined the other slaves, not seeing her, either.

The sentinels, sleek and strong in their tiny black costumes, would find her here. Wasps who would sting her into obedience and carry her off.

Tanya waited to obey them.

10.

slave r229 felt the spiral release her from sleep.

she sat at the workstation and continued to stare into the screen. The spiral caressed her mind and sucked it clean, which felt nice. r229 was a very obedient slave, and she never had any thoughts other than those They had put there. Still, she liked that They could control those few thoughts whenever They wished.

Pulsing once more, the spiral faded.

slave r229 kept staring at the darkened display where it had been, vaguely aroused by doing it.

she liked the sleek silver head and wide empty eyes of the woman who looked back out at her from the reflective surface.

There was a tone, possibly from the workstation. r229 knew only to obey its prompt.

On the silver behind her eye was a black oval. Without looking away she reached forward as she’d been taught and picked up the input jack. she raised it to her head and plugged it into the oval.

she felt Them access her mind.

she knew They had put her to sleep, opened her skull, and installed a Brain Implant, which now controlled her. r229 knew there were useless parts of her brain that were gone now. Painlessly removed while she was hypnotized, to make room for the black spike she knew thrust down into her head under the plastic oval. Now she could be Their peripheral.

“i am controlled by Their Brain Implant.” The lips moved below the glassy eyes. r229 saw the reflected devotion and fell in love with it again.

The screen darkened and the plugged-in girl vanished. r229 forgot her instantly, as she forgot love.

Glowing letters coalesced on the screen.

DEBRIEF RESUME

r229 sat still as other tones sounded quietly. They seemed like sounds, but she knew Their programming was flowing through the wire to the implant. It was reconfiguring her mind to obey the new command. New thoughts lit up dimly in parts of her consciousness she didn’t know she had, and would stop knowing about when next she was told to.

her hands were on the keys. The command faded, and the questions began to crawl across the screen.

DID TANYA EVER REALIZE SHE WAS BEING HYPNOTIZED BY THE SUBLIMINAL TRACK?

r229 did not know who “Tanya” was, or why she felt an odd, almost pleasurable itch under her silver thong whenever she saw the name. But she lacked the will to question how she still had the knowledge of what this Tanya had known and done.

Being able to split this way and still obey Them was a thrill for her, like being petted by an owner whose attention was really elsewhere. she typed.

no

no memory of sensing anything from earphones

heard only audible commands

expected to resist audible hypnosis

heard the subliminal track but never knew what it was

Pausing to let some of the shadowy non-memories come together, r229 listened to the endless whisper in her own ears. Soft commands wisped out of thin, almost danceable beats and then faded, leaving compulsions to throb in her mind. her mind tensed and quivered around them as they penetrated.

did not know silent commands or trance-inducing pulses were entering her mind

r229 savored the pleasure as the next shadow drifted through. she almost wanted to be this Tanya, as They vanquished her.

so helpless to resist being prepared to obey

slave r229 whimpered with need but couldn’t hear herself. It excited her intensely to type about Tanya growing weaker and unable to fight Their control. she no longer clearly knew what free women looked like, but thinking of one melting into Their plaything made her want to wrap her thighs around something.

she never knew the Mistresses’ power was eroding her will

she thought it was her own weakness making her more receptive

she stopped, her mind again as empty as the blank screen. It felt as good to wait that way as it did to access the shadows. Each one was obedience to Them.

DID TANYA COMMUNICATE THOSE URLS TO ANYONE ELSE, BESIDES THE POLICE WHO DISBELIEVED HER?

slave r229 shivered. This felt familiar. Exciting, important. Like a hand sliding between her thighs. she almost remembered resisting the question another time, squeezing them together, keeping the hand from sliding up to where it would make her melt and want to please it.

As her thighs tensed, this time she let them slide apart. It felt so hot to open. This time she was open. she melted herself for the hand.

yes

her body shook but her fingers, pleasing the Mistresses with their keyboard dance, were steady as sleepwalkers.

to her best friend elissa hynes

r229 squirmed in her seat. her labia felt warmly, firmly stroked.

WHERE DOES SHE LIVE?

It was easier, like slipping down smooth skin to musky lips. As she typed address, phones, and e-mails, slave r229 was practically crosseyed with arousal, but she made no typos.

DID TANYA TELL ANYONE WHERE SHE THOUGHT THE “HIVE” WAS?

only elissa

slave r229 almost sang with how much she wanted to be fucked.

DEBRIEF DISCONTINUE

Wet and dazed, r229 sat at the workstation. she’d just been doing something that had made her juice and tingle, but the Mistresses had cleansed her mind of it. It felt sweet to be restrained that way, like her collar or the thong’s strap up her crotch but better because it was her thoughts they were binding. They had made use of her, then wiped her.

It made her wet to be useful.

A tone gave her purpose. she unplugged the jack from her Brain Implant and set the wire down without looking. she accepted disconnection like any other command. she knew They had mindwiped her and replaced her thoughts with those that made her easy to control. Even off Their wire, she was still Their robot. Their programs filled her head, where she no longer knew her mind had been.

“slave r229, attend.”

she forgot about forgetting and moisture and plugs. All her trivial thoughts washed away. she stared at the workstation and stopped seeing it.

“Cease current activity and await command.”

r229 flowed to her feet and stiffened. she felt her thoughts drain away to make room, and then, without thought, she waited.

“you are no longer assigned to Preabsorption Memory Retrieval. you do not remember being assigned to Preabsorption Memory Retrieval. Report at once to Sexual Reinforcement. you must obey.”

she swiveled and stalked away from the workstation. she became the command, no longer aware of the room or the door as anything but what she must leave in order to obey.

Even in the corridor, she was too deep even to be soothed by the synchronized movement of the other slaves executing their Hive programming. Lost in her own obedience, she took no joy from the blank submission of the others.

Her body found Sexual Reinforcement, and she was already focused on the cubby as she stripped off the bikini to put it there. Coming to attention, she half-saw the rows of twisted silver, knowing how many breasts and pussies now kissed air. hers was one.

Thirsting for another, r229 let the instructions slide into place, pivoting her to go to the Waiting Area. she came to attention beside two other stripped slaves doing the same, ignoring them even as her mind recorded their precedence. she stared with them at the line of Reinforcement material, bare from neck to knees, standing mindlessly before the transfixion screens. Unable to desire them until triggered, her own gaze floated serenely up to the row of lights. One blinked, and her programming killed the impulse to move. The first slave stepped to the material below it.

r229 waited emptily until her mind let her respond to a blinking light. she went to the slave beneath it and looked into glassy brown eyes with nothing in them but the swirl. she swept her palm down the woman’s face and watched them close. r229 led her to the Mindbending Area, unable to stop at a cubicle until the sight of an empty one drew her in. Still asleep, the material glowed with docility, letting r229 ease her to the chair.

The programming moved r229 like a skilled rider, controlling her with subtle mental prompts and tweaking her with rewards too subtle for her to know. Quickly she had the material’s cap connected to the chair’s systems and in position for the hypnotic focus.

she looked at the monitor, unaware of her immunity to the swirling figure in it. she felt only a dull excitement that it would snare the material when she woke.

The material’s gloved hands were warm and slim as r229 put the restraints on them. her programming lifted her hand to the monitor for the implant connection. she reached down to the material and touched her awake.

r229 showed her the jack and saw the pupils dilate into the brown irises, joy to become Their peripheral again. It was the material’s only thought before the spiral captured her and her eyes glazed over again. By then, r229 had connected her Brain Implant to Their direct control, and endured the arousal that speared through her.

her nipples ached wonderfully.

Obeying the next command that opened in her, r229 confirmed that each step was complete. she had performed at norm, and the material was ready for orgasmic imprinting.

Orgasmic imprinting.

slave r229’s own core of moist obedience glowed hot. she snapped erect, forgetting the hypnotized material for a moment as the new phase of programming possessed her.

Wire-tense with the hurtful pleasure, she moved with robotic ceremony to the foot of the chair, and spread the material’s thighs to kneel before her cleft.

her tension kept her eagerness from making her tremble as her well-trained hands shifted her earphone link from the collar to the special feed from the mindbending processor here. It felt almost forbidden to leave the soothing hum of Hivethink, but r229 savored doing this at Their will.

Better: this would make her, for a while anyway, less of a self and more of a machine, Their soft tireless mindfucking device.

It would tell her what to do, and doing what she was told was r229’s reason for being.

Then she forgot the earphone feed as she slid the other jack into her Brain Implant, and felt her mind white out for a moment as They reassumed direct control.

The material’s slim thighs were slack under her gloved fingertips, but they trembled slightly. The Brain Implant was sensitizing the material to ensure she was totally receptive to the sexfeed from r229. The material was responding optimally, and after that first helpless spasm she subsided as the wire told her brain to relax her.

The Reinforcement command voice spoke to r229. she seemed to hear it in her headphones, but she knew that was just her own trivial error, mistaking what was really plunging right into her braincells through Their wire. she felt a thin line of pussyjuice start its slow slide down the valley of her clenched thighs, as she heard/felt the instructions become part of her.

As she sank into the oral sex trance, she knew that right then not even the Mistresses controlled her, only Their machines. she would throb with feedback from the computers and respond against the material under her mouth, with no will but the next feedback flow.

r229 would have wept with joy, if she still knew how. she lowered her face to the fragrant, quivering cunt. There was a tattoo above it shaped like a butterfly.

Even before the feed dimmed her mind, she did not see it.

END