The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

I groaned as Queen Wendy burst into my room, followed by her band of giants. “Can’t I get some rest?” I said, crossing my arms over my face.

“You have rested long enough, Leopold Takayama. My project is almost complete and I need more of your genetic material to produce the final formula.”

I uncovered my eyes to check if she was serious. She stood at the foot of my bed, cool and collected as always, in the simple white shift dress that she’d taken to wearing for “efficient removal” before sex.

I couldn’t believe the monster I’d created. After that first time in Santa Monica when I’d shown the Queen what sex could be like between two thinking adults, she’d been back again and again, claiming that she needed more of my DNA for her experiments. She would strip down and lay on the bed, and tell me which movie we were going to mimic that day.

At first, it had been great. Having the woman who’d controlled my entire existence for months writhing and moaning under my touch had done wonderful things for my ego. But after every session, she’d revert to the same cold, logical Queen, driven by the words of her dead mentor.

And if that wasn’t enough to discourage me, Wendy was getting everything that she wanted, and I still hadn’t done anything to stop her from going through with her plan for world domination. So what if I’d made the Queen squeal as I pounded into her tight pussy? What about the millions of workers and thousands of Moons that would be affected by her mad plot?

It wasn’t like making Wendy cum had earned me any freedom or opportunity for sabotage. Instead, I was even more restricted than I’d been before, even being put on a forced diet and an imposed sleep schedule to “improve volume.” The Queen needed her cum supply to always be rested and ready to deliver.

Now, hearing that she was close to some kind of final breakthrough had me wondering if I’d failed already. Had I let my opportunity slip by without trying to seize it? I hadn’t seen any openings, but I also hadn’t been willing to risk much to force one either. I’d become more like a Queen than a Bagger, choosing the easiest and most pleasurable path rather than doing the hard work that needed to be done. Maybe old Queen Trevor had been right giving his successor a set of rigid life instructions so that she wouldn’t slip into bad habits.

“I’d like to try that scene from Hot Bullets and Cold Steel again. The one where Santiago takes Allison from behind in the horse stable.” Wendy dropped her shift to the floor, revealing her magnificent body. I scooted over, as she crawled onto the low bed and immediately took my dick in her hand. She stroked slowly while planting awkward kisses on my shoulder and neck. Even after the things we’d done, she was far from being a talented lover.

My mind was such a jumble that my cock refused to respond, and Wendy’s strokes got harsher and faster. Finally, she let go with an exasperated grunt.

“What’s wrong, Leopold? Are you holding back on me?”

“Holding back…?”

“Why else would my motions not work to get you aroused? You were the one who showed me how to use my hand this way, so why isn’t it working?”

“Why isn’t…?” I sat up straight, looking down at the annoyed Queen. “It isn’t working because I’m not a damned machine, or a character in a movie,” I said.

“The human body is a machine,” she said. “One that I know very well.”

“You only think you do. You might know the biological processes that happen inside people, but you don’t know anything about the whole person.”

She stiffened as I rebuked her, and I almost backed down like I had so many times before. But I was in the grip of a new determination: she wasn’t getting any more of my precious DNA for her evil scheme. I just needed to figure out how to deny her without getting killed.

“So you’re saying you have an emotional problem that’s stopping your arousal? I have drugs to deal with most emotional issues. Which one is causing you to lose your erections? Anxiety? Depression? Schizophrenia?” She rolled off the bed and reached for her dress, bending over and giving me an eyeful of her perfect ass and her juicy pussy peeking from between her thighs. Memories of that hot hole threatened to make me a liar as blood rushed to my cock, but I wasn’t as easy to distract as I’d been before.

My mind had been racing for a solution ever since I’d decided to take a stand, and it felt good to have my Bagger wits come back. Ultimately it was Wendy’s love of old movies that gave me my opening.

“You bore me,” I said.

Her eyes went wide. She looked around the room, then down at the dress in her hand, trying to figure out what I meant. “I bore you? How?”

“Because we’ve reached our limit. Haven’t you learned anything about free men? Remember MI6 Commander Sir Wesley Slate? How many times did he have sex with any one woman before he moved on to another?” The bed-hopping secret agent had been my hero until I’d met Elise.

The naked Queen searched her memories. “No more than four. And that was only with the beautiful but lethal Russian assassin Ivanna Biggunova.”

“And why is that? Because men get bored. Your mouth and pussy just aren’t as exciting after the twentieth time I’ve fucked them.”

“But…we’ve had sex at least twice that many times.”

“And the last ten have been a real struggle for me to stay interested. I wanted to help you, like a partner should, but it seems that I’ve reached my limit.” I waved at my thankfully limp dick. I was headed down a risky path, but it was the one that had opened up for me, and I had to try something. Luckily, Wendy had no use for romance movies, where the couple pledges to love each other and remain faithful for the rest of their lives. Even her other experiences with males like Gregor or Queen Alexander wouldn’t contradict me, I was sure.

“And what about the Workers I sent to you?” Wendy asked. “You fucked them countless times with no issue.”

“Because Workers aren’t women,” I said. “They’re tools. Toys. Devices to masturbate with. It’s completely different than being with a real woman like you.”

She bit her lip as she processed everything I said. Finally, with a loud sigh that rocked her magnificent tits, she gave in. “So what is the solution, Leopold Takayama? I need your DNA to finish my plan. How can I get you excited again? You said my mouth and pussy had become boring…maybe you need to take me in my ass? We haven’t done that yet.” She turned to look behind her and pulled at one of her firm cheeks.

Damn, her tight ass would feel so good around my…no. Not any more. I turned away, angling my body so my rising dick didn’t betray the whole ruse. “It’s not the hole, Wendy. It’s the woman it belongs to. I’m sorry, but it’s just how men are. As for what we can do? Usually, I would simply move on to a different woman, but we can’t do that, can we?”

Wendy shook her head. “Your semen would be just as compromised in any woman but me.”

“Well, I know it doesn’t fit your timetable, but maybe we just take a break and see if my interest returns. Like I said, I want to help you, and hopefully that will be enough. But for now, all I know is that I’ve reached my limit with you.”

“Fine,” she said. I’d never seen the arrogant Queen pout before, but the expression looked cute on her. She lifted the dress over her head, thankfully covering up her body before my dick had any more reactions. “I will continue to work on my formula—there are some side effects that I should probably deal with—and in the meantime, you will remain celibate until your desire for me returns.”

Celibate…?

“Uh, not so fast,” I said, catching her before she could get to the door. “No one said anything about staying celibate. You really should do more research on men.”

The look she gave me must be programmed into women’s DNA—a genetic ability to show the scorn they felt for men at times like this.

“If anything, I should be having more sex. More distractions from the memory of your boring pussy.” I almost lost it as the words left me, but managed to keep myself looking serious. “I would recommend the return of the Workers Jia and Michelle, and maybe even the addition of Alexander’s Worker Roxy. They should be able to help me through this difficult period of adjustment.”

Queen Wendy stared at me for a long time. “You haven’t gone back to lying, have you Leopold Takayama?”

“Of course not. We’ve moved past that, don’t you remember? I’m completely—and honestly—on your side, but I can’t control the genetic imperatives of my gender. I’m really sorry.”

My logic seemed to satisfy her. She gave me a quick, curt nod and then vanished through the door, the giant guards trailing in her wake.

Roxy’s lovely freckled tits bounced in front of my face as she rode me. Jia and Michelle flanked her, naked and gorgeous. They weren’t joining in at the moment, but I had posed them just right to always keep them in view; a perfect tableau of lust and beauty.

I’d also put them there to block my sight of Queen Wendy, who stalked back and forth at the foot of the bed, watching the proceedings with eagle eyes. She didn’t spy from the other room any longer, because her “experiments” had moved past cataloging reactions from a distance. Now she hovered over me and whichever girl I was with, desperate to scoop up any stray bit of DNA that escaped without being “tainted” by one of the Workers.

I’d had to expand the load of bullshit I’d fed her earlier, putting myself in an even more precarious spot by telling her that free-thinking men like me always had to cum in or on their partners. I had some support there at least, since one of Queen Alexander’s kinks was the same. In his case, it was about his ego and declaring his semen too precious to be wasted, but whatever his reason, he’d given me license to do the same. There would be no “spilling of my seed on the ground,” as I remembered the quote from somewhere. It was the worst lie yet, because it was easy to refute, but so far it had held up under Wendy’s protests.

The strange thing was, the threat of getting caught in such a blatant lie had made me hornier than I’d been in years. Sort of the same rush as stealing Workers, but magnified. I’d had some combination of Jia, Michelle, and Roxy in bed with me constantly since I’d first decided to oppose Wendy, and every thrust into one of the Workers was like a “fuck you” to the exasperated Queen.

“Mmm, that feels incredible Roxy,” I said, strictly for Wendy’s benefit. “Get ready, all of you…yeah…uhhh…thirty-two, now!”

With the kind of mechanical precision that only a Worker could exhibit, Roxy squealed in a real-sounding orgasm and rose up off my throbbing dick. Michelle reached behind us and took ahold of my glistening shaft just as it emerged from Roxy’s soaked pussy. As the first spurts of cream burst from the tip, tiny Jia leaned over, her hair fanning out over my stomach, and her open mouth aimed right between the tunnel of Roxy’s spread legs. With the skill of a master marksman, Michelle aimed my cock at its target, and jets of cum flew right to Jia’s outstretched tongue. I was too caught up in the sensations to look for Queen Wendy, but I thought I heard her groan of disappointment as my cum was once again contaminated by the hot mouths and pussies of my playmates.

I took a moment to enjoy the feeling of denying the evil Queen the thing she wanted most. But then, just to make sure…

“Thirty-three, ladies,” I said.

In a scene worthy of any of the bukkake vids I’d sold to Queen Alexander, all three naked girls scooped up whatever blobs of cum they could find, and either smeared it over their tits or sucked it off their fingers. The sound from Wendy was more of a growl this time.

“Up.” The Queen’s dark fingers laced through Roxy’s copper hair, and she pulled the unresisting Worker off the bed.

“You, too,” she said, pointing at Jia. “Both of you.”

Alone on the bed now, I laid back with my arms behind my head in a pose of contented relaxation. Inside though, I was on edge imagining what the volatile Queen would do next.

Wendy was naked, like she was most of the time now. She planted her hands on her hips and stared down at me. “I need a report on your progress, Leopold Takayama. Are you ready to resume our sexual interactions?”

“Uhh, no, I don’t think so,” I said. “The thought of us together still feels pretty boring.”

I expected her to stop and ponder that for a while, but she seemed to be ready for that exact response. “Very well. Then you’ve left me no choice.”

I didn’t like how that sounded. “What do you mean—?” But the Queen had already turned away.

She said something through the door. Her guards moved aside as four male Technicians entered, carrying trays and tubs of equipment. I scrambled back on the bed until my head was against the wall.

“What’s going on?”

“My timetable cannot stand any more delays,” Wendy said. “Sometimes, even in a partnership like ours, one of the partners must be sacrificed for the greater good of the mission. Like Marine Colonel Evan Parker rushing back into the failing nuclear reactor and exposing himself to deadly radiation, so that heroic FBI Agent Digg Derringer could get free and stop the missile launch.”

There was nowhere for me to run. I knew that from the months that I’d been trapped here. Queen Wendy was in one of her moods where she would never change her mind, so I didn’t try to bluster or argue as two of the guards took my arms, and one of the Technicians approached me with a wicked-looking needle…

I needed to get up. I was late.

Late for…something. It was hard to recall. But I knew I shouldn’t still be in bed, enjoying the feeling of a gorgeous woman riding my dick.

The only problem was, I didn’t know how to tell Elise that. How could I convince her to stop sliding her hot pussy up and down my rigid cock. It felt so incredible that I was ready to just forget everything else and let her keep going. I mean, what could possibly be more important than the pleasure we were giving each other?

Just a few more minutes…I knew I wouldn’t last much longer. Nothing was better than cumming inside a hot, wet pussy. Nothing in the world could—

Fuck.

Nothing in the world. Whatever dream I’d been enjoying evaporated as thoughts of the larger world intruded on my intimate little fantasy. The entire fucking planet was in danger, and the last ingredient for carrying out the evil plot was…me. A very specific part of me. The part that I was ready to let loose inside a tight, slippery pussy any second now.

Clearing my mind took more mental strength than I thought I could muster, but slowly the real situation came into focus.

I was still in my prison room, I could tell by the sounds and smells. And I really was being ridden by a hot cunt. The bed frame squeaked in a steady rhythm. My cock was so hard it was almost painful, but the discomfort couldn’t override the feeling of slick flesh rubbing up and down my shaft.

“Bring that beaker over here. I feel him swelling inside me, a clear indication that he’s ready to ejaculate.”

Queen Wendy’s voice brought it crashing together. She’d drugged me, and drugged my dick, and told me that I could be as bored as I wanted, but she was going to get more samples out of me. That’s when everything had gone dark.

I pried my eyes open, and sure enough, the beautiful Queen was riding me with a purpose, her fabulous tits bouncing as she tried her hardest to milk my precious DNA. She was leaning back, turned toward her Technicians, who stood by with bottles and towels and whatever else they might need to collect my pearly treasure. I had a perfect view of the dark lips of her pussy riding up and down my cock, and had to remind myself again of the consequences if I gave in. I’d cum inside her so many times already that it seemed almost unnatural to be holding back, but…desperate times and all.

The rest of the room was full of people, probably more than had ever been in here at one time. The number of Technicians had doubled, plus the six giant guards, and off to one side, my three beautiful former bedmates. Queen Wendy must have forgotten about them in the chaos, because they were still naked, standing silently and watching the proceedings on the bed.

Something tickled on my arm, and I looked sideways to see a blood pressure cuff. Wires spilled off to the side from the sensors attached to my skin. I looked like one of Wendy’s experiments in her secret lab, being monitored for my reaction during sex.

“What happened? Why is he…?” She turned to face me, never losing her steady rhythm up and down my dick. “Ahh…interesting. That sedative should have lasted longer. No matter, it gave the neural stimulants time to work.” She turned back to her minions, “30 more cc’s of the A6 formula.”

That’s when I noticed the IV on the other arm. When I tried to move, I found my wrist locked to the bed frame.

“That extra dose should have you ready to ejaculate any moment now,” she said, putting her hands on my chest for leverage, and bouncing her tight body even faster on my iron cock.

She just might have been right. As the Technician pushed the plunger into my IV something rushed through my veins, cold at first, then burning hot. Sweat broke out on my skin, and I felt every soft scrape of the sheets on my back. The breeze of the air conditioning washed over my bare legs. And above it all, the magic feeling of her Queenly pussy squeezing and sliding and pulsing around me. The sensations running from my cock to my brain were overwhelming, threatening to batter me back into unconsciousness.

I almost wished that I could pass out again. With this kind of pharmaceutical help, and with her accumulated knowledge of what it took to get me off, there was no way I could resist Queen Wendy much longer. Despite my best efforts, she was going to win.

Best efforts…yeah, right.

I’d tried to delay as much as I could, but ultimately I hadn’t had any plan to completely end her crazy plot to take over all the Workers of the world. There’d been a dim hope that if I could just hold her back long enough, that something would happen to turn the tables. I should have known better, and the part of me that was still a Bagger screamed in my head at how stupid I’d been, waiting instead of acting.

Maybe it was the scope of things that had held me back. My father was the one with the world-shaking ideas, not me. I stole one Worker at a time, and took them from one colony to another. That had been enough for me. Saving humanity had never been part of my thought process, which was probably why Queen Wendy had beat me at every turn. She was playing for much higher stakes than me, and the lessons she’d learned from Queen Trevor had made her as bold and as ruthless as any of the worst movie villains.

Meanwhile, I’d been smirking behind her back because I’d tricked her into letting me fuck three Workers instead of her. Only now was I realizing how insignificant the whole thing had been.

Fuck she felt so good.

Wendy had always been fit and athletic, but since we’d started having sex she’d been obsessively working on her pelvic muscles. Her pussy squeezed me like a vice, and the pressure in my gut built until I was teetering on the brink. My breath was coming faster, and off to my right, a machine agreed with me, beeping along.

Annoyed at my feeling of helplessness, and not quite ready to give up, I jerked my free arm, the one with the sensors and BP cuff, yanking the wires loose from all the equipment.

“Leave it,” Wendy ordered, as her Technicians rushed forward. “He’s almost there.” She squeezed tighter around me and gave me a sneer of satisfaction. She knew she’d won.

At least the damn beeping had stopped. My vision was blurring as all of my senses focused on my cock and the overwhelming need to let go. My only hope now was that when the damn burst, I’d flood this bitch’s pussy with so much fucking cum that she’d float right off the bed and drown in an ocean of white.

My free hand was above my head, where it had landed after I jerked the sensors loose. As I squirmed around, waiting for the inevitable, it brushed up against something hard. Between the pillow and the mattress was the canister of apiscene that I’d salvaged from the Land Cruiser. I’d kept it hidden all these weeks waiting for some vague need.

It seemed like that need was now. It was all or nothing time, and who knew, maybe the strange chemical would contaminate Wendy’s latest sample enough to make it unusable. I had no hope that it would solve anything, but in desperation, I turned the nozzle to full and let the sweet-smelling gas escape into the room.

I looked to see if Wendy had noticed, but the Queen had something else on her mind. Her eyes were closed, and her mouth gaped open, and she made that same wheezing, moaning sound that had come to mean that she was on the brink of her own major orgasm. The current situation might have held her back for a while, but her natural sensuality seemed to be breaking out.

I vaguely hoped that she wouldn’t give in. That her robotic, scientific Queen persona would regain control because every time she’d cum while fucking she’d been—

“Ahh! Oh, yes!”

That was as expressive as the Queen ever got, but her physical reaction was a hundred times stronger than her words. As her orgasm ripped through her she slammed down on me, grinding her hips while her tight pussy pulsed around my cock. Her legs squeezed against me and she gripped my shoulders, her whole body locked in a rictus of pleasure.

It was too much. Finally, finally too much. The world was about to end, and I couldn’t stop it. But I didn’t care anymore as I heaved up off the bed and exploded inside the treacherous Queen. Shame and pleasure blurred together as I surrendered. Win or lose, at least the struggle was finally over.

“What! Is he…? Get over here! You, come here! No! This side!”

Queen Wendy hadn’t completely succumbed to pleasure, it seemed. The thing that she’d been waiting for was finally happening, and she could give up her own orgasm to see that the job got done. It made me mad that she could so easily toss away the same emotions that I’d just surrendered to.

I knew that if my Father had seen this whole thing, he’d be giving me his signature look of disappointment. Mother, too. Even Elise, who’d bought into the Grand Plan just as much as my parents. I wanted to tell them that I was sorry, that I hadn’t meant for any of this to happen…

I turned my head away from what Wendy and her technicians were doing. My whole lower half felt disembodied. Maybe it was the drugs, or maybe it was me trying to disassociate from everything. I tipped my head to the side and saw my three girls standing just where they’d been this whole time, watching everything silently and without expression.

It was too bad that they’d been left out. Whenever I came I always liked to “share the wealth” among them, even though they didn’t have the capacity to appreciate it. But maybe…

“Jia, Michelle, Roxy, thirty-three, now.” I said it without even knowing why. Just one of those random notions that hits your brain and exits your mouth before you can stop it.

What happened next didn’t seem real. I watched like it was one of the pre-Separation movies of a type called slapstick. All three women broke out of their stasis like I’d flipped a switch. In a group, they rushed to the bed, shouldering Technicians out of the way.

Wendy was squatting over my legs, watching my cum slowly leak from her swollen pussy into a beaker held by a minion, so she didn’t notice anything until Michelle stuck her hand into the stream and collected a pool of creamy white in her palm. She moved to let Roxy in next, stepping back to smear the sticky goo over her tits.

By the time Roxy had moved away, the Queen finally caught on, and slapped her hand over her mound, keeping any more from escaping. Denied getting any from that source, Jia went after another technician, who was using a metal instrument to scrape cum from my leg into a petri dish. She swirled inside the dish with her fingers and immediately stuck them in her mouth.

I couldn’t help it. After the ups and downs of the day…hell, the week, or the month, or the fucking year that I’d been trapped in this shit…I laid back on the bed and laughed louder and longer than I had in my entire life.

Wendy was shouting, and the bed was rocking. Something metal hit the floor. Because Workers don’t scream or grunt or whine unless they’re told to, the rest of the sounds were just heavy breathing. It didn’t matter though, because I tuned it all out.

I was ready. I didn’t think Wendy was going to forgive me this time. She might have me killed, but I was done caring. I just wanted to drift away and forget it all.

A needle jabbed into my arm, but I hardly flinched. At least I was getting my wish…

I felt the bed move before I was completely awake. Someone had sat down. Then there was movement on the other side. No one attacked, but my senses had gone to full alert. I cracked open my eyelids, trying to see without being blinded by the glare of the overhead light.

Even fresh from sleep, it didn’t take me long to figure out who was sitting there.

“Michelle?”

“Leopold. I…I need…”

She stopped talking and stared at me, but just the fact that she’d talked was freaking me out. I sat up, and sure enough on the other side was tiny Jia. Both girls were dressed in the colony uniform, but in a red color I’d never seen before.

“What’s going on, girls?” I asked.

“We…we needed help. And you’re the person that we thought could help us.”

“Wait, you needed help?” Workers didn’t need anything, they did what they were told, and took what they were given.

“I don’t…we don’t…understand, Leopold. Leo. What’s happening to us?”

This was getting stranger by the second. I checked the door, but no one was peeking inside. I looked up at the cameras in the corners of the room. No way to tell if Wendy was watching.

“Did Queen Wendy send you in here?”

“No.” Both girls shook their heads.

“Did Queen Wendy tell you to say that if I asked?”

“No, Leo. We both woke up, and I felt…confused…and we started talking about…strange things. And every time I said something to Jia, I knew that I shouldn’t have said it, but…but I said it anyway. We don’t understand…”

Michelle reached out toward me, but then hesitated and pulled her hand back. When I looked closer, I could see she was trembling, and when she turned to face me, her eyes were filled with fear.

I’d never seen a Worker acting like this. Something was up, but I needed the whole story. “Girls, come here,” I said. I leaned back against the headboard, tucking the thin sheet around my lower half, then opening my arms, waving for them to come closer. “Number twelve.”

I got my confirmation that something was wrong when neither girl jumped to follow my order. Looking like the startled wild rabbits I sometimes caught in the headlights of my Land Cruiser, both women slowly crawled up onto the bed, and into the circle of my arms. I managed to position them so that they settled against me, both their heads on my chest and my arms draped protectively over their shoulders. Like I’d hoped, both of them snuggled closer, and their breathing slowed a bit.

“It’s OK,” I said. “Now, tell me where you were when this started.”

“In our room,” Jia said. “The one that Mother told us to stay in.”

“It was during our scheduled sleep period. I woke up, feeling dizzy.”

“And I woke up, too.”

“Mother had said that if we felt anything strange, that we should call the Orderlies,” Michelle said.

“But then I said…I said…” Jia looked like she was on the verge of panic, which was impossible.

“What did you say, Jia?” I asked, giving her small shoulders a comforting squeeze.

“I said no. I said that I was feeling better and that I didn’t want to have more needles stuck in me, or lay on the cold exam table. I just wanted to stay there and go back to sleep.”

“And at first I didn’t understand why she was saying that, but then I felt it, too,” Michelle said. “Do you understand, Leopold? I didn’t want to do what Mother had commanded.”

The thing was, I did understand, but I just couldn’t wrap my head around it. No worker was capable of going against their Queen. Never. Even under the effects of alcohol or drugs, Workers could never disobey.

“It’s OK,” I repeated. “So when you felt confused, why did you come here?”

“Because we talked about it, and we remembered that when we’re with Mother, things sometimes hurt or feel uncomfortable, but when we’re with you, we feel…good. We decided that feeling good was better.”

I looked down at Michelle, tucked under my left arm. The things I’d done to her in this bed weren’t always meant to feel good for her; they’d been for the sole purpose of doing what their Queen wanted. But somehow, what I’d done to her body must have felt better than what Wendy did to them in her lab. I remembered seeing them lying on bare tables, wired to machines, and a renewed hatred bubbled up in me for their cold-hearted Queen.

“When we felt good earlier, we were having sex,” Jia said. Her small hand wandered down my stomach toward the edge of the sheet. “So we came here for sex. Number sixteen always felt the best for me.”

I managed to catch her elbow and pull her hand away before she found my swelling cock. It certainly wasn’t the time for sex, not after the bomb they’d just dropped. “But sex isn’t the only thing that feels good,” I said, hugging them tighter. “Aren’t you feeling good right now? Just being close like this?”

Michelle bit her lower lip, as her atrophied decision circuits poured over what I’d just said. Finally, she nodded. “Not as much as number five, but…yes.”

“Yes,” Jia agreed.

“Good. So let’s stay like this for a while, and feel good together.”

Talking to these two was kind of like talking to a normal Worker, but in reverse. With a Worker, you used logic to force them to rationally agree with what you said. With these two…Ex-Workers?…it was the opposite. They seemed to base their new decision-making on emotions instead of facts, so I would appeal to their feelings instead.

I wanted to question them further, but I could see Jia’s eyelids flutter as her eyes got heavy. Michelle’s breathing was getting deeper and steadier as she relaxed against me. They’d slept the same number of hours, at the same time, every night of their lives. Couple that with an adrenaline hangover and a scary new mental freedom, and they were probably exhausted.

Not me. I was wide awake with the implications of what they’d said. Somehow, these two women had thrown off the effects of the Separation, and had defied their Queen’s orders.

It had to be Wendy’s experiments, I decided. She’d talked about all of the “treatments” she’d given these two women since they’d become my regular bed partners, including several versions of her secret serum that was supposed to permanently enslave her Workers.

While both of them drifted off in my arms, I went back over every bit of our time together, trying to figure out what had caused them to…to what? Did they Un-Separate, or were they just detached from Wendy for the moment? If they went through a renewal, would they be back to themselves, or was this change permanent?

And had I been the catalyst? Had Wendy been right about my Double-Moon genes? Could I pass on my immunity? If that was the case, would I have to continue having sex with them to keep them free?

And why now? Why tonight?

Then I remembered yesterday’s fiasco. In my last, weak attempt to derail Queen Wendy’s plans. I’d opened the valve on my canister of apiscene, and released the entire thing into the room. In the past, whenever I’d reprogrammed a stolen Worker, I’d used the gas to “reset” their brain, blanking everything to get it ready for their new Queen’s control. Had something like that happened with these two? Or had the apiscene, combined with Wendy’s drugs, actually freed them from being Workers?

When I’d used it before, my reprogramming method had made each Worker into a blank canvas, ready to be painted by a new master. This time, had I completely ripped away the canvas itself, allowing the real person behind it to show through?

Time must have slowed to a crawl, because I could swear I’d been mulling things over for a day before the door to my prison flew open and a very pissed-off Queen Wendy stormed in.

“What are they doing here!? Jia, Michelle, get up!” For the first time, she looked less than perfect. Her hair was hastily pulled back, and her white shift dress was twisted and wrinkled. She swayed on her feet briefly, before snapping into her normal, rigid posture. There was still an aura of command about her, but I was seeing her in a new light, as someone who’d gotten in over their head and was scrambling to get things back to safe territory.

“They came to me in the night,” I said. The girls had woken up, but instead of getting to their feet, they hugged me tighter. “They’re not like they were yesterday, Wendy. They won’t jump to your orders anymore.”

Queen Wendy’s eyes went wide. I knew how she felt—like one of the fundamental laws of the universe had just been shattered. “They’re my Workers, and they’ll do what I tell them,” she said. The way she crossed her arms and stomped her foot made her look like a Moonie child having a tantrum. “Why are you smiling?” she asked. “Was this your doing? I always suspected that there wasn’t any ‘rogue Queen’ stealing Workers. It was you, and somehow you’ve stolen these two.”

“Oh, come on,” I said. “How could I have done that? I’m a Moon, which means I have zero control over anyone, and no one has control over me. It’s only you Queens that can do that shit. You tested my DNA…am I a Queen in disguise?”

Wendy had calmed down when I answered back, but I wasn’t sure that she accepted my logic. We were definitely in unmapped territory, but when it came down to it, she was the one who’d been playing with genetics for years.

“I’d guess it was your experiments that cause this,” I said. “When you screw with things you don’t understand, there are unexpected consequences.”

“That’s not true. I understand more than anyone else in the world,” she said. “There must have been an error by one of my Technicians. I’ll get to the bottom of it, but until then, these two need to be analyzed.” She turned to her wall of guards. “You, you, you, and you, take the two women to Lab 4B and restrain them there. No exceptions to this command, do you understand?”

All of my hulking guards had filed in behind their Queen and taken up their standard position blocking the door. It had become such a routine in my life that I’d barely noticed. “Yes, Mother,” the four chosen ones said in unison, as they converged on the bed. Michelle and Jia clung to me, squeaking in sudden fear.

I let go of the two women and rolled up to my knees, then stood up at the end of the bed, ready to jump on the four men, even stark naked. But because of Wendy’s hurried command, they didn’t respond to me at all. That was one of the problems with controlling others; if there weren’t commands for every single possibility, it left gaps that people like me could exploit. In taking her guards’ attention off me, and putting it on the two women with “no exceptions,” she’d made me essentially invisible to her minions.

I stepped down from the bed and moved among them, twisting and weaving around their bulk as I relieved them of their tasers. They kept mindlessly reaching for the girls while I ducked behind them, and suddenly I was face to face with Queen Wendy. Her mouth opened in surprise, as I grabbed her arm and tried to pull her to me. She struggled, reminding me how fast and athletic she was. Lucky for me that crafty and experienced can beat fast and athletic nine times out of ten. Tightening my grip on her arm, I swept her feet out from under her and used my hip as leverage to throw her to the floor.

By then the other two guards had seen what I was doing, and their programming was still all about keeping me in check. They rushed in just as I straddled Wendy’s back, and held a stolen taser to her neck. “Tell them to stop!” I grabbed her hair and pulled her head around so she could see the two guards coming after me. I clicked the trigger on the taser, getting it close to her ear so she could hear the electric crackle.

“Everyone stop!” she said, and all six men froze in place. She looked up at me, teeth bared, breathing heavily. “Now what?”

“Now, we have a situation that in the movies is called a ‘standoff.’ Have you ever heard that word?”

“Yes.”

“And what usually happens in a standoff?” I asked. She squirmed under me for a moment, but I sat squarely on her lower back. She might be strong, but she wasn’t budging my ninety kilos from that position.

“Mostly in a standoff, there’s lots of looking from one person to another. People clench their fists and grit their teeth. The music gets louder.”

I sighed. It was so hard to get through to anyone except another Moon. It was like we were three different species now, each shaped by their unique environment. “But what happens at the end?”

“Someone moves. Someone else reacts. Usually, there’s lots of violence.”

“Right. Lots of violence. Is that what you want? Because if your people keep coming, I swear there will be fucking oceans of violence, with you caught in the middle.”

She squirmed again like she might actually throw me off, but I settled my weight back onto her firm butt, pinning her hips and keeping her helpless. In reality, it was me who felt helpless, since I didn’t see any way out of the massive hole I’d dug for myself. I’d assaulted a Queen in her own colony, and even though I had the upper hand now, there was no way I could keep it. Too many things could go wrong.

“What is your plan then, Leopold Takayama? How do you hope to get out of…?” Wendy’s eyes went wide, like she was suddenly confused. “Out of…?” Her mouth hung open, as her question died on her lips.

Something wasn’t right. The normally dynamic Queen looked like she was having trouble even keeping her eyes focused. A shudder passed through her, then all of the tension left her body and her head sank to the floor.

“Wendy?” I touched her neck, feeling her pulse still beating strongly.

“Who are…?” The Queen’s eyes rolled up and she passed out.

Like a switch had been flipped, all of the guards in the room charged, ignoring the cowering Jia and Michelle. Strong hands gripped my shoulders, my arms, anything that they could reach, and almost as one they heaved me off from their Queen. I was too stunned to bring the taser around and try to fight them off. Instead, I flew across the linoleum floor, bare skin scraping painfully as I pinwheeled toward the far wall.

I still had the taser in hand as I rolled to my knees, waiting for the follow-up attack, but the guards were circled around their motionless Queen, all of them trying to pick her up at the same time. When one of them finally took charge and lifted Wendy in his thick arms, the other five flipped to the next instruction in their list and turned their attention to me.

Queen Wendy must have had a failsafe in place; instructions to be executed if she was ever incapacitated or injured. Whether the paranoid Queen had always had it, or whether she’d installed it just for my benefit didn’t really matter at the moment. What did matter, was it looked like she’d added a revenge trigger to the list. She wouldn’t be happy just being carried away to safety; she wanted to make sure that whoever put her in that condition was punished.

I knew how strong and fast her guards were because I’d tested their responses early in my captivity. Taking on five of them, even if they weren’t all armed, wasn’t going to end well for me. The only difference between then and now was that in their haste they’d heaved me within spitting distance of the door. As quickly as I realized it, I was on my feet and running.

The rumble of heavy treads behind me said that the guards weren’t thrilled about me leaving. I got through the door and slammed it shut. The lock clicked just as the first body slammed into it on the other side. If the Queen had been a little less detailed, and a little less paranoid, their huge bodies might have broken through, but Wendy had prepared for everything when it came to imprisoning an unpredictable Bagger like me, including a reinforced steel door and triple bolts to keep it shut.

I sank to the floor, feeling the cold linoleum on my bare ass. After a minute my arms shook as the adrenaline ebbed out of me. I wanted to sit and think, to regroup and get my bearings after the sudden frenzy, but the steady pounding on the door was making it impossible. The giant Workers would never stop obeying their Queen’s final directions until they beat their bodies raw against the steel door.

One thing was crystal clear though: I was free. After all that time at the mercy of Queen Wendy, I could finally leave. I could get ahold of my parents, and Elise, and tell them everything. The Guard would come down on Wendy like a hammer. Her, and Alexander, and that asshole Gregor. But that would only happen if I could get all the way out of UCLA, maybe out of the cluster entirely. There was no way of telling how Wendy’s final directive would play out among her Workers, and among the other colonies in the L.A. area.

Regardless of what occurred later, I decided that the first step in my escape plan was to not be naked. I was headed for the shelves to look for clothes when a sound caught my attention. The steady pounding of the guards was still going strong, but on top of that was another note. Two notes. Michelle and Jia had added their voices to the cacophony. They had been scared and confused before all of the events from tonight, and now after all the screaming and violence, I’d abandoned them.

Guilt hit me in the gut. Even if they were just Workers, even if their new freedom was just temporary, they were relying on me to help them. It was a strange feeling, and it froze me in my tracks.

All my life, I’d only depended on myself; on my wits and my free will. I’d never brought anyone else into my secret existence because I knew what might happen to them if I was ever caught. I was willing to risk my own skin for the thrill of stealing Workers, but not someone that I cared about. I’d wanted to tell Elise so many times before—the two of us would have been an incredible team—but I hadn’t felt right about putting her in danger.

Now though, through no fault of their own, the two Workers on the other side of that door had become important to me. Not because they’d become my favorite bed partners—I’d learned long ago that no matter how a Worker acted during sex, she was still a Worker, and at the end of it all, she hadn’t really felt anything for me. What had made Michelle and Jia so special to me was the fact that it was my DNA that had freed them from their Queen’s control. I’d been the catalyst that had done the impossible, and together we’d broken the unbreakable bond. That made me directly responsible for everything that was going to happen to them from that moment forward. It was a stronger connection than even what I felt for my sister Zuzanna, and look at the stupid things I’d done for her.

So when I heard the two girls wailing from behind the locked door, all thoughts of escape fled. Instead, I tore through the room, looking for weapons or some other way to handle the guards.

In the end, my plan wasn’t perfect, but it was all I had. I moved one of the metal shelves over and propped it against the wall closest to the door. When I unlocked the last bolt, the latch gave way and the door burst open under the weight of the guards. I stepped back, ready to run, but my calculations held as the heavy door wedged against the sturdy metal rack and stopped, with only a narrow gap now connecting the two rooms. An arm pushed through, then a shoulder, then the determined face of the first guard. The opening allowed only one of the giant Workers to squeeze through at a time, and as each one pushed into the room, he got the shock of a taser right to the neck.

The sixth guard still had the limp Queen in his arms and couldn’t get past the unconscious bodies of his comrades. I finally had to move the shelf and let the door open fully for him to get through. I stepped back to defend myself, but instead of attacking he made a beeline past me, headed for the corridor outside. I tried to go after him, but hot on his heels Michelle and Jia ran in, still wailing in fear and headed right for me.

In my split second of indecision, the guard managed to get the outer door open and ran off with the unconscious Queen. Wendy and Jia charged at me, but at the last moment both of them pulled up short, still crying and upset, but unsure what to do. With all of my other options gone, I dropped the taser to the floor and opened my arms. This time they understood the gesture, hugging themselves to me with an intensity that only a free, emotional person could muster.

I squeezed them both, resting my cheek on Michelle’s soft hair. I was still naked, and because Jia didn’t know there was any other reality, she reached for my dick, which made me yelp. I had to assure them that everything was fine, and that she hadn’t done anything wrong as I plucked her hand away.

I sent them off to find something to wear. They moved slowly, pausing to constantly look back at me for reassurance. When they reached the shelves and started pawing through the clothing, I got a chance to look around the room, taking in the chaos that I’d caused.

I was free, but still trapped in Wendy’s colony. I had two Ex-Workers, who knew nothing about the real world or even how to make a logical decision, depending on me to keep them safe. Queen Wendy had been unconscious when she’d been carried out of the room, but who knew when she would wake up, or what kind of revenge she would seek for the way I’d attacked her and disrupted her plans.

Michelle stepped in front of me, dressed in a light blue version of the colony uniform. She reached out to me, but when I didn’t respond, she dropped her hand to her side. “Now what, Leo?”

Yeah, now what?

“I have no fucking clue.”