The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

It was very cold outside. Winters are hard in Chicago. Those homeless who don’t stay in the shelters overnight don’t last long. Their bodies are found in alleys and in doorways, blue-white and frosted, frozen over with miserable expressions caught on their faces. The wind cutting a vicious current around him, a man in a threadbare coat and woolen cap stumbled out of the Henry Street Soup Kitchen and sluggishly made his way down the closest alley. He groaned softly as he began looking through a trash bin, hoping to find some bottles. Sometimes people still threw bottles out with their garbage instead of recycling them. If someone were persistent, he might make a few bucks. It wasn’t a half-bad living.

The homeless man had already located two good bottles when a great shining light and loud pop! exploded behind him.

The derelict jumped and smashed the top of his skull against the overhanging trash bin lid. He cursed. The bottles in his hands fell and shattered across the street. “God fucking dammit to hell!!” he screamed and held his tender head. Still cursing like a sailor, he turned around and saw a weirdly dressed guy leaning against the alley wall.

Dude, the fellow thought. It’s Michael Jackson. With better skin.

The guy—young, white, dark-haired, and with a thin mustache—wore the tightest set of clothes the homeless man had ever seen. He was covered in skin-tight blue-and-red spandex from the waist down. The muscles in his legs and ass were as clearly defined as if he wore nothing at all. Above these “pants,” for lack of a better word, was a vest of similar material. It was sleeveless and cut in an open-front style that left the guy’s chest and arms totally bare. It was a suit, in other words, designed to leave no doubt as to its wearer’s physical charms. He looked like a whore from Hollywood Boulevard.

“Where am I?” this apparition said. He held a metal device in one hand. It was shaped kind of like a football. The derelict didn’t say anything, and the guy got upset. “Where the hell am I?!” he screamed.

The bum licked his chapped lips. “Uh, well, dude… you’re in Chicago, man.”

“Chicago?” The male-whore looked at himself, then at the device he held. “I’m back. I made it back!”

He did a short jump of celebration that freaked the hell out of the already freaked-out derelict. He began to back away but ran up against the front of the trash bin. The whore heard him and stared at him again. “What day is it?”

“Uh, it’s Tuesday… no, wait. Last night was stew night. It’s Wednesday. It’s Wednesday, man.”

The male-whore shook his head. “It’s been a week,” he said, talking to himself. “It’s been a week here at least.” He raised the metal device, and the homeless man cringed, afraid the guy was going to hit him. Instead, the guy looked at a small panel on its side.

“I have to get to the Partners. I can still warn them.” The device in his hands hummed.

He stopped. “I can’t use this yet,” he said, more to himself than to the other occupant of the alley. “It’ll just take me back.”

He looked at the derelict. “She has to be stopped,” he said to him. “She’ll take everyone in the city if she can.”

“Uh, yeah… whatever you say, dude.” The homeless man looked toward the mouth of the alley for help.

“I gotta go.” Without another word, the male-whore took off at a run down the alley and out onto the street. The homeless man heard someone shout at the guy to put on some clothes.

“Weird, dude,” he whispered, then looked down and remembered his broken bottles.

“Shit.” Only seven A.M., and already it was a bad day.

The girls were being processed.

A beautiful black woman with smooth coffee-tone skin knelt tremblingly in front of Sandra. She was holding her smoothly shaven head flat to the floor while her ass stayed high and in the air. Sandra was in the same position. All the slaves were. After the Mistress’ soldiers handed them over to their interim Processing Masters, they were marched to a large metal hallway—porcelain-white plastic edges outlined every corner and groove—and ordered to get into line.

They were shouted at: “Heads down, sluts! Get your asses up! Spread ‘em! SPREAD ‘EM!!”

And, of course, they had, complying instantly. They were as obedient as the slaves they were. As obedient as the slaves they wanted to be.

The Masters liked having them with their asses in the air. Sandra had seen several lucky sluts get fondled and their cheeks slapped. A few even got their breasts squeezed and their cunts probed. She desperately wished one of the guards would probe her needy, longing cunt. The slave pressed her burning hot face to the cold floor, her lips unconsciously widening and kissing, her tongue poking through to gently lick at the glassy surface. Sandra’s Masters could do such incredible things. They had already done so many things to her, and so quickly, that it was hard to keep track of them all.

As a doctor—and the slave still thought of herself as a doctor, at least part of the time—Sandra knew how impossible these things were. Her Masters possessed frighteningly advanced medical technology. What was truly disturbing, though, was how offhandedly they employed it. They performed miracles with the informality of automobile mechanics on an assembly line. She was, in fact, on an assembly line.

Following her ecstatic, hours-long ravishing by Masters Bors—and the slave Sandra shuddered in recollection of the things done to her, the way he (He!) had used her slavebody, the way His touching had made her feel so very complete, so helpless, and so lovingly needy—she had been put in with another group of slaves. Sandra remembered crying, begging to be allowed to stay and serve Him, but in the end He dismissed her, as was His right and pleasure. Sandra knew she should be ashamed, humiliated, and angry, but all she truly felt was satisfaction (She had pleased her Master!), happiness (Master Bors had given her worthless slavebody so much pleasure!), and, of course, absolute need (Oh please! please, wouldn’t He take pity on a poor slave and use her again! or someone? any one?). She was merely a slave, a willing convenience for any Man’s glorious Seed.

Her slavebody still juiced in physical memory of the way He had filled her slavecunt.

What happened afterward was amazing and almost impossible for the physician still inside Sandra to fathom. She and the sluts she was with began “processing.” They were anally and vaginally probed. The procedure involved an electrical stimulus that hours later still had Sandra twitching. Next, all the hair from their bodies was dissolved by a chemical shower. A second and third immersion process coated the slaves with a slick, oily substance that had yet to dry. After that, they were lined up against a wall, face first, while a Guard came around to secure them in place. Sandra hadn’t known and wondered at the time why the Masters kept them chained all the time. None of the slaves wanted to escape. Not anymore, anyway. Regardless of their feelings, though, curved ceramic plates positioned themselves over their wrists and ankles, waists and necks, holding the girls completely fixed in place.

Sandra learned why a moment later. Small, transparent tubes emerged from sockets in the wall and injected themselves into her arms and legs. There was no pain. An odd green light shown down on her and the other slaves. Sandra gathered, from what the Masters said as she overheard them speaking, that the light acted as both an analgesic and a sterile field. There was no pain. There was guilt, however, for her inadvertent eavesdropping. Slaves were expected to hear only what was said to them.

They began washing her blood.

Sandra saw the tubes on one side of her fill with red, then the tubes on the other side begin flowing green. It was like dialysis. Blood was taken out and cleaned while another liquid—something alien that caused Sandra to feel very strange—was pumped in to keep up her volume. Instead of the weakness the doctor part of her associated with dialysis, though, this procedure, when her blood was eventually returned to her, left Sandra feeling younger, energized, and vital.

The Masters are removing this slave’s plaque, she realized later, held in place and stunned by the thought. The “cleaning” had apparently destroyed the fatty deposits coating her veins and arteries. Remarkable though that feat alone was, it was only the start. The Masters focused sonic vibrations on her next, along with needle-like pins inserted in various places, to tone and tighten Sandra’s skin.

Chemicals were injected into the soles of her feet. These softened the bones and allowed another machine, a box-like unit that emerged from the floor to envelop her feet, to reshape them.

There was no pain. Her tendons were shortened. Her joints were modified. The cartilage reshaped.

Again, no pain.

Finally, she and the other slaves were bathed in stinging rays of electrifying, purple light that, from the way her Masters spoke, disintegrated the inert, dead matter inside her slave’s body. From the unnecessary inorganics every living creature collected throughout its lifetime to all the minor things modern medicine deliberately put inside human beings to safeguard their health: all were removed, from the fillings in her teeth to the pin in her leg from when she broke it fifteen years earlier.

These things were no longer needed. Toxins were removed. Cancerous cells were obliterated.

As if she were some machine, Sandra found herself refitted for a new life.

She had realized then, for the first time, and she had thought about it ever since, kneeling there, her ass in the air, waiting in line for the next step in her transformation, that she was just a machine now.

A love machine… a sex machine… a fucktoy and pleasure model.

She was all these things and more. She was a slave.

The person she had been was gone.

No, that’s not true, the doctor inside her resisted, shutting her eyes and trying not to feel how her blood was boiling, how much like a bitch in heat she had become. This slave is… is Sandra.

No, that wasn’t right. That didn’t sound right.

She tried again.

Sandra is… is… is a slave, she sobbed, finally, unable to think anything else. Sandra is a slave.

Sandra. Sandra. Poor hairless Sandra.

The problem, she knew with a burst of sudden comprehension, was that Sandra (is a slave) didn’t connect anymore as a name. Sandra… Sandra. No, she had lost her right to that name when she became a slave. Sandra wasn’t so much her name anymore as it was her label… a temporary identification her Masters used.

This slave is a sandra, she thought, and that thought felt better, more natural.

This slave is a sandra. Yes. That was definitely better.

The old Sandra was… was gone. That had been somebody else. Not her.

She… she was just a sandra.

She was just a slave.

The slaves were ordered finally to crawl forward. Masters took hold of the sandra’s wrists and pulled the slave to her feet. She had crawled into a curving, narrow corridor. Circular hatches covered the floor in evenly divided spaces. Over each a pair of dangling manacles descended. The Master lifted the sandra’s arms and attached her wrists to a pair of manacles, as were the black slave’s wrists in front of her and doubtless were the slave’s behind the sandra as well.

Another Technician—another, glorious, manly Master—stood in front of the sandra and told her to open her mouth. The sandra complied, hoping He would deign to use her. Instead, the handsome Man intubated her, inserting a long, narrow tube down her slavethroat. She swallowed eagerly, hoping to be found pleasing. Minutes later the hatch below the sandra’s feet irised open, and she was lowered into a large transparent cylinder filled with bubbling green fluid.

She could still breathe. The tube in her slavemouth provided more than enough air… and something else as well. The slave felt herself becoming sleepy. Through the glass or plastic or whatever it was, the sandra could see other slaves in their own tanks, eyes closed and their lithe forms suspended. Two rows of green tanks stretched off into the distance.

Technician Masters walked back and forth between the tanks keeping track of readouts displayed on monitors.

The sight was… was wonderful.

Beautiful.

The sandra fell into a deep, all-encompassing sleep.

The law firm of Frank, Bennet, Weschler, and Marx had had offices in Chicago for four generations. It was, relatively speaking, a small firm. Less than fifty fulltime attorneys were on staff. Nevertheless, no one within the legal community disputed the agency’s extreme influence. Frank, Bennet had an international reputation; it handled cases for some of the largest corporations in the world. Partners in the firm spoke regularly with consuls and ambassadors while rumor had it that a few were associated with intelligence services like the CIA and NSA. Of course, said the critics, the very fact that this rumor was in circulation disproved its validity. What was better established was that at least one lawyer for Frank, Bennet was a close friend of a recent President of the United States. Another was a retired federal judge who had once seriously been considered for a place on the Supreme Court. Equally prominent attorneys were affiliated with the firm, as were several others not quite so well known but of comparable, and in some cases superior, legal acumen.

The firm occupied offices on the 30th and 31st floors of a major downtown Chicago office building, with branches in cities all over the world. Naturally, wherever they were based, the fees charged by Frank, Bennet were astronomical.

From an outsider’s perspective, even walking into the firm’s main offices was intimidating. The main floor of the building was modern glass and concrete, airy, and more than a little futuristic. Stepping off the elevator on the 30th floor, however (there was no outside access to the 31st), one immediately saw polished teak-paneling and fixtures reminiscent more of the 19th Century than the 21st. Thick, darkly blue carpeting dominated. Antique furniture filled the waiting rooms and offices. Oil paintings of men and women—Frank, Bennet’s Partners, more men than women over the years—covered the walls.

Telephones rang constantly. Assistants moved briskly and confidently. There was an air of competence, power, and prestige. This atmosphere became only more apparent after a visitor took either the stairs or the private elevator to the next floor where the firm’s current Partnership held discussions and conducted their business.

Six of these Partners—four men and two women—and their Associates sat in leather chairs around a large desk and watched as their security guards secured the poachers captured earlier. It was six o’clock in the morning.

The two women sat tied to chairs at the foot of the big table. The bonds they wore were there not so much to prevent them from moving as they were to keep them from sliding to the floor. Both were paralyzed. They had also been stripped. Both stared as blankly forward at the gathered attorneys as a pair of department-store mannequins.

The Partner who had been at the capture gazed upon them.

So this is Celestra, he thought. The poacher was a giant of a woman, at least six-and-a-half feet tall and built proportionally. Her blond hair was plaited and as thick as rope. She was absolutely stunning. Her arms and legs were athletic without being overtly muscular. Her stomach was as flat as an ironing board. Her tan was even everywhere. Her breasts were large and full and stayed upright without the benefit of support. And her nipples … .

“Why are her nipples that color?” he asked. They were as black as polished marbles.

An Associate spoke. “It’s some kind of body modification. We ran a sample of Celestra’s blood for analysis. Her physique’s been chemically altered in several ways. She’s producing elevated levels of pheromones. Her nipples secrete a concentrated form of the same compound.”

Chief Supervisor Bors, a guest of the Firm, sat nearby and nodded. He had changed his clothes to something more appropriate to the milieu, a business jacket and trousers. He still had his inhaler tube, though, and at the mention of Celestra’s pheromones he raised the intake valve to his nose and took an invigorating sniff of the stimulant within. It was a common enough vice on the Colony World of his birth.

“At least one effect is a heightening of personal attraction towards her, regardless of gender,” the Associate concluded.

“Interesting,” another of the Partners said, an older woman in her forties. She was thin and pale and stared at Celestra in undisguised fascination. “Is she a danger to us?”

“No,” the science Associate said. “She’s immobilized. Bound. We doped her with a chemical destabilizer to counteract the pheromones. And she’s been encoded with slave protocols.”

“I’m concerned with that,” another man spoke, a gray-haired man in his fifties. He was the most senior Partner at this meeting. He stood up. “Our Colonist guest here downloaded a second-stage slave program into them.”

He gave a stern look at the stout Colonist Agent, also sitting at the table, who looked down resentfully at his shoes. The elder Partner turned to the science Associate.

“What are the chances of neurological damage? Will either of these girls be able to answer questions?”

The young man shrugged. “There’s no way to know until we start.”

“Then I say we should begin,” the first Partner who had spoken said. He held the small crystal device the Colonist had removed from the hospital yesterday. “Wake that one up first.”

He pointed at the second captive, a smaller yet equally attractive woman. She was thin and had short dark hair. She had nice, well-shaped thighs. The young Partner looked forward to enjoying her later, assuming she was in any condition to properly serve him. And when he had the time. Out of the hundreds of chronal frequencies their projector-relay equipment normally gave them, only one was working. The Firm was receiving complaints from offworld parties wanting to return home. These women should presumably know how to fix the problem. If they hadn’t been damaged.

The Colonist Agent nodded. He approached the brunette and lightly touched the side of her head with his immobilizer. There was a short beep, and the woman was instantly alert and crying.

“Fuck slave!” she screamed, her eyes wild with hunger and passion. “Fuck slave!” She bucked in the chair. Saliva flew from her mouth. “Fuck slave! FUCK SLAVE!”

Everyone jumped back.

“Jesus,” someone whispered. The former soldier strained at her bonds, clearly not intending escape but rather making clear her desire to jump the bones of any person in the room.

“Fuck slave!” she screamed again.

The slave tried to separate her thighs and touch herself. She only became more entangled in the ropes.

“Is she describing herself,” one of the Partners asked, bemusedly, “or is she making a request, do you think?” He looked around at his colleagues, smiling, saw that they hadn’t heard him, and shrugged.

“Dammit to hell,” the elder Partner said, glaring at the Colonist. “Look what you’ve done! She’s ruined.” The desperately needy—and obviously brain-damaged—slave bucked, cried, and shivered.

“Fuck slave! Fuck slave!” Her face was turning bright red with useless exertion.

The first Partner fumed. “We can’t interrogate that. We won’t even be able to sell her.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” the other female Partner in the room said. She was in her mid-thirties. “There has to be a market for mindless sex drones somewhere. For pure animal instinct. Some Client or other will have that taste.”

“Turn her off, will you please,” someone else said. The slave was beginning to bleed from the mouth. She was biting her lip in desperation… probably. It was hard to say for sure. She was struggling so hard, she might easily have ruptured something inside. “Fuck slave!” she screamed, more hoarsely now. Her voice was beginning to crack.

“Wait,” another person said. He was the youngest member of the Firm in the room, an expert on foreign relations in Eastern Europe. “Let me try.”

He stepped around the table and put himself in the slave’s direct line of sight. She immediately focused on him.

“Fuck slave!” she said again.

“Perhaps later,” the Partner replied. “What’s your name, girl?”

“Fuck slave! FUCK SLAVE!” she bellowed. Blood flew from her lips. Her fingers quivered and shook in the Partner’s direction.

The young man gestured, and the elder Partner handed him the small crystal ball.

“Can you tell me what this is? Is it a Client technology?”

The slave’s eyes began to bulge. “Fuck slave!” Her chair rocked back and forth.

The man stood up, shaking his head. The Colonist Agent came round the side of the table and placed his immobilizer against the slut’s face. She tried to twist her head around—to suck or to bite, no one could tell—and then she was once again paralyzed. Her body relaxed visibly, the energy draining away.

The senior Partner faced the Colonist. “You stupid son of a bitch,” he said, almost calmly. “First you lose one of our men, then you destroy the minds of the only people who know how to fix our projector problems.” He straightened.

“Your Client has lost all contractual privileges with this world. You and your siblings will not be allowed back.”

The Colonist’s round face reddened. “You cannot do that! You do not have the authority!”

“I will once I make it clear to our Client how much you and your brothers have cost us.”

He looked at the paralyzed mad woman. “It’s only a matter of time before we open up chronal frequencies again. Any delay that could have been prevented is your responsibility.”

The Colonist looked around, furious. The security guards tensed for any sudden action. Supervisor Bors, sitting in a corner and trying not to be noticed, shook his head slightly at his friend. Finally, the extraterrestrial clone sat down, staring at his hands. He saw red but did not want to make the situation worse. He consoled himself with the thought that at least he had had his revenge. The Celestra-female had paid for what she had done to his Unit Brothers. She would be as much a vegetable now as her female-soldier. Perhaps, if no one else wanted them, he would be allowed to buy them?

He smiled, thinking of the possibilities.

“Let’s try Celestra,” another Partner said. “Maybe she wasn’t as badly affected.”

The Colonist snorted. The science Associate for Frank, Bennet, Weschler, and Marx took his immobilizer. The young man checked its setting, stepped in front of the giant blonde, and touched her arm with the small handheld device. He then moved out of the way quickly, remembering the previous reaction. This time, though, the affected woman merely shook her head and opened her mouth in a stretching motion. She blinked several times and looked down quietly.

The Colonist turned to stare at her. His eyes widened in disbelief.

“Well, that’s more encouraging,” the Eastern European expert said. The young Partner stood in front of Celestra and held out the crystal ball. “Tell me, girl, can you tell me what this is?”

The blond Amazon raised her head. She was smiling. Seeing that smile, the Colonist immediately tensed to leap. But it was too late.

“Yes, certainly,” Celestra said, very calmly, very rationally. “Command: execute.”

Several things happened at once.

First, a brilliant point of light energized inside the small, outstretched sphere. It turned the glass ornament into a tiny star sitting in the Partner’s hand. Less than a second later, more dazzling flashes of light bloomed into existence all over the meeting room. In the split-second before the popping began, the Colonist was the only one to recognize them as projection wavefront effects.

One pinprick of light flashed slightly above and in the middle of the table, where a centerpiece might be put. Another emerged in a corner near the ceiling. A third flared directly in front of the elder female Partner. A dozen others manifested as well. A noise like a dozen champagne bottles opening filled the chamber. Someone screamed.

Where each pinpoint of light glared, a gas grenade materialized and burst.

The room exploded into chaos. Greenish clouds of gas expanded and settled like an emerald mist over everyone and everything. The young Partner holding the glass ball yelled and fell over backwards on his ass. The Colonist, his cloned and gene-enhanced reflexes faster than anyone else’s in the room in spite of his harmless Humpty-Dumpty appearance, almost got to Celestra before succumbing to the chemical.

Almost. He collapsed, hands clenching and unclenching uselessly.

The security guards attempted to raise their pistols. They fell to the floor a moment later stunned and paralyzed too. Partners and Associates alike yelled and screamed. Once. Then they too fell gasping.

More pinpoints of light flashed in the room. The mist shaded them a dull orange in contrast.

There was another loud series of pops, and suddenly the office was filled with Celestra’s soldiers, their lean and tight female bodies wrapped in black leather and latex. Their whips cracked. Their thigh-high boots gleamed lustrously.

Celestra’s lieutenant—a tall, red-haired soldier who wore leather pants but nothing else above the waist save a pair of silver bands around her arms—materialized, glanced around briefly, approached her bound leader, and saluted. The tips of her nipples, like Celestra’s, were a gleaming, beautiful black.

The soldiers were tense with pheromone reaction.

“Ma’am,” the lieutenant said. She, like the other invaders, was totally unaffected by the gas. Their bodies had been saturated earlier with the antidote. “Reporting as ordered, ma’am.”

“You terrible bitch,” Celestra said softly, a warm grin building on her face. “Very good. Very good indeed.”

She watched her well-trained troops fly into action. Several took up guard positions near the door. Others went out and began securing the rest of the floor. The blond giant heard more projection pops and gas grenades exploding.

The Firm would soon be hers, if it wasn’t so already.

Everything had gone splendidly, exactly according to plan. She looked down at herself, though, eyebrows raising.

“I would appreciate having these ropes removed,” Celestra said coolly to her lieutenant. The red-haired soldier nodded, bent down to untie her, then hesitated. This was an opportunity. Her eyes rose to meet her leader’s, though.

Celestra looked at her. “Don’t even think it, Clio,” she said softly. “Do you really think you could take me?”

The lieutenant considered, then shook her head, gulping slightly.

“No, ma’am,” she whispered and quickly untied her commander. She turned and was about to untie the other captive when Celestra ordered her to stop.

“She let herself be enslaved,” Celestra said, standing. Her shapely muscles smoothly flexed. She cared not in the least she was unclothed. “She’s nothing but a property now.”

“Didn’t she volunteer to accompany you, ma’am? You said it was a choice assignment.” Celestra smiled. One of her subordinates handed her a large black, leather bag. The grin she gave the lieutenant had all the warmth of a shark’s.

“Yes, I did, didn’t I?” Celestra said. “I lied.”

She began removing items of clothing from the bag and putting them on the table. Clio shuddered; she had almost volunteered to accompany Celestra herself. It could have been her sitting in that chair now, reduced to a mere slave.

“I have to supervise the rest of the takeover, ma’am,” she said. Celestra nodded, and she left.

The leader of the leather soldiers looked around. The gas was settling near the floor. It made the room appear covered in a fog from a toxic waste dump. Celestra stepped around the bodies on the floor or still in their chairs. She saw Bors, the Supervisor whom she had loaned the doctor-slave recently. She said hello to him sweetly as she passed. They were all still alive, of course. They were even conscious. As if they had been hit with an immobilizer, though, they were completely helpless. Two of Celestra’s soldiers remained in the room at her orders. One of them searched the Colonist Agent and handed her leader his slaving module. Celestra checked its output meter, then approached the man, who could only glare at her impotently. Magnificently nude, she hunkered down and straddled the frozen clone.

His eyes rolled. This was the only difference between the gas and the electro-neurological paralysis of an immobilizer.

Celestra held the module out to the Colonist so he could see it. In a curious gesture, then, she pressed it flatly against her own forehead and activated it. The module hummed. A ring of light flashed around its edges. Celestra’s face didn’t change expression, however, and a moment later she lowered the Client-built device, obviously unaffected by it.

“I’m immune,” she said simply. “It was an expensive surgery, but I had all the necessary nerve inputs blocked. The procedure also burned out the pleasure centers in my brain, but it was worth it. I know how men like you think.” She hunched down even closer to him. The Colonist gurgled softly.

Celestra rested her bare ass on the clone’s groin and slowly ground herself on him. She felt his manhood harden beneath her, and she laughed. She then flipped the encoding module around and in a slow and deliberate motion placed it squarely on the Colonist’s forehead. He whimpered.

“Let’s see how well you take it, shall we?”

She activated the encoder. Raw, unfiltered, second-stage slave programming went streaming into the man’s brain.

His eyes bulged.

Celestra could almost smell the neurons frying.

The Colonist shivered all over and gagged. Celestra felt his prick grow even harder beneath her. She writhed on top a moment more, smiled at his reaction, and stood.

“Immobilize him,” she told her aides. “See to his feeding and care. Never release him. I want him burning in impotent lust forever. Understood?” The girls nodded. They all heard the anguished cry at their feet, manifest in spite of the gas.

“What about the others, ma’am?” The soldier gestured to the frozen staff of Frank, Bennet, Weschler, and Marx.

Celestra casually tossed the module to the floor. “Gather them up and take them back to Base. First-stage encode them all, except for our late sister here.” She kicked the woman still tied to the chair. “Give her to my men. They need a new fucking machine in Sector Five, I recall.” The aides saluted and acknowledged. They went about their orders.

From the table, Celestra selected a brief pair of black latex panties and slipped them on, enjoying their tight feel as they settled snugly into place. She added thigh-high boots, black gloves, and a shoulder harness that was purely decorative. She took her whip from the table too. Everything else went back into the bag.

To others, she might have been practically naked.

She wasn’t naked. She was nude. No one in their right mind would ever mistake Celestra for defenseless.

Celestra left the meeting room and inspected the work of her highly trained bitches. They had locked onto her signal and projected the gas grenades into every room on the floor. Normally, that would have been impossible. Client-based Agencies always isolated the chronal frequencies leading to their own coordinates. It was a basic security measure. Who knew when someone might want to project a bomb into the workplace, after all? Having a transmitter on the inside made all the difference in the world.

And now she owned their asses. She could hardly believe how stupidly complacent they had been. If she had known how easy it would be, she would have done this years ago! Everything had gone according to plan, from the Firm’s Agents investigating her projector holdup to allowing them to “capture” her and giving her a protected escort into their building. She had been counting on some complacency, sure, but to see her predictions come true so effortlessly boggled the mind. She had never even considered the Firm using vatbred fools like those cloned Colonists!

And then there was that slut doctor.

What a godsend she turned out to be! Celestra had wanted somebody to investigate the placing of her transmitters—that had, in fact, been essential—but to actually enslave some stupid wench of a girl, and thereby lead her directly to them, had accelerated Celestra’s timetable by weeks. She very nearly considered the doctor her lucky charm now.

Because of the former Dr. Sandra Pitzler, Celestra was almost ready to move on to stage two of her scheme.

As she strolled through the mist-covered rooms, rubber and leather-clad women piled together the paralyzed bodies of office workers for convenient projection to a Base. One of the soldiers was going around with an encoding module and programming them for their new lives. Young, old, male, female: Celestra had markets for all contingencies.

Clio met Celestra again near the stairs to the 30th floor. The redheaded lieutenant reported they had taken both floors.

“It’s early in the morning here, ma’am, and the offices are apparently soundproofed. We checked downstairs. No one else in the building is aware of our presence, and we’ll be long gone before anyone is.” Celestra merely grunted a reply.

The truth was, she wouldn’t have cared less if the police, FBI, or other federal authorities had been called in. In a short period of time, none of that would matter anymore. She had more pressing matters to occupy her mind.

“Get me a list of everyone who works here,” Celestra told Clio. “I want to know who’s in the city, who’s in the country, and who’s on the planet. And out of it. One of the Partners said the vatbred lost an employee of his. I want a name and I want a location. This is a priority.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the red-haired soldier said. Then, “We found the relay device.”

“Good. Show me.” The semi-nude dominatrixes walked along the teak-paneled halls. Celestra remembered similar furnishings from her childhood, a long time ago even by local temporal standards. She paused by one wall painting and stared at the man featured there in oil. She recognized the face. The last time she saw it, the expression had been filled with a doglike devotion, a very different picture from this noble image captured on canvas. It was a cherished memory.

“I want this painting taken with us,” Celestra ordered. “Have it placed in my private quarters.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Clio said, nodding. Then, daringly, she asked, “Is he someone important, ma’am?”

Celestra shook her head. “Not anymore. Not after I was done with him. Where was the relay found?”

“We found it in the Senior Partner’s office. It’s this way.” They went into a closed-off set of offices apart from the rest of the floor. A blond secretary—and soon to be sniveling slavegirl—lay slumped over a desk near the entranceway.

“Ah… ,” Celestra whispered, inside the room and approaching a large, kaleidoscopic metal-and-plastic block.

The device in front of her was about four feet long by two high and wide. The Partner who had used these offices had hid the relay in plain sight, placing it on a small pedestal like a work of modern art. As she approached its shifting, multicolored surface, Celestra noticed a humming noise coming from her bag. Startled for a moment, she then smirked in her customary way, reached in, and took out the crystal transmitter that had been her ticket inside this place.

The glass sphere cradled in her gloved hands was picking up the system’s power feed. As she looked at it, a swirling, semi-liquid radiance appeared to mirror that flowing across the relay’s surface. The relay had been the one piece of equipment she hadn’t been able to buy, borrow, or steal, though it was the key to everything.

The relay—this decorative block of Client technology—generated an energy field that roughly corresponded to the physical dimensions of Chicago. Any projector used on Earth outside of that field was limited to its internal power supply, which while great was nowhere near what was required for true interstellar journeys. Used inside the energy field, though, a projector could tap into the relay’s power and send—teleport—man-sized or smaller objects almost anywhere with an open and matching chronal frequency… which amounted to practically anywhere in space-time.

The only limitations were those programmed into the relay itself or which had been imposed from outside, like the interference from her crystal transmitters, secretly planted in twenty-seven radiation-generating locations around the city.

Interference was only a byproduct of the transmitters’ true purpose, though. What they were really doing was collecting tachyons, subatomic particles that naturally moved faster than the speed of light. The spheres were using them to affect the relay’s energy field, modifying it to suit Celestra’s purpose. Earth’s physicists didn’t know their reactors produced tachyons yet, and they probably wouldn’t for another thirty or forty years. When they did, they might stop using them. The tachyons weakened the underlying structure of space-time.

Which, actually, was exactly the reason Celestra was gathering them in the first place.

The sound of feet in the warehouse storage area woke Rosalie up. The teenager blinked, inhaled sharply, and yawned, trying to get the fuzziness out of her eyes… and out of her mind. Myopically, she glanced at her watch and was surprised to see it was nearly ten. She had slept practically the whole morning away. She was missing school.

She looked around. She was in an office. Hospital tables were scattered around the room. She was lying on one. Where am I? she asked herself, a strange dullness filling her head. What am I doing here? After a moment or two of concentration she remembered.

She was at the warehouse. She was going to meet someone.

She was going to be taken care of.

The details were still unclear, but those were the important things. She had been there all night and fallen asleep.

She heard the noise again outside. Rosalie shook her head and jumped off the table. There was a dreamlike quality to everything this morning, and she wasn’t entirely sure she was awake yet. In the warehouse proper, through the interior office window, she saw an oddly dressed man approaching. He looked angry yet at the same time almost as befuddled as Rosalie herself felt. He also seemed very familiar. Rosalie was sure she had seen this man somewhere before.

He walked into the office, and the teenager blushed. She resisted an urge to giggle wildly.

On top, the man wore a raincoat that looked like it might have been lifted from a Salvation Army center. Underneath, he wore something that looked like an underwater wetsuit, save that it was tighter and more revealing than any Rosalie had seen on TV. They also never, in her experience, came in colors like that, a vivid scarlet and blue, nor were cut so deeply through the chest. The outfit was blatantly sexual in a way Rosalie had previously only associated with young female pop stars. The man started to go toward a metal door set in the office’s far wall, then noticed he wasn’t alone.

He looked at Rosalie. A startled expression filled his face. “What the… ?” he whispered. He looked shell-shocked.

The teen straightened and cleared her throat. “Excuse me, sir. I’m Rosalie Pitzler, and…”

The man interrupted her. “How long have you been here?” He seemed stunned by her presence.

Rosalie smiled. She felt a little woozy herself this morning.

“Since midnight last night, I think. I think I have an appointment this morning with someone… someone… .”

She trailed off, not knowing how to proceed. Was the appointment about her mother?

Spandex-boy goggled at her. His eyes looked as if they were ready to fall out of their sockets.

“It’s only Wednesday?!” the man said, interrupting Rosalie’s thoughts again. “That Wednesday?”

He spun around, located a clock on the wall, and stared at it in total amazement. “Jesus, the time differential is bigger than I thought.” He turned and looked at Rosalie again. “What time is it, exactly?”

“Oh… um, uh,” Rosalie muttered, taken aback, and looked at her watch. He just saw a clock, she thought.

“It’s, ah, 10:02 A.M.,” she said.

“Jesus,” the man said softly, talking to himself. He rubbed a hand through his dark hair. “I have to get back. I have to get back now.” He pulled a metal tool from the raincoat’s pocket. His eyes met Rosalie’s.

“I need help. I need your help. You’re coming with me.”

He began making an adjustment to the device, tapping in numbers on a small panel on the side. Rosalie began to get nervous in spite of her bewilderment. She backed up a step.

“Where’s my mother?” she asked abruptly, for no apparent reason. Wasn’t she at home? No, she hadn’t been there last night. Off with a guy? No, that didn’t make sense either. She had a bad feeling. She wasn’t supposed to be here.

The man raised the device. In that instant, suddenly, Rosalie placed him. She gasped.

The hospital. The garage. Sitting in her Bug. Nobody answering her questions.

She remembered answering this man’s questions, though.

“Where’s my mother?!” she screamed at him, rushing towards him, at once furious.

Her hands reached inside her purse for her pepper spray.

“Let’s go see her together,” the spandex-clad man said and depressed the trigger on his device.

A viciously bright light filled the office, and a popping sound as air explosively filled a sudden vacuum. When the light was gone, both Rosalie and the man were gone as well.

The office stood empty and alone, save for a random tachyon or two.