The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

Callie woke Sunday morning with the headache to beat all headaches and a black hole in her memory of the day before.

When she heard noise in the living room, she crawled out of bed, put a wet towel against her temple, and ventured out in her white terry cloth robe.

“Did we go out last night?”

Refa, rummaging in a cupboard, turned. Come to notice now, Callie’s sister looked rather the worse for wear herself.

Refa said, “You don’t remember?”

Callie tried not to let on how blasted she felt. Or how confused. “I remember going to the lab in the morning… but then after about five minutes, I had to leave.” Yet even as she spoke, Callie tried to remember leaving and could not.

What had happened to her precious Saturday/day off?

Refa’s expression was understanding. “Did you have a bout of claustrophobia again?”

Had she? Callie did not like to acknowledge weaknesses and it had not been that bad, really. Had it?

Wait, did she have claustrophobia at all?

“Oh maybe a little.” Then, fishing a little, “Did I look discombobulated when I came back from the Institute?”

“Discombobulated?! Remember when the kids in mid term school called you ‘Callie Vocabulary’?” Refa grinned and looked ready to go on, but put her hand in her pocket to pull out a comm dot which was blinking. She waved her hand and glanced down as it expanded. “Maybe a little,” she said vaguely and then held up a forefinger like “hang on,” and disappeared back into her suite space.

Callie could hear her talking low and emphatically, and there was something else, another voice, almost inaudible. It sounded faintly familiar.

Listening, waiting, Callie sat down on the couch and began to feel out of place, sleepy, confused … There was a smell she could not place. Since when did she have claustrophobia?—she was not claustrophobic! Was she? What had Refa been doing out here anyway? Callie looked over at the cupboard. There was some sort of pattern running on the wall screen that was not windowing, and, while the lights were supposed to dim when they left the room, she—Callie—was still here. What was that old Ingrid Bergman movie, with the Italian opera, a foggy London? What had happened to her yesterday?

Her crotch area—Callie let her fingers drift southward on a scouting expedition, purely investigative, gathering information—felt as if it had received more attention than she could recall having given it recently. “If you know what I mean,” she said aloud to herself with an uncharacteristic hint of humor.

Not that Callie lacked a sense of humor. It just tended to focus on less sensitive topics. Less sexual subjects.

Refa’s suite now silent, Callie returned to her bedroom, a little surprised that she had touched her bare pussy in the living room where Refa or a neighbor could have walked in at any time.

Callie was a practical person, not prudish by any means, but also not inclined to advertise her sexuality—a neat person, meticulous in daily habits, just comfortably this side of being obsessively clean. But the latest fad in the sex toy industry was called a “Bolt,” and Callie now pulled hers, a gift from Refa, actually, out of her bedside table to see if there was any sign that she had used it recently.

Objectively, it was weird not to know and it was weird to check, as if she were spying on … herself. Callie watched herself tap the drawer button and lift out the Bolt.

She felt as if she was watching herself from outside her body, elsewhere, above. That made no sense, either, but somehow she looked around for a camera watching her. Did she have exhibitionist tendencies?

This was not typical Callie behavior. In terms of her thinking—even apart from the humor.

It was much more like Refa.

Then Callie had a peculiar experience she’d had just a few times, most of them recently. She was beginning to think of them as dissociative episodes. She was not sure if that would be the proper term or the correct psychological diagnosis. It wasn’t that she was out of her mind, in psychological terms, or dreaming.

But for an interval it felt as though she was not in control of her body. Maybe her mind was unlinked to the rest of herself. Or, it felt to her, if she cast about in memory and experience for an analogy, like the moment when you see a mouse and find yourself, without thinking or exercising any volition, up on the kitchen counter with a broom.

There was a period a few years back when a teenage Refa had delighted in hiding in a darkened corner to jump out with a howl whenever Callie came home late. Once Callie had found herself at the bottom of the service stairs with no idea how she had gotten there and no memory of anything after Refa’s wide-eyed face.

In that disconnected way, Callie was lying back in her bed now and rubbing the back of her head and neck. Why was her back itchy down near her tail bone? And why was she was picturing her boss, Professor D’aoud, dressed in skin-tight silver, or magically turned partly into shiny titanium alloy—and excited by that?

Her relationship with her mentor and superior was, and had always been, professional and cerebral.

It was utterly unlike Callie to think of D’aoud in lascivious terms. Or anyone that way.

It was unlike Callie to think wanton thoughts, except perhaps in the darkest part of the night.

It was unlike Callie to play with herself.

It was unlike Callie to spread her legs and touch herself with her fingertips. Using both hands.

It was unlike Callie to sniff the Bolt delicately and then lick it.

It was unlike her to get insanely turned on by all of this, especially the impression she was being controlled by some power distinctly not Callie.

But here she was. And she was so turned on she was drooling a little onto her pillow, making soft noises that might have been a cross between a murmuring and a moan. She was shivering.

Callie felt drugged but not sleepy. She touched the tip of the Bolt to her clit.

Was she ignoring evidence of her own evolving nature? Maybe a new nature, a new Callie was developing. How would that happen and what would it feel like? Was she, Callie, a bright, shy, slightly-OCD quirked, mildly introverted experimental scientist, emphasis on ‘scientist’?

Or had she changed?

Was she failing to consider indications that she had somehow become … for want of a better word, Refa-ized?!

And if that had happened, when had it happened and how could she not have noticed? How could you not know?

Callie had no sense of how she had gotten here: from a normal morning waking up as the Callie she inhabited every morning to—this.

Whatever this was.

Crazy and bizarre as it was, it was crazy and bizarre how excited she was getting—

But she was picturing D’aoud looking her in the eyes.

Callie was looking back into D’aoud’s hypnotic green eyes. She imagined herself, rapt, as she sometimes was at D’aoud’s brilliance…

Seeing with some part of her mind that thrilled to it, the perfect curve of D’aoud’s full, firm breasts, bulging luxuriously outward a few degrees, with only the sheerest covering, like metallic paint.

Everything was a little skewed, like in a dream. But this was not a dream.

Was there something driving the Bolt? Was IT sentient? The idea thrilled Callie like a newly-discovered fetish. She could feel that odd pressure in the back of her skull, and going along with the fantasy, just for the moment, imagined she and Refa were turning into machines. Was D’aoud turning into a machine too? She tested the idea, trying out the fetish in her mind, measuring it by how much it excited her—to fine tune it, like a lab program. To make herself more excited…

No …—hotter if D’aoud was doing it to them. That was really hot.

Callie thrust the Bolt into her pussy hard. And saw herself do it. She pulled it out and stopped.

Jeez—get a grip, girl! She liked herself, her modest, cheery nature, her fascination with the way things worked, her dedication to her job, her dedication to … D’aoud. She liked not being like Refa. Didn’t she?

But her grip tightened and then she was thrusting the Bolt back inside her wet folds again, her mouth dropping open as if to help make room for the Bolt—did opening her mouth somehow open up her pussy?—an advertised feature of which was its ability to expand on sensing arousal—oh the joys of modern technology—for the fantasy, for the power that would take her over! Callie realized she was not stopping; once again she was not able to stop. This was not a choice, not her choice. Was it? Instead, she was speeding up, thrusting faster and faster—and, she observed from outside herself, very evenly, mechanically.

Callie imagined she was a machine now, her arms, her whole body, all but her pussy now mech, like her fear—her fantasy image of D’aoud.

The idea of the change, that sudden transition or morphing into D’aoud or becoming a slut like Refa was obviously ridiculous and perverse.

It was contrary to all Callie had striven for in her life and violently antithetical to all she knew about herself as a person. On the other hand, Callie considered that she had always wanted change—from childhood. All children wanted to grow; naturally she had worked so hard to grow into a scientist. Would this imagined change be any different? She had fought her OCD impulses and worked hard to acquire knowledge, fought to grow in person and understanding, to matriculate to adulthood, finish graduate school and gain the ability to reach further and further intellectually into many different disciplines.

Was that changing, transitioning into something else?

Maybe D’aoud was misleading her, shepherding Callie not towards becoming a brilliant scientist like her, the eminent professor, but into something else, something mechanical, something controlled, a thing, a tool, a toy for D’aoud—the idea was so weird and, frankly, evil, that, Callie intuited, it was all the more hot because of the way it violated her own sense of her self.

Yessss.

Callie was thrusting to a crescendo like a machine accelerating to overload. She pictured herself changing—perhaps not just inside but also, like her fantasy, or D’aoud’s style of dress, into chrome-bright titanium; Callie—Callie was changing changing changing changing; and this changed creature was—coming coming, coming coming. And coming.

Like a machine Callie shut her mouth and turned off all sound, so Refa could not hear—but inside she was screaming as she came, sweating, shaking, practically exploding.

Two hours later in the glow of a cool fall morning, Callie was curled in one of the two pre-tech chairs on their little plein air balcony, sipping some certified natural/organic stim bev from a rainforest on a planet grown by—the stim bev not the planet—unreconstructed indigenous people somewhere, or something.

A gift from Professor D’aoud come to think of it!

The stim bev was aromatic and tasty; the air was clear and early-morning crisp. There was a faint metallic smell from the Spaceport, but Callie could also smell something else, something organic—

Refa popped the airdoor with a foot and floated a whole maker tray out, disrupting the peaceful stillness and seemingly overfilling the tiny space between the railings. The redheaded musician was singing softly to herself as usual, something Callie would never admit she liked, but …. honestly? The sexy sister, who ran contrary to Callie in so many ways, had real musical talent and a sweetness deep down that Callie believed, secretly, was the real attraction for all the sexual partners she seemed to find, even if they thought at first they were attracted to Refa’s looks.

Or her mech-perfect body.

Or her unabashed sexuality.

Callie was starting to replay her newly-discovered fantasy—stop it! It was not real. It was not what she really wanted. It was a late-night sex narrative that belonged in the bedroom. She pushed those thoughts into the back of her mind.

The two women sat silent for several whole minutes, a bona fide luxury, in their typically very sped-up lives.

At some point Refa ventured conversation. “How do you look so put together this early in the day? You must have a special drug.”

She regarded Callie appraisingly, before proposing multiple choice options.

“A scientific treatment—like a conversion pod you go into down in the lab?”

Refa pulled her chin.

“A, B or C. A magic spell? D’aoud’s magic spell?”

She looked out over the spaceport.

“If I did not know that my sister did not ‘do’ love, I’d swear you are in love. THAT’S the kind of look you have.” She nodded, the matter resolved in her mind, the nod said, and poured her drink.

“B. It’s a special secret scientist formula. They inject us weekly at the Institute and then put us in a pod.” Callie shot her eyebrows. But thought that she really did not do creepy at all well and why did she jolt at the word “pod” and the notion of what it might do? Refa—Now Refa—Refa could make your skin crawl. She had this robot imitation that made any sane person want to run.

Or what. Callie did not want to become a robot. Duh. She was not some mental patient who confused schizoid voices with God or something.

But Callie had her own questions. “You spend some time in the District after your multicast last night?” She looked down at her drink, hoping she was not getting that feverish flushing above her cheek bones that Refa called her ‘gambler’s tell.’ “And did I meet you there after? I have …I have…”

I have a stutter now, Callie thought. A less beneficial change, lol. Shit, what a weird morning.

“A missing hour? Missing hours?” Refa squinched her eyes unevenly, going for mildly-goofy in faces. She yawned demonstratively. “You know that would be nothing new for me. I plead memory loss. Brain damage. Some good excuse I will improve upon and elaborate after I have my stim.” She took a sip of the steaming brew the maker tray had disgorged and exhaled in an elaborate expression of satisfaction. “Ahhhhh.”

Callie eyed her warily.

“You look good. You always look great. Too…” And, Callie realized, she really meant it. Today especially. Something in the line of Refa’s neck, her inflectionless skin, the way her hip swelled and curved as she turned a leg sideways to make herself comfortable—had Callie tingling. Was this another new fantasy, an unexplored fetish—yuck! Why did her sister’s presence trigger sexual—? Oh of course.

“Did you use that pherin spray last night? The multi-pheromone mix?”

Refa looked shocked. “Moi? I would never—” Then seeing that Callie was at least in part serious, turned to face her. “I splashed last night and this morning. So you have nothing to worry about.”

One of the few luxuries Callie’s position at the Institute allowed her was a near-instant splash unit to augment the old-fashioned shower stall. That, and the tiny balcony alone had almost doubled the cost of the unit. Callie loved the speed and efficiency of the splash system—and it felt OK too—but at times, it seemed as though Refa used the splash unit so much she thought it was Callie’s gift to her. But Callie, with her love of efficiency, her scientific antisepticism (Refa teased that Germaphobia was the only religion to which Callie actually subscribed), and her OCD-ishness, had originally insisted on it; in fact she had asked D’aoud for recommendations, and D’aoud had helped her pick out the model and co-tagged the electro-loan for it.

As to the pherins, they were all over the place these days, and, in Callie’s mind, genuinely scary because the new version were said even to contain nanoparticles and their effects could last for days. (Oh criminy, was that a new fetish too—for some reason, Callie felt her nether regions respond with a frisson and a warming sensation.)

“Something is going on with you,” Refa said with the kind of mind-readerish insight that had discomfited their parents when she was about 6. “If I didn’t know better, I would have guessed you had a wild night of love-making behind you.”

“But you do know better!” Callie shut her eyes and dropped her head back against the padding. “My love life is pretty much non-existent. You have to carry the banner as the family social butterfly.” And that was and also should be the way it was. But Callie was seeing herself from outside again at times and saw herself give Refa a look that could be characterized as hungry. She looked away feeling a little shocked at her reactions. “You’re the raving beauty,” Callie heard herself continuing, but wondered why she was saying it, even as she said it and meant it. Refa knew she was hot. When boys or a certain kind of woman told her she was hot, it was to get into her—

“Me?” Refa sniffed. She did a little shimmy in her chair Callie could never have imitated. It was intensely sexy, but her verbal answer was bland and accompanied by a one-shoulder shrug. “I’m Ok. I know how to work it … at times.” Then her smile grew mysterious. “But you—do you remember Ian? He used to ask about you every time I saw him. I broke up with him finally because I realized he had such a crush on you, my bookish little-big sister!” She chortled.

This was news for Callie, who was beginning to feel like she should be back in bed, asleep. Today needed to start over. To get back to normal, a landscape of her life she recognized. Refa had dated Ian for two years, an eternity in Refa’s scattered existence, and if Callie had really been responsible for that ending, she truly felt guilty. She had liked Ian but she had never led him on. Had she? Callie’s most common regret with Refa and her friends was her neglect—that she was always working or studying, so always taking rain checks on events and parties. She was quite conscious that Refa sometimes felt abandoned.

Callie looked Refa straight in the eyes and said sincerely, “I am really sorry Refa. I had no idea.”

Refa hooted. “Oh, Callie, Callie! My dear scientific super nerd sister! I know!—I know you had no idea Ian was drooling over you! I’ve come to understand you do not even know how hot you are. You aren’t even sure you’re good looking. Much less ragingly hot! You bury your nose in your books or your experiments, try to avoid washing your hands too often, and hardly ever look up to see—“ Refa inserted a pretty credible impression of popping up to look around “—there is a world out here—!”

When Callie’s face manifested bewilderment, Refa just laughed harder. She grasped Callie around the shoulders and planted a wet kiss on her forehead. “Oh Callie, the Thinker, always so deep in thought…over-overthinking”

After a moment, in which Callie processed some feelings she had not expected—an almost sexual thrill down into her groin from her sister’s kiss, go figure—she responded drily.

“I’m glad I am such a source of entertainment for you.” She did not want to be overly serious but she did need to say—“I work in part to make things better for both of us.”

Refa’s laughter wound down; she wiped her eyes and sighed. “I know. I know, Callie, the old spiel—Dad died in debt and we were left hanging—so you stepped up. It’s true. And I appreciate it—you—so much. You really have no idea. You do wonderful work and you are so fucking brilliant I have nowhere to go with that—I can’t touch you with your Institute projects, all of that super science stuff. But sometime somewhere I hope you—” Refa scanned the skyline, her head wagging as if looking for an answer there. “—get swept off your feet! I hope you fall so hard in love, it will open you up completely. Some guy—or some woman, yes, either is fine—will grab you, shake you, change you and make you so happy you’ll scream.” She laughed again, a little wearily now. They had both been struggling for money of late, and Refa’s musical production was in its annual slowdown, the off season, just now.

Callie tapped her cup with a half-hearted rhythm sequence. “That’s kind of sweet. … I think? But I am happy. I love my work; I love this stuff. I do—and I don’t think I am missing anything at all.”

She was going to say something more, but Refa, seated now, with her chin resting in her palm, tapped her fingernails on the table thoughtfully. “Yeah? You know when you got the job with D’aoud at first, I thought I’d never see you. And I wasn’t wrong that it—she—has taken over your life. But I see you come back some nights tired, but kind of glowing, and I think, hmmm, give me a little of whatever they serve there! Must be something really good! I really do.”

She looked for Callie’s reaction before continuing. “Yeah! But then I came to see maybe we find love where we find it. I mean I think D’aoud is hot! If she did not scare the shit out of me, I would be hanging around the Institute lab all the time myself to see if I could just get her to look my way. But at that lab party for that big discovery for which you got all that publicity, you know? I watched her watch you, just studying you like a mother watches a favorite child or something—and I realized she is almost as enamored of my sister as my little-big sister is of her!” She barked a laugh again so loud Callie wondered if any of the other tenants, although concealed behind the standard vis-screens, would over hear. You had to be really rich to buy privacy these days, and the quality of their camouflage was only so-so.

But also the comment on D’aoud caught Callie by surprise. The nerd criticisms and the ginning up of FOMO were regular Kinneleavy sister fare. But Refa had never brought up her interest in D’aoud before and Callie was suddenly very uncomfortable. How much did Refa know? How much did Refa see … through her?

“D’aoud?!” Callie said weakly. “D’aoud? Please! She’s my boss—and yes, she is an amazing woman. She won the Zcelaphon Inventor Prize twice for chrissakes and she is not even in astrophysics, really. Or particle mechanics anyway… In theory that is not her primary specialty…” why was she getting tangled up talking about her boss? “… but she is twice our age, at least and—” Refa shook her head, and cut in.

“Not with her rejuvs. 6 feet and shaped; those lips, eyes! She could step into one of my sound and dance videos without auditioning. She’d be the choreographic centerpiece! She’d be the cut-to when we wanted to turn up the heat!”

“—and I am not into women! You know that! There is nothing wrong with that, I just …”

“I know, I know. You just stick to what Dad wanted for you. And he wanted a nice marriage, kids, a family so I could have nieces—But you are always looking at my ass—yeah I notice, and when you are around D’aoud, you so get a hazy, muddled look like someone just clocked you on the head…” Refa was laughing again. “—and there is nothing wrong with that! There’s nothing wrong with that!” Her impression of Callie from a moment before was spot-on, as if she could channel her sister in real time.

Callie was shrinking into her arm chair, her face—she could feel it—beet red. She felt six years old, and that did not help dispel the aspersion. “I do not! I do not,” Callie said, not exactly brilliantly, or modeling a third degree doctoral candidate very impressively. “Besides, everyone is after your ass.” For just a moment, Callie worried she had gone too far, in the implication. But after dropping her jaw in mock shock, Refa just gave her another side look and slid her crotch right down onto Callie’s hand where it was resting beside her leg. “That’s not all I got, sweet sister, and it’s all so tasty.”

“Refa!”

On Monday, D’aoud was gone.

One of the duties of her position, which Callie definitely did not envy, involved having to appear yearly at the Coalition Congress or whatever subcommittee was handling the Institute budgeting this year, to negotiate funding. Along with a hundred other ministerial tasks. D’aoud sat atop a pyramid of divisions and employees, and so D’aoud’s job, and Callie’s job, as her sidekick, were secure. But so many things—fluctuations in mineral production on any of the 6 Centrals or a failure of a core drill on an asteroid—could result in dozens of layoffs, so this was one of the few parts of the year when D’aoud had to focus on administration. ‘Coalition politics and social dreck,’ as D’aoud put it.

As usual when she was out of the office, the professor left Callie a videmo with an update on her own work, and specific instructions as to how to move forward on their common projects. It was waiting on Callie’s desk in her lab office when she dropped her tablet and purse there first thing the next morning.

On a Post-It—the preeminent mind of her generation, blah-blah-blah still used old-fashioned Post-Its! (Callie liked that so much she was trying to come up with a similar harmless quirk to adopt for herself, to begin to build her own more modest legend)—on the videmo card, D’aoud noted that they needed to start to assemble a precise set of physical statistics on the FSA. So Callie was thinking uncomfortably about having to return to the clean room where she’d had a prior uncomfortable moment the week before—with a bunch of instruments and analytics. It made her wince. She still had not sorted out in her mind what caused the combination of attraction and fear that accompanied her visits to the artifact’s clean room.

And so she did not notice right off the ways the videmo differed from their usual communications. Appearing holographically in front of her, D’aoud was full-sized today, not the comfortable, unthreatening reduced image they had traded back and forth for months. D’aoud had a preference for using a kind of spiral motif in transitions between vids and topics, but now the familiar spiral was like a watermark in the background. A watermark in the air. Was there a reason for that?

And there was an odd roiling in the holo-space around D’aoud as she appeared as though either there were a technical glitch in the production system or the lasering, or they were both—what? what did it look like?—being sucked together towards a vortex. The effect, whether intentional or not, was annoying as well as disturbing, and for a while as Callie watched the spiral effect, she completely missed the substance of what D’aoud was saying.

Was D’aoud talking to her? Was D’aoud teaching her … something?

When Callie shook off the dizzy feeling the technical glitch seemed to cause, she realized that the professor was dressed in silver again, not her lab jacket and scrubs, and her eyes looked even greener than she recalled. And, she decided, the videmo was not that bad. In fact, it felt—it was quite good.

The videmo image, the holo shaped D’aoud, was just as powerful and almost as intimidating as the professor in person. But that was appropriate given their relative status. The teacher naturally occupied the dominant role over the student. And the opposite was also oddly true. That the professor was not here in person allowed Callie to relax a little, let down her guard, worry a bit less about how she might appear to the professor.

That was very nice, even comfortable. Callie liked looking at the lovely professor and imagining herself becoming one with her, almost hive mind-like.

D’aoud not only looked impeccable. Her voice was inflectionless, perfectly smooth, alto, rich. Callie was pretty sure Refa would call it ‘sensual.’ To her, Callie realized, D’aoud’s voice was, and always had been, THE teaching voice, the ideal tone and timbre, phonation and pitch to impart knowledge. That rich voice was designed and gauged to cause her mind to learn, or put another way, to reprogram her thinking. The best professors should be able to speak like this, Callie thought, exactly like D’aoud—this mellifluously and persuasively. In a world where science and wisdom sat properly atop the power hierarchy, and rationality ruled, Callie’s paradigm, the ability to immerse her in the subject matter they were considering, in the topic that constituted the subject matter of their inquiry—D’aoud’s voice had that ineffable assurance, that clarity, and inherent persuasiveness that absorbed all of her attention.

Callie could not wait to speak to others this way and pass on the knowledge she was receiving in the same way D’aoud did. The notion thrilled her, and she realized, that if she felt some thrill even down in her sexual organs, that was just an aspect of biology—nothing to be embarrassed about, just as D’aoud said.

When D’aoud spoke, first her voice seemed to steady Callie, to center her and focus her right now in the present. Be here now, it said to her. That voice made her conscious of herself as a sweet, slightly diffident young woman in a short metallic skirt and one of those diaphanous blouses so popular these days leaning close with a bit of a shy smile to show she was open to learn. Then it—that beautiful voice—reached right through her and filled her up entirely. Learning from the professor was an experience of Callie’s entire being, which was, Callie thought, just how education should be. Perfect!

That voice seemed to erase the distinctions between the two of them as people, the two women, as sentient beings. For the time they were linked, Callie could become what or whom she so admired, as she absorbed and learned how to do that.

At times it felt as though D’aoud was stepping in and occupying Callie’s body: that’s how well they worked together and how good Callie was at learning from the esteemed professor.

D’aoud had graciously given Callie a moment to connect, feel their connection, and get settled into position. Because it positioned her at a better height with regard to the holo, Callie put her legs under her on the chair, so she was, in effect kneeling on the cushion. That way she could lean forward, too, if the holo warbled again and she needed to get closer to see better. She looked at those rejuved abs, washboard flat, and those things.

“Callie…” the professor said, and the way she let the name hang in the air, together with the warmth in her voice let Callie know that D’aoud genuinely valued her as a person. They shared a near-familial warmth, D’aoud conveying a maternal consideration for helping Callie grow as a person. Callie found herself focusing a moment on D’aoud’s very perfect chest, the shape of the maternal organs that in a professional, scientific environment had no role at all, were irrelevant. But since we were all born and grown with these parts, the progenitive and reproductive organs, there was no reason to pretend they did not exist or that they did not have some biological effects. Callie welcomed the slight moistening of her lips, her tongue. These reactions just indicated how engaged she was, and ready to learn.

With the sound of her name, Callie leaned forward a little. Of course the holo could not see or interpret her behavior, but it was a two way street, in a way, and part of the reason Callie demonstrated her readiness to learn, to attend to what was being imparted to her, was to remind herself that she was and should be—she realized. Teaching was the outgoing aspect of education, and learning, absorbing, imbibing the right thoughts was—her part, Callie’s job.

“You are so smart, Callie. I love that, as you know. I noticed from the first time I met you how eager you are to learn. It’s a wonderful quality, that enthusiasm and openness, and for me it is a pleasure to be able to take advantage of your remarkable brains.” For just a second, something in what the holo D’aoud was saying clanked. It struck Callie as a little off, and the expression on the beautiful older woman’s face appeared hungry, even predatory.

But Callie that was a quirk of the technology, she decided. D’aoud was the best. Callie gave the videmo diske a tap, which she knew was silly—it was so much more advanced than a tap would fix—and in a moment D’aoud’s voice had her relaxed again. Truly everything was fine, more than fine.

As she concentrated again, Callie found her eyes level with holo-D’aoud’s pelvis.

“As I have said, we are looking straight into the mech-bio schism here, because that is what this ancient society presented us in the artifact. What is difficult, possibly uncomfortable here and alien to us, is exactly the issue. Unlike current society, the creators saw no need to maintain distinctions—but that does not mean they were not conscious of them, or that they ignored them. If anything, they were even more conscious of the distinctions, but what saw as different, what they did differently than we—including the Coalition and the Institute—have done in all the years since, is they sought to enhance and amplify the respective characteristics of each, not squelch or ignore them. Right? Are you with me on this?”

Asked in that tone of voice, with those eyes and the love her expressions conveyed, what could Callie say, she thought, but yes? Yes! Yes! But it also made perfect sense too, obviously. Callie nodded, knowing full well that the holo could not see her or react.

Almost as though it could, or as if D’aoud had anticipated Callie’s positive reaction, however, D’aoud, in holo form, smiled a wide and toothy smile and nodded approvingly. It was so convincing a mech performance that Callie imagined a pat on her head, and, not inappropriately since full accession and involvement in an important and very groundbreaking endeavor such as this could only be seen as good, wonderful—she felt a thrill in her loins. Learning as a complete act of the biological person. “Good girl!”

“We are biology, right? That is our side of the fence. As the most backwards thinkers in galactic politics would point out, we don’t want to be mech—that is anathema in our civilization. So—we see therefore that we should cherish the effects that make biology biology. The conclusion drawn has to be that if that is our lane, we should celebrate it, yes? If what we have to contribute to the mix is biology, we should recognize that. Do you understand?”

Callie was thinking just how beautiful D’aoud was, physically, yes, biologically and wondering if she had perfumed the holodot (but why would she do that; there must be a good, rational reason beyond the hint of sexuality, or was that the point?) when the question came, so she was a little fuzzy about it.

But then when she understood that D’aoud, in the hologram, was leaning forward from her hips and gazing into her eyes green into blue, and that her lips were parted like an open wound as she held her breath just quickly, awaiting Callie’s response, Callie jumped a little, almost like waking up.

“Yes, yes! Yes professor. I agree completely.” Was it silly to be talking to the holodot, or just proof that she was learning? It was an excellent point, too, so it appropriately felt good to acknowledge that, to agree. Every nerve fiber in Callie’s body twitched a little with the affirmation and she felt a surge of warmth. Sheerly as the biological aspect of it all, the difference between herself and D’aoud, and the mechs, Callie observed additional moisture in her mouth—biologically-speaking, salivation—and wetness at the genitals. In the moment, Callie almost forgot she was answering a hologram. She had such an urge to reach out and touch—

“The point is,” D’aoud continued very sensibly, “we are sexual beings. You’re a sexual being; I’m a sexual being. That is a large part of our biology. As evolved, we have these organs.” Delicately, incredibly slowly, the holo D’aoud cupped her breasts and then slid both hands down to her—her—turning the palms out, so that the back of her hands, her fingernails were touching her pussy. Callie almost stood up, but the roiling and the spirals calmed her and she remembered, “We are not mechanical and do not want to be. D’aoud’s eyes flashed and the holo seemed weirdly to be monitoring Callie’s reaction. On impulse, to show she was on board and understood, Callie cupped her own breasts the same way and laid her hands on her pussy, except fingertips down. It was weirdly like a secret fraternal order handshake or something but it seemed appropriate, an acknowledgement of what D’aoud was teaching her. And it gave Callie a thrill. “Good girl. You are learning so well. We can be modest about this and keep our sexual proclivities out of the workplace, but take away those elements of our persons, and we might as well be mech.”

Callie heard a noise out in the hallway, and was suddenly distracted from the videmo. She looked around to make sure the office was locked. Checked her comm screens to be sure no one was paging her. Still tired from the night before, her romance with the bolt—she thought about stepping out into the lab to get a cup of hot stim. But looked down at herself, fortunately, first. Seven Suns! Her blouse was unzipped and her crotch was—wet. Soaked. There was an embarrassingly obvious wet spot the size of a softball.

What was wrong with her? She had definitely been hanging around Refa too much; she needed to get herself in control and not screw up her dream job with some wildly unprofessional behavior.

But when she looked back at the videmo holo—it started up when it sensed her gaze—it was in a phase transition, and the spiral was fascinating. And D’aoud was speaking again in that rich, absorbing voice.

“Callie, dear, as we have discussed, a major issue that needs to be answered in the course of our study for the Reconstitution will be which developmental model came first. In other words, did they start with the mechanical design as their basic construct, adding the biological component afterwards? Or did they take existing biological options, meaning creatures that had already evolved in the natural world, and inculcate, incrementally, or more radically, the technological component?”

As she finished the last sentence, D’aoud or the holo-D’aoud swiveled her oh-so-shapely slim but curvaceous hips suggestively and, with a grin, pointed with both hands and all her fingers together like the sides of an arrow emoji at her crotch.

“Touch yourself for me, Callie, sweetie. Be a good girl and play with yourself so I can see how controlled you are.”

At some point, Callie, realized later, she had fallen asleep. She was dreaming; she understood that now. It must have been hot in her office—ever since the artifact had been installed just down the hall, there had been complaints about the temperature throughout the lab and its offices—and she was finding all of this session with holo D’aoud so hot in a backwards and upside-down way. To imagine the rot of lasciviousness creeping into the antiseptic setting and corrupting all that lived inside it under the rubric of education was so fetishy that she had given into it and as often happened when she felt sexy, dozed off. Wasn’t that the stereotype about men? Callie had wondered at one time if Adele A, D’aoud’s admin liaison, was lesbian—she had never seen her date and was not clear why she suspected it—but now she was picturing Adele, her best friend in the labs, maybe seated in D’aoud’d mech chair, with D’aoud leaning over her—or was that Callie?—doing something to her. Making her slutty like—well, Callie’s sister, Refa. Forcing her to learn—no to suck from D’aoud’s breasts.

When she recalled it all that evening, Callie thought, Jeepers Creepers and Six Centrals, where had her mind been today? She resolved, over a dinner alone—Refa had left a cheap com dot to let Callie know she would be out with a friend until late—to stay away from both Refa and the Bolt for a while. She did not want to compromise her career, for frells sake. What if the real Adele Adiche had looked in while Callie was watching the videmo?

But as she recalled later, D’aoud went on to say, “I’d like you to look, Callie, at whether the creators retained the sexual characteristics of the biological entities that they incorporated into their then-final product, our artifact. My recent research this weekend—I spent all day here Sunday—suggests that the creators anticipated growth and expansion; that is obviously the goal and ultimate objective of any form of sentient existence not naturally self-destructive.”

In her dream, Callie pictured D’aoud stroking her thigh and then pulling Callie’s head, like a favored child’s into her lap. “They would have had to weigh the different ways to solve that as a practical problem. Biology has of course cracked that “—D’aoud ran a finger lightly down to where Callie’s ass began to split “—over many millennia with sexual reproduction, which, while self-evidently complicated and wasteful, also effectively addresses the ultimate issue of error: what happens if a bump, solar radiation, a stray meteor impacting miles away, perhaps, or any of the innumerable conceivable external forces, causes a typo, in effect, in the reproductive process resulting in changed genetic sequences—or, yes, exactly, a change in existing biology?”

And as she spoke holo-D’aoud was stroking Callie’s arm. D’aoud—or the hologram—leaned forward so that Callie was treated to a new angle and a close-up of her boss’s breasts. Those curves. Their lushness. In her dream, Callie felt the professor’s touch on the back of her neck, doing something there, and somehow it was as if D’aoud reached inside her and filled her up. Callie recalled felt herself open up, open and expand, even under her skirt and panties as if being Bolted.

“We all change, Callie. Everything does; as you and I have agreed many times, that is one of the colossal givens of what we deem ‘reality.’ And that is maybe the most important recognition of biology; biology addresses change most saliently, of course, through the more complicated sexual reproductive process, by recruiting, in essence, two databases to access more and a wider range of patterns and genetic information and then letting the more dominant, prevailing or functional option control.”

Callie pondered D’aoud’s theory. Nothing about it was invalid. As a matter of logic. She felt confident that she was being taught correctly. She felt she could rely on her instructor.

“How would the FSA have been able to accomplish growth with the biological part of its combining? We all need incentives, don’t we?”

D’aoud had her fingers on Callie’s pussy—in the dream. “For biological beings, it’s all a matter of motivation. We all need to consider why we do what we do. What is the incentive? Is it an abstract sense of human progress, or, since we are now so familiar and involved with the Ca’ ta ’ts and the Fillonians, life progress?” The Ca’ ta ’ts and the Fillonians were the two largest clades of non-human biologics in the known universe at the time. Callie was close to passing out or coming. In the dream she was struggling to hang on and hear it all. D’aoud’s fingers curled just a little, tightening into Callie’s most sensitive part. It was so wrong in this context, so crude, but that just made the dream more fetishy hot. “Why do you do what you do, Callie? Is it money? You are well paid here at the Institute, and I made the case again this week, that you are worth it. You work very hard and you are brilliant. You are very committed to your work. You are very committed to—me. Aren’t you? Do you miss me? Now when I am gone?”

The questions were confusing to Callie; of course it was possible to have responsive videmos but that was not how their exchanges had worked in the past and this could not be one could it? If it was a dream, could the questions be her own subconscious exposing what it had figured out?

Callie heard herself, as if from above or outside, answering, “Yes. Yes. No, I want to learn! I want—I want—“

“You are a very good student, Callie. Such a good girl! I have been able to teach you a great deal.” She moved her hand, tightening, and somehow looked right into Callie’s eyes. It was hypnotic. “You have changed a great deal, Callie.”

Callie wondered for some reason, even though it was a dream, if she looked robotic in responding. “I want to grow and learn, of course, professor. I am doing best.”

D’aoud looked at her with that almost maternal gaze. “You don’t want to change. You don’t want to learn. As if—I know you’re doing your best. You are a such a good student and good employee.”

Callie could see herself smile, but then thought not only was that a two-way exchange but the two sentences were both clearly sarcastic. What did that mean?

At some point around about 6 o’clock Callie found herself asleep in her office chair, her crotch still damp and her neck sore in the back. She stuck her head out to be sure no one was still around and then scurried to the stairs and ran all the way to the ground floor where she made a bee line to her apartment.

After her lonely dinner, Callie went straight to bed.

That night Callie dreamed that D’aoud came to her again asking for help. “You are almost ready to become a teacher yourself,” D’aoud was saying, and Callie pictured herself with a mortarboard and the kind of sash worn by Institute Faculty at ceremonies. Then, in Callie’s dream, they marched together, professor and student, ceremoniously into a room where a an un-mortarboarded student sat in a mech chair with a helmet on her head. As they rounded the back of the chair and stationed themselves in front, Callie realized she recognized the student. It was Refa.

“Your sister needs to learn. We can teach her. Have her join us in transitioning. Help me convert her, good girl.”

When Callie woke up in the dark and heard noises from the other side of her bedroom wall, she was relieved. Clearly she was just responding to the sound of Refa enjoying one of her regular trysts. There was nothing more than that going on.