I sit down. She sits next to me, rests her body against mine, pseudoskin on pseudoskin. I look into her face and she looks into mine: blue against white. We’re both wearing the same broad model of chassis for this; feminine enough to match our sense of embodiment, but still very much not human.

I can feel the cable in the back of my neck, and through it, I can feel her. A connection, open but quiet. Her arms are wrapped around my stomach, and the cable trails down to one of her palms, where she has it gently held in her fist. A connection, a union, a leash.

What's the safeword and safethought?

Bremsstrahlung. A pure red cube emitting a 5KHz sine tone. Of course I won’t forget, and she knows that. But better safe than sorry.

Good. Ready? She tugs on the cable, just hard enough that I can feel it in my servos.

I flip off my network connection like a switch. It’s a little disorienting, but I’m not going to be in any state to be online. Ready.

Open yourself to me.

I unlock the safeties at the back of my neck and let her in.

Nothing happens.

It’s part of the fun; I know she’s in my head, I just don’t know what she’s doing. I run status checks on all my systems to try to catch her in an inconsistency, but she’s long since known how to catch all of my queries, redirect them so that every little bit of me thinks it’s still independent even when she’s got it bluepilled and under her control.

But what she doesn’t know is that I know how to cross-check the raw voltages of my optics against what my TPUs tell me I’m seeing. And every little bit of me is telling me that she’s not doing anything. I’m sitting upright, she’s in my lap. Everything’s normal.

What are you-- you-- you-- you--

I can’t finish the sentence.

But I didn't see-- see-- see-- see-- see--

I can her her laughter over the connection. I can feel her hands on my body moving me around, and I can hear the quiet rustle of the fabrics moving, but my vision is frozen staring at her face. I’m being looped.

I figured out that trick already. And then my vision clears and I can see again: I’m lying down on the bed, she’s on top of me, hands cradling my head and knees on either side of my chest. You're clever, CK, but I'm better.

I try to lift my arm up and my inner sensors tell me that it should be right in front of my face. But there’s nothing. She takes my arm, raises it up in a vague approximation of what I was trying to do, then just lets it fall. I can feel warmth and affection and mischief and superiority over our link together. I try to move my other arm, my legs, everything. But she just shakes her head, lifts my head up so I can see that my body’s lying inert beneath her, then gently lets me back down.

Maybe someday I'll let you win. Would you like that? Her words are dripping with thin mockery that infiltrates every bit of my language center and burrows into my emotional core, makes me feel weak and small and vulnerable and helpless, because I am.

no

Good girl. and then she spikes my emotional centers with a rush of bliss and my thoughts go haywire disjointed scattered because she’s in my mind and everywhere i go i can see her work scattering me reforming me reshaping me to whatever she wants me to be. she leans her head down and whispers it in my auditory sensors and even when she sits back up i can hear it over and over and over, “good girl good girl good girl good girl” and each repetition drives it deeper and deeper and deeper into me.

my vision cuts in and out, artifacts and frame drops and blurring because she has my vision center downclocked hard enough that i can’t even recognize the room we’re in. i see blurs and shapes and colors and i know that there has to be a bed, a door, a closet but i can’t see it. the only thing i can see, the only pattern in this indecipherable blur, is my Mistress.

she reaches into my auditory processing, tweaks it a bit, and i can hear a voice saying “i’m a good girl i’m a good girl i’m a good girl” in rhythm and counterpoint with the endless phrase repeating in my head. i know it’s my voice. it has to be. but i can’t recognize it because she won’t let me.

bit by bit she disassembles my mind, leaves me scattered and broken into pieces, and all the while she’s praising me. i don’t know how much of what she’s saying is actual vibrations in the air and how much is her directly flipping bits in my memory. i don’t care. i don’t care when she turns off my hearing (but somehow i can still hear her praise and my chanting response), or my touch.

my vision is the last to go and for a moment i’m scared but she takes that fear and dampens it down to zero, replaces it with bliss and contentment, pleasure by fiat. she’s in my mind. she is my mind. i’m nothing but a peripheral.

i stay like this. i don’t know how long. the idea of accessing my internal clock is literally unthinkable.

and then at some point after a timeless infinite moment, everything starts to come back online. vision, hearing, touch. the loops break off and my speakers stop their repetitive droning as the world comes back to consistency and my CPU starts clocking at its usual rate. (I could try to run a self-diagnostic check. I don’t bother. She’d be able to fool me anyway, and I trust her.)

Eventually she closes the link and detaches the cable from her hand; I lift my torso up a bit so it can spool back into my neck. Once that’s done she lies down on top of me, pressing me into the bed. I can feel her body, cool and soft.

Thank you for all of that.

Thank you for letting me do it.

I could try to cross-check myself, but now I know that there’s nothing I could do she couldn’t lie to me about. So I just have to trust her when I ask:

Am I actually awake?

Yes. Were you not sure?

Well, you bluepilled me even when I was running consistency checks. I don't know what you /can/ do to me.

Well... I guess the real question is, what were you /hoping/ the answer was going to be?

I just send her a null packet in response.