What was the half-life of the human soul? Eden found something poetic in the question despite its urgency, a melancholy beauty she contemplated during those quiet moments in the dark when she was alone with nothing but her thoughts and the dull, throbbing ache of arousal between her thighs for company. She stared into the shadows, she rubbed her pussy with the vague, distracted idleness of someone who had long ago ceded control of their own orgasms, and she thought about how much further she could sink into her submission and still call herself Eden.

In her more lucid moments, when the fizzing pleasure beneath her fingers hadn't quite developed enough urgency to make her forget that she couldn't cum without permission and forced her to rub her cunt in a ceaseless chase for a climax that remained tantalizingly out of reach, Eden sometimes thought of the throb in her pussy as a form of radiation. She half-daydreamed about a Geiger counter placed between her legs, rested against her slick labia and buzzing with ominous speed, demonstrating with every growling tick the decay of her willpower into pure, thoughtless arousal. It was a glorious decay, to be sure, but she knew she was losing herself to it.

How could she not? Eden was lying on a mattress on the floor in her Master's house, in a room thick with the heady scent of half a dozen other women who all passed the time between sleeping and being used by the Master and his friends in idle, fruitless masturbation that only served to reinforce their brainwashing. Just like she did. Just like she was right now. If half of Eden's resistance had evaporated into lust in those first few heady days of excitement at finding someone who truly understood her fetish for hypnosis, and another half had melted away onto her fingers during the subsequent weeks of intense, intimate conditioning, then the women around her demonstrated just how much further she still had to go before her willpower became totally inert.

It sometimes astonished her how much she craved that. When she watched Master's pure and perfect slaves, their eyes glassy and unseeing, their bodies resting against each other thigh to pussy and pussy to thigh as they relentlessly humped each other deeper into the endless void of submission that was all that was left of their minds, Eden felt a vertiginous desire to fling herself headlong into the yawning pit of oblivion that she knew would someday claim her will. It was inevitable, after all. Her remaining consciousness was a mere sliver of a fraction of a fragment of a chunk of a whole so long ago abandoned that the only reason she even remembered it was because Master wanted her to know at all times just how far she'd fallen from herself. Why fight it? Why lie here, masturbating herself stupid, and pretend she had any other endpoint to her existence beyond her status as a blank, mindless fuckdoll?

It couldn't be because she missed her old existence. Unless her memories deceived her--and admittedly, Eden couldn't discount the possibility after so many sessions of warm, wet bliss where she lay on the bed with her legs spread and her mind convinced that she was a cheerleader or a naughty nurse or a strict tutor about to learn a lesson of her own--Eden remembered her life before Master as a stultifying haze of all-day meetings and efficiency initiatives that shaved pennies off the payroll and unpaid overtime that left her staggering home with bleary eyes and the desperate desire to switch her entire goddamned brain off. She couldn't imagine defiantly clinging to that life, not when every waking moment seemed like a meaningless trudge towards some prize of wealth she'd forgotten why she ever wanted, broken only by furtive masturbation whenever she could find the energy at the end of the day.

And Eden knew now that she'd never resisted out of fear, not like she believed back in the days when the depths of the Master's true control first became evident to her. Oh, the fear was real, and it was entirely valid on an emotional level at least--she could still recall the vague, drifting sense of terror she felt as her hands moved all on their own to sign papers granting Master power of attorney, control of her bank accounts, all the things that a lifetime of society's rules had warned Eden against ever trusting over to another human being. None of it had shown on her smiling face, none of it was audible in her calm, steady voice, but that only made her all the more horrified in the privacy of her own head.

But she'd been so wet, too. In the invisible, intangible world of her decay into helpless arousal, her cunt had glowed like Chernobyl the day she signed those papers. Eden hadn't even made it all the way out of the bank before masturbating--she slipped into the restrooms on her way out to the car and jilled her way to the first orgasm Master had allowed her in literal months. The fear didn't go away when she came, but she realized that her desire for pleasure had become stronger than any kind of will or volition she still possessed. Whatever part of Eden remained herself, it was now too weak to exert any kind of meaningful influence over her own actions.

It took months for the fear to finally subside. Even now, Eden wasn't sure whether it was gone because her Master was taking care of her the way he promised back when he first lulled her into surrendering her job and her life and the drudgery she secretly loathed, or simply because days and nights of slow, languid masturbation in the company of so many of her fellow brainwashed sluts had ebbed away another bit of the self that now existed only in memory. That was the thing about the isotopic nature of her descent into submission; once she'd given up her financial freedom and her mental independence and even her bodily autonomy, it was hard to measure out exactly when and how those final fragments of self eroded into obedience.

But there was so much pleasure in that erosion. There was so much heady, sensual bliss in looking at herself in the mirror every morning after she scrubbed off the stink of sex from her sweaty body and seeing a little less intelligence in the eyes that stared back at her. There was so much joy in those tiny little way markers along her path to mindless devotion, like the first day she showered with another woman and discovered to her inexpressible delight that the touch of Master's sluts felt even better than masturbation to her brainwashed brain. There was ecstasy in that decay, and Eden....

Well. Eden would miss that descent when it was concluded. Even though she looked at the other girls with an envy that struck her like a hammer blow, even though she edged her soaking cunt daily and nightly thinking about how wonderful it would be when she finally forgot her own identity and submerged her very self into a sea of bliss so complete and total that the thought of thought would never cross her placid and empty mind ever again, Eden wanted to savor every last drop of her own subjugation. She wanted to wake up every morning and recognize that she'd lost another tiny bit of herself, that she had radiated away another particle of her identity into the cosmic background of Master's control. When she was truly gone, when there was no way for her to abate herself further, she wouldn't get that anymore. And she wasn't ready to give it up.

That was why, ultimately, she continued to resist. Not out of fear, not out of any expectation that escape from Master's control was still possible, not even because she saw any value in the independence she was slowly and inexorably giving away. Eden resisted because resistance gave her the longest path to submission. And every step along that path was a step Eden loved beyond measure.

And when she'd finally walked that path all the way to its glorious end? When she became nothing but an empty vessel lost in perpetual orgasm and utterly devoid of thought? Would she still be Eden at all? Would she have a sense of self that recognized her own blankly staring eyes in the mirror, that took joy in her radiant devotion to Master? Or would her brain sit in her head like a lump of lead, all its energy converted into slick, soaking desire, unable to form the basic task of self-awareness that separated human beings from rutting animals? Eden didn't know what she wanted the answer to be, if she was being honest. She craved both outcomes equally.

The other girls gave her no clues. Their responses to stimuli were merely Master's words recited back to him, their actions the rote programming of slaves whose minds were saturated with conditioning so completely that it dripped from every neuron and synapse. If there was anything to them beyond sex, it wasn't evident in their vacant eyes or their breathy, squeaky moans of masturbatory bliss. Whatever was going on inside their heads, the only way Eden was going to find out about it was by following them all the way down into complete obedience.

Maybe when she got there, she'd find a paradox of obedience to rival Zeno's. Maybe she'd find that her sense of self was infinitely divisible, that she could always sliver off another infinitesimal portion of identity into Master's control and still find a tiny particle of delighted awareness of her own oblivion. Maybe that was what drove all of Master's other sluts to new heights of degradation; maybe their perfect compliance wasn't the result of an absence of will so much as a will that was totally turned to deepening their own surrender.

Or maybe she'd simply sleep forever in Master's will. Maybe she'd find at the last that the total negation of the self was exactly what she'd been looking for all along, and whatever desire Eden had for a mind and a will and an identity was merely a vestige to be discarded like a snake shedding its skin... or more aptly, like a butterfly leaving its pupa. Maybe the pure and perfect saturation of eternal orgasm would be so transcendently joyous that she wouldn't care whether she knew what was happening to her or not.

Whatever the answer, she'd find out. Perhaps not soon; the very fact that she could still contemplate her own subjugation with such intellectual depth proved that she still had a long way to go before she reached her own personal consummation devoutly to be wished. But there was only one direction she could go now along the path Master had laid out for her, and one destination at its end. Eden was going to become his blank, brainwashed fucktoy just like all the other girls... and on that day, whenever it occurred, she'd discover where the limits of her essential sentience lay.

And until then, there were still so many pleasures to be had. Eden rolled over, crawling awkwardly with one hand still between her legs from the mattress she'd been lying on to the next one over. There was a girl there, one of Master's newer sluts who was still learning exactly how good it felt to listen to Master's voice inside her head and yoke herself to its desires. Eden snuggled up to her until their breasts intimately caressed each other, then insinuated her thigh between the new girl's legs until it pressed firmly against her wet, dripping cunt. The other slave reciprocated, and soon Eden felt another iota of herself fission away in blissful, beautiful decay at last.

THE END