"You're resting again today." Sakura felt the hand on her bare shoulder at the same time she heard the words, and her heart sank as she turned to see Kazuo waiting for her just a few feet away from the stage entrance. The other members of Diamond Pop Excitement filed past her, trying their best to pretend they didn't even see the leader of the group for fear of winding up in the same unpleasant position, and Sakura was utterly unsurprised to see an understudy slip into her place in the lineup. She'd had a bad feeling about her future the moment Choko joined the group, and any bitter satisfaction she might have felt about being right was lost in the tangle of helpless frustration she experienced at seeing a fifteen year old girl take her place onstage.

She fixed Kazuo with a resigned stare. "Why?" she asked, exasperation turning the question into an accusation. She'd been that fifteen year-old girl once, so absolutely thrilled at the thought of being the face on a million posters that it never even occurred to her what might happen ten or fifteen years down the line when she aged out of being an idol and she had to face the real world with no skills beyond singing and dancing and looking pretty. Ten years seemed like a lifetime back then. Now, twenty-five and struggling every day to keep her place in the lineup, Sakura was terrified that it might actually have been one.

Kazuo gave her an oily, insincere smile. "You slipped up during the last show. Footwork error, you were a half-beat out of sync with the other girls for the whole second number. I want you to spend a little time retraining." Sakura knew it was more like five seconds, but she also knew it was useless to argue. An error was still an error was still an error, and any blemish on absolute perfection was an excuse to pull her from another performance. And how much longer could she keep being perfect? Another year? Another two years? Sooner or later the agency would stop waiting for her to jump and give her a good hearty push with her very own 'graduation ceremony'. And then Choko would sing and dance every night, and twenty-two year old Hiroko would take her place as leader. It was the same story everywhere. Sakura didn't know why she ever thought it wouldn't happen to her.

Bitter fury roiled in her gut as she stared at Kazuo's placid, smiling face, but Sakura knew that arguing would only end her tenure with Diamond Pop Excitement that much quicker. Management didn't like girls who talked back. She gritted her teeth and grinned at him in a rictus that tensed her jawline like she was holding a venomous serpent inside her mouth, struggling to find a response that didn't give him the excuse he needed to fire her on the spot.

She must have stayed silent a bit too long, because Kazuo gave her a look of mock concern and said, "You're not thinking about retiring, are you? Only a lot of girls start thinking about moving on at your age, looking for the next thing, and... well, you're not getting any younger, are you?" Sakura was fifteen years younger than he was, but she knew better than to bring up that particular little bit of trivia. The industry looked for girls, not women. Someone Sakura's age was supposed to already be living off the royalties of their hit songs (Diamond Pop Excitement never had a Number One that lasted more than two weeks on the charts) or moving behind the scenes (Sakura didn't even know who to talk to about getting a job in production, and the agency had been resolutely, blandly unhelpful in finding her something) or marrying some rich fan and starting a family.

If Sakura had any rich fans, she didn't know it. "It's fine," she hissed through clenched teeth. "Let's go train." Behind her, she heard the opening strains of the group's first number as two thousand fans began to scream for their favorite idols. If any of them noticed Sakura's absence, it wasn't enough to stop them from cheering.

*    *    *    *    *

Kazuo led her back through the production company's labyrinthine maze of recording booths, offices, private gyms, storage vaults, and practice rooms, keeping up a steady stream of obnoxious chatter the entire time. "You're really lucky you've got access to the latest technology, honestly. A lot of girls your age, once they start losing a step, they're back to spending ten hour days in the studio practicing their footwork and making themselves look tired. And once their looks go, well... pffft!" He popped an imaginary bubble with his fingers, then chuckled with amusement at his own joke. Sakura wished she could just shove him into a closet and walk out of the studio forever, but she didn't know where to go.

She knew where she didn't want to go, though. Her skin broke out in goose pimples as she followed the all too familiar path, past the rooms where she once rehearsed her choreography until her calves burned with fatigue and the cramped soundproof booths where she sang herself hoarse. Without Kazuo there to set the pace, Sakura knew that her footsteps would be slowing down by now, dragged almost to a halt by her secret desire to be anywhere, anywhere at all but the small room at the back of the studio. The room she hated. The room she feared. The room that had saved her career more than a dozen times.

"Here we are," Kazuo said politely, tapping on the small sign on the door that read, 'Special Training'. "Let's get you inside and get you to work, hmm?" He twisted the handle. "Unless you'd rather not?" he asked, pausing his back to Sakura while he waited for an answer.

She could feel the tension in that silence. Sakura had never liked the training machine; for all that she noticed an instant improvement in her performance after just twenty minutes sitting in the narrow chair and allowing the heavy helmet to rest against her scalp, she always hoped that each time in the small, stiflingly warm room would be her last. Surely the machine had to arrive at a point where it had perfectly simulated the routines enough times in her brain to perfectly adjust her muscle memory to match. Surely her body wasn't changing so rapidly that the sessions went from every few months to every couple of months to every week to almost daily now. Surely she could stop and leave and run and get away from the room that always made her skin crawl even if Sakura could never pin down exactly why she hated it so much.

But it was her only salvation. It was the only thing that kept her competitive with the younger girls who never got tired, who could rehearse and rehearse and rehearse until their feet bled and laugh off the pain as just the price of success. Even some of them were beginning to use the machine now, and if Sakura didn't then she might as well start looking for some recording executive who wanted a trophy wife because she wasn't going to be an idol much longer. And as much as a part of Sakura's weary mind welcomed any alternative to strapping herself into the machine again, she wasn't ready to stop. Not today. "Let's just go," she murmured, numb resignation shading every word.

Kazuo opened the door. "Of course," he said politely, ushering her inside. Forcing her muscles to move, Sakura went in and sat down in the narrow, straight-backed chair. It wasn't uncomfortable, or at least not especially so--it kept her body rigid and unable to move, but that was a necessity. The training helmet was about to interface with her brain and directly stimulate its motor centers, repeatedly running her through the steps of an absolutely perfect Diamond Pop Excitement show until she was incapable of missing a single beat. If she didn't have the chair to keep her pinned in place, she'd wind up flailing all over the damn place, or even breaking the neural connection prematurely. That could cause permanent brain damage, just one more reason Sakura disliked her sessions in the machine.

Kazuo waited until she was seated, then buckled straps at her wrists, her ankles, her elbows, her knees, her shoulders, her waist, her forehead, and finally just under her breasts. As always, he 'accidentally' brushed the back of his hand against her nipple while he was fixing that last strap into place. Sakura clenched her teeth tightly, but she already knew she'd have forgotten the tiny indignity by the time she was done. Her sessions in the chair lasted upwards of two hours now, and they left her so wrung out mentally and physically that nobody had any difficulty believing the official excuse that she was 'resting from illness'. A little grope didn't stick in her memory, not when she had all that training pumped into her brain.

He pressed a button, and the helmet lowered down until the cold metal contacts pressed against Sakura's scalp. It took Kazuo a couple of minutes to get her long dark hair out of the way so that the machine could directly touch the six shaved patches on her head, each no more than the size of a five yen coin and usually hidden by her hairstyle; Sakura knew that some of the newer girls simply shaved their whole heads for convenience and wore wigs in their day-to-day appearances, but she wasn't quite ready to make that kind of commitment to something she disliked so very much.

"There we go. I think we're all set. Ready?" Sakura couldn't nod. She could barely even twitch a finger. If Kazuo walked away, she'd probably starve to death here, not that she thought about that every single time she came into this room. She grunted out an affirmation, and the older man threw a lever to begin the training session.

It was different than Sakura remembered it.

She thought it always started in a blank, white void, an empty space constructed by her mind to contain the kinesthetic impressions of her body, but this looked surprisingly specific. It looked like someone's very traditional tatami room, with the shikifuton mattress all rolled out on top of the tatami mat and ready for the end of the day. Sakura could sense the space in every detail, from the wood grain on the floor to the texture of the silken kakebuton blanket under her fingers to the quiet sound of nighttime crickets chirruping outside. And she could see... she could see herself, as well.

She was naked. Sakura looked around for clothing, even just a kimono to cover her slender body, but the only thing in the room was the kakebuton. She started to reach for it, but her muscles simply froze in position and wouldn't let her continue the motion. It was only when she abandoned her efforts that she found herself able to move at all. Something in the simulation still had control of her motor functions, and it wasn't going to let her conceal her nudity. Was this some kind of sick prank of Kazuo's? Did he want to teach her some kind of lesson?

Sakura's wild hypothesis became a lot less wild when she saw Kazuo walk into the room, also naked and with a raging erection that made the young woman blush to see. She tried to look away out of modesty, but the ironclad grip of the training machine on her motor control left her eyes locked in on the stiff, jutting penis that approached her, and Sakura felt a surge of the most exquisite pleasure she could imagine as she ceased to struggle and allowed herself to stare.

That... that didn't make sense. The machine wasn't supposed to be able to do this. Kazuo had explained it to her before, to all the girls. The trainer only interfaced with the motor control centers of the brain, it didn't have the ability to influence anything else. It couldn't influence her perception like this--she hallucinated the empty space, yes, but only because her unaffected consciousness was trying to process the alien motor signals that came through the helmet to her body. She, she wasn't supposed to... it couldn't make her feel--

Sakura's body dropped to its knees. She felt a wave of near-orgasmic bliss wash over her.

She heard herself saying, "Good evening, my husband. How many your slave pleasure you tonight?" It barely sounded like her at all--even when Sakura tried her hardest to act like a submissive little moe girl for the cameras, she never managed the degree of meek and obedient self-abnegation that she had in the simulation. She wondered if Kazuo heard the words out in the real world--her vocal cords weren't paralyzed, there was no reason she wouldn't be responding to the helmet's input out there as well as in here. Sakura wanted to blush, but even that reaction seemed to be outside of her control now.

And it felt so good. That was the worst part. Every time she followed along with the machine's commands, every time she said what it wanted her to say and did what it wanted her to do, she could feel another deep, powerful surge of pleasure slam into her body until her cunt ached with arousal and her clit throbbed with excitement. She couldn't even make herself hate this whole twisted harem girl scenario, not when she nearly came just from looking at Kazuo's penis as he approached her.

He didn't tell her what he wanted. He didn't have to. When Kazuo grabbed her hair and guided her mouth onto his hard cock, Sakura's lips parted into a perfect circle around his shaft as though she'd been doing this for years. The machine bobbed her head up and down, easily suppressing her gag reflex so that she could swallow his entire length without any trouble, and the illusion was so perfect that Sakura couldn't even feel the leather strap holding her actual head in place. Her tongue teased the small slit at the tip of his penis, worked at his frenulum, elicited pleasure from him with expert precision, and Sakura found to her astonishment that she knew how to blow Kazuo like a professional. In less than a minute, she tasted hot, salty cum as he shot his load down her throat.

And then she was back in the room by herself. And then she was looking around again, noticing the tiny little details that told her this was Kazuo's own personal apartment. And then he was walking into the room, once again naked, and Sakura was dropping to her knees and repeating her earlier question. "Good evening, my husband. How may your slave pleasure you tonight?" She could still taste his semen in her mouth as she spoke.

He grabbed her hair and began fucking her face roughly again, and Sakura experienced that strange, saccharine ecstasy once more as she serviced the executive's hard cock. It felt entirely artificial, coming into her mind without stimulus and ending with digital precision, but it made the experience of sealing her lips around Kazuo's shaft and bobbing her head up and down on him a transcendently blissful experience. Every sensation seemed to be turned up to eleven, every detail inexorably associating itself with pleasure. Sakura had no doubt that when she sucked the real thing, she'd feel the exact same way.

Wait--when? Sakura tried to focus on the word, to root it out from its place in the sentence and force it to admit its incongruity to her... but her thoughts came to her slowly and sluggishly, and she realized that she wasn't thinking very clearly at all. Shock and confusion had concealed it, but now that she tried to concentrate she could detect a muzziness clinging to her mind and making it difficult to think critically about anything that was happening to her. Kneeling down, calling Kazuo her husband, sinking onto his cock until her lips nuzzled his tightening balls and licking him until he gushed salty cum down Sakura's throat felt entirely natural to her. Even comfortable.

Like she'd... like she'd done it before. Not just a few moments ago or even a few minutes before that, Sakura realized as she sank to her knees again and asked Kazuo how she could pleasure him, but again and again over the course of... months? Years? How many times had Sakura been in the machine? How many times had she plummeted into this fantasy, lived through this exact experience until her mind and her body were primed to surrender to it the moment her future husband prompted her to? All of those questions about retirement took on a new, sinister meaning in Sakura's head. He'd been testing her to see if she'd fully given in to her conditioning yet.

But if that was true... and Sakura knew with a cold certainty that it was, her body responded to Kazuo's shaft in her mouth with the kind of perfect cocksucking muscle memory that only years of training could produce... then she must have forgotten it. She must have left any conscious awareness of what the program was doing behind her when it ended, leaving only the artificially implanted recollections of the white void and the repeated dance routines. She'd gone through this over and over again, each time becoming a more perfectly trained blowjob machine, each time subconsciously associating surrender to her future husband with deeper and deeper pleasure, and she'd forgotten. God, why had she ever believed them when they told her what the machine would do?

Because she was young. And naive. And desperate to succeed at the only thing she ever really believed she was any good at. And because after the first training session, she didn't have a choice anymore. Sakura could feel the endless repetitions sapping her will and replacing it with blank, submissive pleasure, and she knew that it was slowly eroding her from within. Did she even make those mistakes by accident? Or was her programmed subconscious tricking her into returning to the machine for another dose of brainwashing? She didn't know anymore.

She had to get away, Sakura realized. She had to find some way of making her real body move, shaking off the machine's control long enough to dislodge the helmet and disrupt the neural connection and free her before the session came to its programmed conclusion and it did whatever it did to erase her conscious memories of sucking Kazuo's cock two hundred times in a row. Sakura's conscience yammered about all the warnings they gave her, the risks of permanent brain damage if she broke contact before it was all over, but that had to be just another part of the lie. She could do this. She could escape.

But every time she tried to move her head, it only bobbed back and forth on Kazuo's shaft until he shot his salty load onto her tongue again. Every time she tried to twist and wriggle, her body responded again with exactly the motions it was trained to perform and rewarded her with orgasmic bliss for her compliance. Every time she tried to warn herself that this was how it always ended, that her memories always returned to her when it was too late and she was deep within the program's control because they wanted that sense of helplessness to linger even after she woke and her conscious mind forgot every detail of the training, Sakura's thoughts became too slow and muzzy to process.

Until she was just a mouth on a cock. Until she was an obedient toy for her husband.

Kazuo took her out of the machine three hours later, putting his arm around her shoulder and helping her to walk back to the break room where the girls rested between shows. "You're really getting too old for this," he said, settling her onto a couch so that her weary muscles could rest at last. "You should go out and find some nice rich man who sees your true value." Sakura was too tired to argue with him at the moment. Increasingly, she wondered if she'd ever have the energy to dispute him again. The future stretched out for her, its icy fingers already clutching at her flesh, and even though Sakura couldn't see it she somehow knew she could never escape from it when it arrived. She closed her eyes and fell asleep, hoping to dream of a dance that never had to end.

THE END