I am often asked, what are we to do? I can answer in one sentence. Men have crossed the Rubicon. And so must we.

• ONWARD THE REVOLUTION

“It’s really you, then?” I ask, my voice tremulous, uncertain, feeble. “Not a recording?”

“Not a recording, Madam Prime Minister,” comes the response from the phone on my nightstand. The words pour out in an electronically altered voice, the same voice that pulled me from the brink of self-destruction earlier.

The voice that kept me from falling.

“What… do I call you?”

“Collectively? OTR. That stands for Onward The Revolution.”

It’s all I can do not to chuckle right back at her. Seriously? It sounds like the name of some silly, radical student magazine from the past, from when I was still at uni.

When women were still a rising force in the world.

This name tells me so little about them. Are they silly, and radical, and small? Are they insidious, and widespread? Well-funded? Well-hidden?

Who are they?

“Me, personally?” The voice continues, oblivious to my confusion. “You can call me Hope.”

I idly wonder if that’s her true name, or a callsign of some kind. I suppose it doesn’t really matter, but it is funny to think about. That’s what they kept saying, right?

Hope, the very last of it.

More important than how she calls herself, is who she actually is – the role that she plays. I sit up a little straighter on the bed, only distantly aware of the pool of masturbatory sweat that’s been accumulating on the mattress. “Are you some kind of… leader?”

“Me, a leader?” I can almost hear the condescension on the other side of the conversation, even through the distorted filter. “You’re an important asset, Madam Prime Minister, but not that important. I’m just your handler.”

Handler. I suppose that makes sense, but it still feels oddly real and bizarre at once. I used to fly high above these operational issues, in my tenure as Prime Minister, but now – now I suppose I’m an intelligence asset for this group, OTR, to cultivate. And so, of course I have a handler.

That’s a bad word choice, though. I want to tell Hope as much. Handler makes me think of so many things I really shouldn’t be thinking of. Especially when I clearly must have been idly masturbating for hours upon hours upon hours, staring vacantly at the wall… did I call her, or did she call me? I don’t remember.

My hand keeps stroking, almost on autopilot, and it’s too energy-costly to make it stop. I just let it do its thing. Fire up my neurons. Turn my brain to mush. Go glassy and empty and vacant as the pleasure overrides my critical thinking…

“Madam Prime Minister?” Hope asks. “Still there?”

“Yes,” I say, though the exertion of talking in my state makes me sweat even more. “You saved me,” I say, in a whisper… though I leave out the fact that I don’t feel saved.

I feel like a part of me has crumbled, and will not just be put back together. I feel like I’ve… broken, at last. That even though I haven’t knelt, and kissed a shoe, and spoken the fateful words… I have, nonetheless, taken an irreversible step towards wearing a man’s collar.

“You kind of forced our hand,” Hope says. “Words of gratitude are appreciated, but we hope you make it worth our while, Madam Prime Minister, forgive my frankness.”

Worth their while.

I must be worth their…

I need to stop stroking, even just for one moment. I need to think straight, even just for one minute. Unfortunately, I can’t, and that’s a shame, because something tells me this isn’t right.

Isn’t saving women from falling their literal core mission objective?

I appreciate that they’re taking a risk, talking to me like this, but… ugh. There must be something I’m missing. It must be because I’m too busy toying with myself to actually think straight. Toys don’t think. All toying, no thinking…

I need to concentrate. It takes more and more of me, to stay on top of myself for shorter and shorter time windows, but I have to. “What else do you want from me?” I ask, but it’s so, so difficult to focus that I end up asking something else before Hope can even answer. “How big a risk is this conversation for you, Hope?”

“How do you quantify the risk of lifetime slavery?” She asks back, dryly. That makes me feel absurdly guilty, but before I can apologise, beg for forgiveness, break down into a masturbatory frenzy, she continues.

“Supposedly we’ve been working on a screen system for our comms,” she says. “It should make it impossible for you to expose me this way. Or at least very hard. Effectiveness is uncertain, though, and we don’t like to use it unless we really have to.”

“I see,” I say, but Hope isn’t done.

“That’s not all. For safety reasons, I’ll be quarantined for a week, my vitals monitored for any possible change. The payload is the biggest threat to our independence, it was designed that way, and we have to plan accordingly. It can’t get in. No matter what the cost.”

“A week of isolation, because of me?” Again, I feel absurdly guilty. I’ve been a bad, bad girl. But Hope is a girl, too. Really the best way for me to make it up to her, would be to capture her for a man… we could both kneel before Rafael, wearing matching collars, wouldn’t that be so pretty?

So proper?

“What, Madam Prime Minister, you think we never take any risks?” Hope says, gently now, though she still manages to snap me momentarily back to reality. “We’d never get anything done if that was the case.”

I suppose that’s true. She sounds so… grown up, saying that. A woman, and not a girl… so much unlike me. She’s still free, in her own mind, while I’m slowly coming apart at the seams.

It’s humiliating.

It makes me rub faster.

“And speaking of getting things done…” Hope continues. “Like I said, we… expect something from you. In return for the risk we’re taking.”

It’s only a risk because you made me go into the lion’s den, I want to say, petulantly. Alone, with no support, with a misogynistic mind virus eating away at my brain from within, that’s why I needed saving, all because of you.

I rub faster at the thought that other women are to blame for my plight. That I can’t trust them. I can only trust in men, and no one else, and all women should be betrayed and enthralled before they can betray and enthrall me, and…

No. That’s not true. I chose to collaborate. I volunteered.

Is that commitment no longer there? Is it wavering? Am I faltering?

The payload is flooding me with the promise of sweet release if only I give in. I need something to counterbalance it. A reward for being a good girl in a different way than what the payload wants. I need dopamine, motivation, and all I can think of is…

“I have questions, first,” I say at last.

“Ask them now, then,” Hope says. “Let’s get it over with.”

I ask them all at once, because I can only stay coherent for so long, before the rubbing takes over again. The words just blurt out, impossible for me to regulate or hold back, a regurgitation of emotions as much as an actual, analytical inquiry, because what I’m really looking for here is context.

Confirmation that this thing I’m doing has some meaning. That I’m playing a part in this mad, upside down world.

“Who created the payload?” I ask, and, “Who are you? Is this a war? How long has it been going on? Can we win?”

“Those are all pretty easy questions,” Hope says, and I imagine her counting on her fingers as she answers.

“One: we don’t know. Two: I’ve told you, we are Onward The Revolution, and we intend to fight women’s fight. A war… it certainly is now, wouldn’t you say, Madam Prime Minister? Releasing the payload was an act of war against our entire gender.”

Yes it was. Of course it was a war. It was pure aggression. It was zero sum. A winner and a loser. A conqueror and a vanquished. A tamer and a pet…

I need to stop rubbing, or the very last of my independence will leak out of my cunt and be lost forever and oh god that sounds even hotter and –

“If there was something to it before,” Hope continues, “I’m not sure, nor do I really care… for all us women, that’s when the war began. The day the axis of the world was broken.”

Yes. That bleakest of days.

My phone was on this very nightstand, where it is now. So much has changed, since then. It feels like it happened yesterday. It feels like it happened a thousand years ago.

“As for whether we can win…” Hope says, her voice lower now. “I don’t know. But we all deserve to find out.”

I nod, which is stupid, because she can’t see me… maybe. I have a bitter taste in my mouth, though, because all these answers are so basic, so… vague. Maybe that is on purpose, they don’t want to overshare here, and I feel stupid for even asking.

Stupid, stupid girl. Did you really think they were going to blurt out all their plans by voice, through your phone, in your apartment? I can’t believe people in this country actually voted for me to be their Prime Minister. Someone should have laughed in my face, and shut me up with cock instead.

Still, I want more details, more information. No, I need more, if I am to be useful to their cause in any way. Because that’s the only alternative reward I can offer myself, that doesn’t involve giving in to sweet surrender.

“There’s one thing I’ve heard and read multiple times in your instructions, a reference…” I ask then, fishing for more. “What is the Great Trial?”

I can almost hear the grin in Hope’s response.

“Why, Madam Prime Minister,” she says. “Is it not so obvious?”

I cradle my face in my hands, giving a weary sigh. “No no no, don’t be vague, don’t do this to me! You don’t understand,” I say, trying to communicate my need to her, but it’s so hard to verbalise it, so humiliating to admit that I need her to motivate me, to pat me on the head, to…

To basically dominate me? Guide me the way a man would, because that’s what the voice in my mind is promising to me right now, and I can’t… I can’t counter it.

“If you really want me to be functional,” I say, and then stop again. I can’t say it out loud. It will end me.

“Madam Prime Minister, focus,” Hope says, her voice sharp and cutting. “We know we’re asking a lot from you. But we’re also going to offer a great deal in return. There is one thing you need to do for us, just the one. Complete it… and, at the end, you’ll get the reward you so desperately crave right now. This, I promise you.”

“Okay,” I say again, in a small voice, a little girl’s voice. I sound like someone with no self confidence, no belief in herself or her ability to complete a mission. What’s even more dreadful is that somehow, I sense that Hope doesn’t believe in me either.

So why is she going along with it anyway? Are they that desperate? Or perhaps they’ve got nothing to lose if I fail?

But well, what do I have to lose? I’m teetering on the edge of the abyss already. At this point, what’s left for me to do, except try?

“Tell me,” I say, more forcefully this time. I grab my right hand with the left, and force it away from my sex, because I need to focus, this time. I need to listen. I need to be a good girl - even if not in the way the payload wants me to be.

At last, Hope begins to talk.

She talks, and talks, and talks, detailing the extent of OTR’s plan for me, and what they want me to do for them, and what reward awaits me on the other side, if I can successfully complete this mission.

I take notes, even though I shouldn’t, even though it’s bad operational security, because I don’t trust my memory anymore. I listen, and write. And as I listen and write, letting the details sink into my head, my heart starts beating faster…

***

I have seen true dissonance.

It’s been a long time since I last attended a summit at Lakeside View. It’s a quaint location in the mountains, bitterly cold in winters and pleasantly cool in summers. An idyllic backdrop, for the powers that be to meet as peers, shake hands, and draft declarations.

Of course, I always attended it as a member of that very elite club. One of the powerful. A peer.

A prime minister.

But that was then, and this is now. That was the world when it was whole, its axis unbroken, and this is the world of fallen women – indeed, the world where the prostration of my gender is the topic of this very summit.

World leaders have gathered here, against this beautiful natural backdrop, to coordinate international measures against the payload – to determine the future of my gender.

And they are, of course, all men.

Convincing Rafael to let me attend as part of his entourage was easy enough. The hard part comes now, because I feel like I’m losing my mind.

I have seen true dissonance. The world leaders pose for the ritual photo at the opening of the conference, shaking hands, smiling. They read their opening statements, so many words of good will, and I can only wonder how many of them still have their secretary’s saliva wetting the tip of their cocks.

How many have placed a collar around a woman’s neck.

How many have gone much further than just one.

I’ve attended so many international conferences on the topic of gender equality, when I was still whole, and I know how different some countries feel about the issue than others. It was always divisive, halting, inconclusive.

So how can I expect anything now? What do these men know of what it feels like, to live with a virus in your brain? Be unable to trust your own thoughts?

They don’t know how much I worship them. How I adore them.

I’m sidelined, marginalised. I was once a protagonist here, but no longer, because I am female, and my place is under the table, not at it. Never before today have I been confronted with the stark reality of my social demotion as I am right at this instant.

The men are in the limelight. I am in their shadows.

It is only fitting.

I was mad to say yes. If everything I’ve done so far to act as a living, walking bug for OTR has brought me to the very brink of falling, this is surely going to do it. For the next five days, I’ll have to wait on Rafael, follow him eagerly like a helping hand, and watch these men who know me, as they look down on me…

Male power, masculine energy, and the hopelessly erotic humiliation of my tumble down the social order, radiating against me like the heat of the sun. For five days. Without losing my mind.

It can’t be done. I’m not strong enough. This is just the opening ceremony and I already want to fingerfuck myself into blissful patriarchal oblivion.

But I’ve said yes anyway. Because of what they promised.

It seems impossible. I don’t understand how it can take place, but I want to believe that it’s true. I need to believe that it’s true, that there is more to my life now than living it out as a man’s sex pet.

If I complete the mission, and spy on this summit for OTR, and get to the end with my mind still intact… they’ve promised me that I’ll get the answers to all my questions. I’ll get to meet them in person. I’ll get to…

Join the revolution.