The television was the colour of a television tuned to a dead channel. That deep, somehow bland blue gave way at the centre of the screen to a small dot, black at first, then kaleidoscopically neon.

Your gaze slid off the blue to rest on the dot, which sat in place for a while, at the heart of the screen. Only the fact it was changing colour drew attention to it, but somehow it held your attention. You only noticed how firmly it held your attention when it was gone; when the commercial had ended and another had come on, leaving you with a strange sense of something important, the phantom shapes in your mind of words you couldn’t quite place. That strange, deja vu like feeling that you would know them if you heard them, spoke them, read them, wrote them.

You had entirely forgotten the commercial by the time the show had finished. Your boyfriend, however, had not; you found this out while you were in the kitchen fetching drinks and your boyfriend called out “What did you make of the ad without any branding?”

“What?” You actually replied before you’d considered the question he asked. True, your attention was on something else, but that was becoming the case more and more.

It was something you’d started at work, where you’d learned that often the answer to a question when your boss’ boss approached you directly was “Yes, sir, of course,” both because it was important to be polite if you wanted to keep your job and because it made you feel good to agree with your superiors. The habit had somehow crept from work back home, where it was less likely to be agreement to a request, and more likely to be a general response without thought.

You had somehow failed to notice that whatever you answered became the way you thought about the question. It wasn’t something you kept track of; after all, you wouldn’t be answering before thinking if you were thinking deeply.

“That weird ad,” your boyfriend called through again. “The one that was just a dot.”

You blinked. For a second, you had that strange sense of words before your eyes. Important words, words you should follow. Words you had to follow. But you had no idea what those words actually were.

You popped the cap off both bottles of beer and put them on the little red circular tray. This was a new thing, too; Linda at the office had started using a big tray for the coffee run, which had gradually become a smaller tray again as you and everyone else at your rank slowly stopped taking teas and coffees, leaving only the higher-ups to be served. You added the small bowl you’d found in a thrift store a couple of weeks earlier, and you filled it with salted peanuts from a bag.

“I don’t remember,” you called through again, though you’d already picked up the tray and you were making your way back into the lounge, where you briefly handed your boyfriend the tray.

“How can you not remember?” Your boyfriend sounded irked, which wasn’t ideal. You wondered how you’d make it up to him.

You took your bottle from it - the one with the straw - and you settled onto all fours by the side of the sofa, your bottle between your wrists, your head up to view the TV. You kept your back ramrod-straight, something that seemed to happen naturally now, not requiring any thought on your behalf. As always, your boyfriend paused a little while before placing the tray on your flat back.

You weren’t sure why he was so unaccustomed to the idea. It felt like you’d been doing that forever.

“What happened?” you asked.

He explained it all to you again, but you didn’t really remember.

*

The commercial ran another three times that night, and when your boyfriend pointed it out you agreed that it was weird, and when your boyfriend wondered aloud what it could be for you said “I think it’s probably a government thing,” and only when you’d said so did you think for a second and decide it was probably a government thing. But you couldn’t have said what made you think so, or why.

*

That night, as he had done often lately, your boyfriend was introspective and quiet. “Babe?” he asked at one point. “Did you… Are you sure everything’s OK? With work and everything?”

The question was a strange one and you really weren’t sure what he meant by it. You lifted your head from his cock, relishing the sticky, drooly pop that always came when you broke the seal with a flourish, and tickled his balls gently with the fingertips of your free hand, the other one keeping his dick upright and proud. “Yeah,” you said, a little breathless. “Work’s going great. Why?” And you’d taken him deep inside you again before he could answer.

Cocksucking was something you’d only really started to enjoy recently. Sure, you’d done it a time or two over the years, both with your boyfriend and with previous lovers, but it had always felt like something they held out for, something they expected as a reward for anything out of the ordinary, and something that just wasn’t fun.

Then one day, about six or seven months ago, you’d been sat at work trying to get the pivot table to work correctly in an Excel sheet and a thought had presented itself to you. Just popped into your head, not following on from anything else, not something you’d ever thought before, but suddenly it was just there, clear and certain and somehow bigger than the thoughts you usually had, big enough that other thoughts got trapped and stuck in traffic behind it.

You tried to dismiss the thought, but it wouldn’t go away, and it had a gravity to it that kept drawing you back to it over and over, and the more you tried to stare at the spreadsheet, the more the thought mattered.

I can’t believe I’ve never sucked my boss’ cock.

You didn’t want to, because you’d never really enjoyed sucking cock and anyway you had a boyfriend and the two of you were loyal to each other, and you weren’t even attracted to your boss (hard as that is to believe, looking back on it now). But the thought wouldn’t go away. You felt like it had been there, lurking, for some unknown period of time, growing stronger and stronger until you finally noticed you were thinking it; once you did, you couldn’t think of anything else.

You didn’t act on the thought for almost five whole minutes. Then, suddenly, the ridiculousness of a situation where you hadn’t sucked your boss’ cock was more important than all your objections. You blinked.

It was almost an out-of-body experience as you got up and left your cubicle, walking past six or seven other employees all intent on their work. I’m going to suck my boss’ cock, you thought, and none of them know.

You knocked on his door but immediately opened it and went in, too full of the need to experience his cock to wait. You saw on his screen that he had a CCTV view up, pointed at your cubicle - you recognised your purse resting by the phone, where you always put it after lunch - but that wasn’t what you were interested in.

So eager to fill your mouth were you that you dropped to kneel two paces out, approaching him on your knees like a needy slut. Not that you’d ever dream of calling yourself that.

You remember fumbling with the buckle of his belt, fingers too eager, and he had to help you get his cock out, but once he did it was no longer a case of you thinking you needed to suck. Sucking was an instinct.

When you were done, you sat back on your knees, swallowed, and ran your tongue over your lips. Your boss was grinning at you. “Very good,” he said. “If you make the cut you’ll know when I release the rota.”

You blinked, thinking clearly again, and went back to your office. You were glad you’d worn the trouser suit that day, and a little embarrassed, but as you returned to your Excel sheet the embarrassment melted away in an instant.

A while later, the thought was back, but it had changed.

I can’t believe how little I suck cock.

Your boyfriend was very surprised when you grabbed him that evening, the moment he’d got inside; you spun him around in a kiss and kicked the front door shut with your heel, and before he could even finish asking “Not that I’m complaining, but what’s got intoooOOOH” you were on your knees, his jeans were open, and you had engulfed his cock with your mouth through the cloth of his boxer briefs.

That was when he started asking if things were okay. You knew it meant he was confused, even worried; you knew he feared that you blew him out of guilt for an affair or some other indiscretion. But it wasn’t that at all; you could hardly be guilty about sucking your boss’ cock at work, not when he’d put you on the rota. The fact you handled his Monday blowjobs proved you were the most skilled on that rota, providing him with the pick-me-up he needed. It was part of the job, not something you were guilty about.

So you told him everything was fine at work, and you sucked his cock, and encouraged him to treat you as his furniture, and all the rest, and you hoped you could make him believe that everything was fine.

*

You left early so you could get to the gym before work started the next morning, as you regularly did. (Your boss had been very generous three months ago and - quite against regulations - had tipped you off that body shape and the gropability of your ass were both going to be factors on your annual review. He told you he didn’t want you to miss out, so you’ve showed him how good a loyal little worker bunny you can be by working hard on his tip-off.)

The subway was usually better the earlier you got on, and that day was no exception. You were almost sleepwalking, barely awake enough to navigate properly, but that was fine; you knew that would change in the gym, where you stowed your coat and backpack in a locker and went through to the warm-up area in the leggings and lycra top you’d been wearing under the coat.

You always warmed up on the stair stepper; it was a good way to tone your legs and work on your ass before you properly began your session, even if it had been hell on your cardio when you first started. By now, your endurance was much better than it had been.

The gym had big screens on the walls in front of the stair steppers and the treadmills. They were tuned to the same music channel that provided the gym’s soundtrack, but it meant every so often they would play a couple of ads. You’d originally moved to using the gym in the morning because you were much less likely to get a McDonalds ad in the middle of your workout.

One of those commercial breaks took place during your warmup, and during it, that same mystery commercial flashed on screen. Once again, the neon, flickering dot on the screen caught your eyes, to the point that you took in nothing but for the duration of the advert, and once again, you were left with the strange impression of words in your head, words you couldn’t see, couldn’t connect with. Of something important, hopelessly out of reach.

And then it was gone. You moved on to the leg press, where you probably got yourself woken up ahead of work. Feeling the burn in your thighs after the gym always made you feel positive; it was a sign you were doing something good for you that would also be well received at work.

Your boyfriend was happy about it, too, if his wandering hands were anything to go by; it seemed to be hard for him to admit it aloud, but you were paying more attention to his body than ever, and you were confident.

You showered, packed your leggings and top into your bag, stepped into your sneakers and threw your coat on over your otherwise bare body. Then, concealed enough for the outside world, you made the short walk between your gym and your office.

You considered the new office dress code one of the smartest innovations they’d brought in. It was only a couple of months old now, dating from after everyone below the rank of manager gave up coffee at work. It was nice to know nobody had been put off that the staff now only wore clothes if they were managers or spoke directly to clients; you were pretty sure in most places of work, there would have been protests.

But you were proud to work somewhere entirely staffed by loyal little worker bunnies and thoughtful (and hot) management.

You collected your laptop from your desk and went through into your boss’ office. It was a Wednesday, so it was Savannah’s turn on the blowjob rota.

“Morning, sir,” you greeted your boss. “Morning, Savannah.”

Savannah enthusiastically moaned a greeting back to you as you settled down beside your boss’ chair, setting up your laptop just under his desk, and then went forward onto all fours.

Your boss gave a low rumble of pleasure, but by now he was used to working in an environment where his good little worker bunnies gave him the treatment they knew he deserved. He cleared his throat. “Take a letter,” he said, and you began to type at his dictation, remaining in place with your back straight like the best quality office furniture even when he set his drinks bottle down on the small of your back, the chill condensation pooling just above your hips.

*

The commercial stayed with you that day in a way it hadn’t, really, the day before. It probably didn’t help that when you went out to buy lunch from the nearest cafe, you saw a version of the same image on the back of someone’s newspaper in a full-page advert. It took you out of the queue; you stood stock-still until the person reading it moved the paper and broke eye contact, and when you collected yourself again, a mother with a pram had taken your place in line.

Back to work you went, and you had plenty to be getting on with after your one-on-one morning with your boss. You sat down in your cubicle and set up your laptop directly under the management camera, so your bare breasts would be on best display. You even switched on the side light you’d installed for more flattering shadows.

Then you got on with the job, occasionally pausing to smile at the camera. When you did that you tucked your arms in close under your tits, giving them a bit of a lift, and you let the girls sway from side to side; you no longer felt embarrassed doing this, the way you did when your boss first told you to. He called you his executive toy when you did it; now that you rarely wore a bra at home, it was also great for distracting your boyfriend on the rare occasions you needed to.

In the cubicles around you, other employees were working away, often finding their own ways to look pleasing for management cameras; good little worker bunnies and bulls working in happy harmony.

You knew other businesses didn’t work like this, but any time you thought about that the next thought presented itself easily and unbidden.

So why would I ever want to work anywhere else?

Except that afternoon, the more it went on, the less that thought popped up. A different one would fill your mind instead, still interrupting your thought process, but definitely different.

For one thing, you had no idea what the thought actually was; you could sort of feel the shape of it, but the specific words or letters it might be composed of just weren’t there.

It was an unpleasant feeling, the strange and uncomfortable sensation that something so important was escaping your memory. You remembered your friend who spoke four languages, and who had discovered to her frustration that the more languages she knows, the more common it was for the word she needed sometimes to elude her in every single one of them.

You felt like it was simple and obvious, but it wasn’t clear, and the more you tried to remember it, the more an ache opened up somewhere right in the middle of your head.

Which was odd; that wasn’t how headaches usually happened for you, either an ache around the temples and spreading out from there or the uncomfortable band of pressure around the head were familiar. This was new, and only happened when you tried to concentrate on the invisible thought.

So you stopped concentrating on it, and let your mind slowly, absently drift; being well trained and well drilled by now, your body continued as a loyal little worker bunny, giving your boss both a productive employee and an enjoyable show should he happen to watch you at any point.

Work came to an end, and you wrapped yourself in your coat and headed out, saying goodbye to Savannah and the rest in your boss’ team as you did.

There was an abandoned newspaper on the subway when you boarded, left halfway open. As you moved to sit down your eyes fell on the print advert you’d seen at lunch, and this time you were actually aware of your own body and thoughts suddenly stilling. You stayed standing, unmoving, drinking in the image as if you saw something beyond the bland blue background and the single dot, for two stops, until someone came in who, wanting a seat, cast the paper aside from where it had rested. Once you could no longer see the advert you blinked, several times, and a sense of peace settled over you.

The thought you hadn’t been able to remember you now remembered. You went to sit down, only to find that someone had stolen the seat which you’d stood in front of for so long while your attention was elsewhere. Flustered, you blushed and smiled your apologies.

You made it home ahead of your boyfriend, and that was a relief, even if - despite your best efforts and all but insisting - the pair of you still shared cooking duties, alternating days when the evening meal would be your responsibility.

You spent most of your day all but naked in line with the work dress code, but your boyfriend didn’t like you to just lounge around naked being decorative for him.

No, you corrected yourself. That was being unfair to him. He loved it; he was just uncomfortable with what that said about him, so he still preferred it if you didn’t.

In either case, getting home early meant you got to arrange your compromise. You’d already converted a lot of your old wardrobe for this purpose; after your second shower of the day (your boyfriend had once smelled your boss’ sweat on you, and it had led to a confusing and awkward argument, where he was very upset about something perfectly normal that you weren’t allowed to explain) you found the comfy old pajama bottoms you’d cut down until they covered about as much of your body as a one-size-too-small pair of hot pants, so he could always admire your ass without feeling guilty that he was admiring your ass.

Your boss not having given you permission to do more than edge that day, you were particularly keen to get dicked that night, so you pulled out your secret weapon; his old college hoodie. It was baggy enough on you that even the hot pants would be a nice surprise on their unveiling.

Then, finally, you had time. You dropped onto the sofa, tucking your long, bare legs up under yourself, and you followed through with the thought.

The thought had turned out to be a web address. It wasn’t a site you’d been to before, so it was strange that it seemed to have dredged itself up from your memory, but you weren’t going to look a gift thought in the mouth. After the past several months at work, if you had a thought you couldn’t explain, you followed it without question.

*

Your phone screen turned the colour of television tuned to a dead channel. That deep, somehow bland blue gave way at the centre of the screen to a small dot, black at first, then kaleidoscopically neon.

Your gaze slid off the blue to rest on the dot, which sat in place for a while, at the heart of the screen. Only the fact it was changing colour drew attention to it, but somehow it held your attention.

After a few moments the neon started to shift in colour, and the dot grew in size. A few moments later you were looking at the seal of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, with the minor tweak that the neutral space behind the eagle was now a pulsing, flickering spiral. The spiral and the pulse were new; the rate at which it flickered felt somehow familiar and comforting. You could feel yourself relaxing.

You were aware that words were appearing beneath the seal, but your eyes were on the spiral. Anything else was beyond you.

“I consent to this recording,” you said. You didn’t know why.

“Yes,” you said, a few moments later.

Then, “yes,” you said again. The words beneath your focus had changed. You were having a conversation, but you were missing half of it. The more informative half.

You didn’t even know if you were telling the person something or agreeing to something.

“I’m not sure,” you said. Then, “Yes.”

“At work,” you said. Something muffled almost penetrated your total focus, but failed; you were aware of it only in the vaguest of terms.

“My computer started to flicker,” you said. You remembered that; the screen had acted funny for a few days before you first had the Thought. It had stopped when…

…now that you came to think about it, it never did stop, did it? You just got used to it. Stopped noticing it.

“I am a loyal little worker bunny,” you said, and you wondered anew what questions were being asked or prompts were being given. A conversation you only had half of was disconcerting.

“My manager,” you said, and a few moments later, “I sucked his cock for the first time, and he put me on his cocksucking rota.”

Abruptly, there from nowhere, you could read the words below the seal too. Your vision swam for a moment, but you felt as if it hadn’t been a question of focus before but of something preventing you from seeing. As if whatever strange effect the commercials had on you, this website had on you, were all things you had been complicit in hiding from yourself.

Not that that made any sense.

Were you asked to do anything else?

“Yes,” you said. And you listed off every sexual act you’d ever done for your boss, everything you’d done because he told you to or because an irresistible force carried you away. You found yourself smiling as you did so; a record of just how good a little worker bunny you were, a clear demonstration your priorities were in order. And you’d made sure you had enough energy after work to please your boyfriend, too, all of it feeding back into a combination of pride and bliss. Such a delicious combination. You wanted it always to continue.

Will you give us your place of work?

“Yes,” you said again, and you recited the office address from memory. It was a shame, you thought, that these were questions. You much preferred receiving an order to being asked a question.

Do you want to break your conditioning?

“No,” you said. You weren’t sure what conditioning even was, but the idea itself scared you.

Except…

Except it didn’t scare you. It was more like you’d been told to be scared. At the moment it happened, you discovered your heart wasn’t entirely in it.

Conditioning, your memory was slowly supplying, was all the ways you’d changed, stemming from work, over the past few months. And you enjoyed them, you were proud of your place on the cocksucking rota, you liked the glances of appreciation members of management gave you and others, you liked it when the CFO would bend you over your own desk in your cubicle and fuck you, choosing you for everyone else in the team to see, you cheered on in your heart when managers chose the other bunnies over you, and especially when the Vice President or the head of HR picked out their worker bulls for their dickriding sessions.

But you didn’t like what it was doing to your boyfriend to wonder about all this. And if you could have an opinion - and only the fact this question had been asked the way it was, without leading you, allowed you to do so - you would be happy if this was all for him.

He deserved it, the way all this had been going.

You will need to follow our instructions for a few days, not the ones you get from work. She swallowed uncomfortably just reading that. Can you do that?

“I don’t know.”

You can do that. The words hung there, just under the spiral that remained your focus. Say it.

“I can do that.”

You will follow our instructions for a few days. Say it.

“I will follow your instructions for a few days.”

You will not follow instructions from work. Say it.

“I will not follow instructions from work.”

You will be prepared to testify in court. Say it.

“I will be prepared to testify in court.” There was something about that instruction that seemed wrong, but as you often found when you verbalised ideas, they almost immediately started to feel true for you.

The seal abruptly vanished, taking the webpage with it; instead you had a popup floating above the site window saying Your Session Has Been Terminated. You blinked, several times.

“Babe?”

Your boyfriend’s voice was so close that you practically jumped out of your skin in surprise. In your hyperfocus on the phone, you’d completely missed any sign of his arrival, not even hearing the rattle of his keys in the door.

“You startled me,” you told him, and he laughed. After a moment you laughed too at how obvious your statement had been.

“Are you OK?” he asked, and you nodded.

“I think so,” you said. “Why?”

“Because I walked in partway through that and… who were you talking to?”

That was perhaps the only thing you were sure of. “The FBI,” you said. You remembered the spiral, and suddenly, an internal memo your boss had had you dictate months ago flickered back into recall. It hadn’t been important because you had been told it wasn’t important.

Marko,

You probably heard Wakewater Health got raided and since you know where we got the code from, you might be feeling a little worried. Don’t be - nobody at Wakewater will rat on us, and the Mind Control Unit can only investigate so many claims a year even if anyone made one. But we have our personnel locked down, so there’ll be no whistleblowers; remember, our staff are good little work bunnies and bulls, and neither bunnies nor bulls can blow a whistle in the first place.

It’ll take decades before we even need to worry about them, and by that stage enough companies will be working with the code that someone will find a way to declare it legal anyway.

So please, do be cool.

“I think,” you said slowly, “that I’ve been brainwashed.”

Your boyfriend’s eyes went wide. “Is that why-”

“Yeah.” You cut him off hurriedly, not wanting him to say it. Him saying it might make it seem like a bad thing, and it wasn’t. You were sure of that. “Whatever you were going to say, yeah.”

He bit his lip and nodded slowly. “Okay,” he said. “Okay. Well, there was that thing in the news a couple of years ago. I-”

“Honey.”

He didn’t listen, surging on. “I know they’ve got people out there who know how to deprogram. It’s probably expensive, but we can get a loan, maybe take out a second mortgage depending on the cost-”

“Honey.”

“- they know what they’re doing, they must do. There was that woman who wrote that tell-all book, they have to have cured her, so-”

Rather than try and interrupt him verbally a third time, you broke into his train of thought by closing your hand gently around his crotch. It got his attention, and you smiled up at him from where you sat, stroking his cock through his pants with your thumb. “Honey,” you said again, “would you listen to me, please?”

He stayed silent, and you decided to take that for consent. “I don’t need a cure.”

“But-”

“I don’t want to be cured. Whatever happened on that call - I think maybe I have two sets of programs in my head now - I don’t have to follow my boss’s orders right now. So that means I can say things to you that are me saying them, OK?”

“Okay…” He was worried, edgy. You gave his cock a gentle squeeze of encouragement. “I like who I’ve been turned into.”

“You’re only saying that because you’ve been made to be.”

“Probably,” you agreed, your voice placid. “So?”

In the two seconds you allowed him, he didn’t have an answer for that. “What I don’t like, now I can form an opinion about it, is who I was doing all this for.” You looked up at him, meeting his eyes, let him see your sincerity. “But I want to do it for you. And I know how much you’ve enjoyed me like this. Right?”

“Well, I - look, babe, we were happy before-”

“Right?”

His shoulders slumped, but he had the grace to smile as he nodded. “Yeah.”

“So we can stay like this, you can keep getting your cock sucked, and you know I want it. Doesn’t that sound like a good deal?”

“I… yeah.”

“Good.” You smiled. “We’re going to need something to lift our spirits because I probably need to look for a new job soon.” Before he could jump in again all Mr Practical, you decided to declare the subject closed.

“So do you want me to take off your hoodie or do you want me to blow you while I wear it?” you ask, and wait for his answer.