Flying home after my time out there was strange. It’s going to sound ridiculous - I mean, I’d only been there a few days - but I’d become so used to my brother’s life that anything else was starting to feel implausible.

They say that power corrupts. Honestly? I think what corrupts is getting a taste of it then going somewhere you don’t have it anymore. That or just flying Spirit is enough to turn someone power-crazy so it’ll never happen again.

I’m joking, of course. The thing about my brother’s bequest was that it didn’t fit in with my life at all. If I wanted to honour it - and there were people, real people, who relied on me to - I needed to make certain changes to my life, too. Changes I hadn’t ever considered and wasn’t at all sure I wanted, but…

Well, I couldn’t just abandon them. And I knew that, before the time came, I would need to have a better solution of my own in place. We’ll come to that.

On the flight home all I could think about was the level of comfort I’d come to feel from having any one of my brother’s slaves nearby - even when I wasn’t putting them to use. It was knowing that I could.

I suppose this sounds egotistical, but believe me, you get used to someone obediently fetching you a drink and kneeling to offer their open palms as a coaster faster than you’d imagine.

Instead I was sat next to Jack, who introduced himself cheerfully once I sat down and told me he was a computer programmer with enthusiasm, just one headed my way to visit the family for an aunt’s birthday.

I didn’t tell him I had come to own a software company; it wasn’t likely he would have shown more than a cursory interest, but if he’d asked almost any question he would have been asking things I didn’t understand well enough to answer, and if he asked me the few questions I could answer, I would be telling him things it would be unwise to tell him.

Instead I told him about the farm, and he told me about his family. I lived, we discovered, just about an hour and a half’s drive from his aunt. It was her fiftieth birthday, he told me, and she and her husband “but mainly Aunt Dottie, because Uncle Roy’s never exactly been one for the kitchen, you know?” would be catering for somewhere upwards of twenty family members once everyone had got back to town.

To me the idea of having to feed and entertain twenty people as a way of celebrating my own birthday seemed insane, but if she enjoyed it, I was hardly going to be the one to criticise her. I told him in turn about my brother’s death, and about how I had missed Pat while I was away.

It was easier to remember how much I had missed Pat when DeeDee, CeCe, Mimi and the others weren’t competing for my attention. So eager to please, so individual, and so passionately, obediently themselves, they had easily taken up my attention. Without them by my side, I remembered the last person who had been my completion more fully, more vividly.

I still try not to think about that conflict. It points to something… at least, I think it points to something… but what it points to is more complicated than my understanding can achieve.

*

Pat was waiting outside the terminal in the pickup; she greeted me with a broad smile and the travel mug I’d forgotten to take with me on the flight out, filled with fresh-brewed coffee. A small brown paper bag on the dash held a small tub of her potato salad and a fork, and if you think that doesn’t sound like a warm welcome you haven’t tasted my wife’s potato salad.

We kissed before I got into any of that, the kind of kiss you get after years together, with maybe a little extra spice because we’d lately been apart.

“What have I missed?” I asked, and already it felt weirdly like my time on the coast had been a dream. As we pulled out of the parking lot, Pat had already set my mind at ease about our shared life’s work.

“Nothing much,” she’d said. “I need to do a restock on the feed tomorrow, though. Way easier when there’s two of us.”

I’ll confess I winced at that. “I’m sorry, sweetheart. I know this went on longer than I thought it would…”

She patted my knee, smiling cheerfully out at the road. “I’m not complaining,” she said. “Just telling you I haven’t felt comfortable doing the run without anyone else around. It sounds from your calls like you’re going to have to go out there again?”

“Right.” I was collecting myself. I’m pretty sure, looking back, that I still felt guilty about the fact I wasn’t being open with her. Couldn’t be open with her.

Yet.

“Maybe we need to bring someone else in. A third pair of hands.”

Pat said that like she was apologising, and she kind of was. We’d talked about it from time to time, and one or the other of us would always make the case that anyone we hired who could do what we needed them to would cost more than we were comfortable with. Pay minimum wage, get minimum results, all that kind of thing.

“Yeah,” I said. “I think you’re right.” I gave it a moment. “The good news is, even without the will passed through probate, I do have some new income in my control.”

“We can afford someone?”

“Right.” I smiled. “And I have a good idea how to improve the interview process, too.”

“Interview?” Pat laughed. “I just figured we’d ask some of our neighbours for recommendations.”

Which was that I’d been thinking, initially, too; but the conversation going the way it had gave me an opportunity I just couldn’t pass up. “I’ll show you when we get home,” I said.

“A bit after we get home,” Pat said, and I looked across to her, a little puzzled. Pat glanced across to me, then took her attention back to the road. “It’s been too long, mister,” she told me. “I hope the plane ride left you rested, because when we get inside you’re taking me up to bed.”

*

Afterwards, while Pat was attending to herself, I messaged Cecilia.

See sea shells on the sea shore. Collect Miriam, take her to the company, and play everyone the recordings I made you.

Yes, Master, she answered. And then?

I’ll be calling soon.

“I’ll be in the kitchen,” I called through to Pat, and I went down to take my brother’s laptop out of his old travelling bag. Mine hadn’t had a proper space for it, but there was nobody who’d be contesting the will - everyone who might have done had a trigger phrase already - so, yeah, I was already making free with my brother’s property most of the time.

Pat came downstairs in her worn old terrycloth bathrobe, her hair up in a towel, a flush on her cheeks and a smile on her lips. “I want to go drive round the fields in a bit,” I told her. “But before I do, I want to show you what I was talking about earlier. You remember I told you what my brother’s company turnover was?”

“Oh, I remember,” she said with a laugh. “I’m not sure I believe.”

“Well, let’s see.” I turned back to the laptop and double-clicked on one of the icons, then beckoned her over. “Their main product is this thing. It’s a career aptitude test, and it’s supposed to be the best on the market.”

Pat snorted, and I remember I looked at her and I smiled.

“Businesses where the right person in the right job really matters make this thing a key part of their interview process. You lease it for thousands, or you spend upwards of two hundred bucks on one test.”

“That’s crazy, Rick. Spending that much on something like this is crazy.”

“Well, lucky for me, the company’s new owner can let us use it absolutely free.”

She grinned at that and came across to the table. “Sure, but is it really going to help on the farming side of things?”

“Well, that’s why I want to try it - to find out. I wouldn’t exactly be giving people discounts, but - actually, you know what, why don’t you give it a try?”

I had, I think, made it sound natural, but Pat knows me well, and I’m only an okay liar at the best of times. I couldn’t be sure she wouldn’t sense something odd behind my question. I was holding my breath.

Pat just smiled, her hand on my shoulder, and kissed the top of my head. “Sure,” she said, “if you want. But when I’m finished we should get some work done.”

“Right,” I agreed, and I got out of the chair, stepped back so she could sit down and run the program, and I stood back and I watched.

I knew what the program does, of course. I didn’t - still don’t, really - understand how. But one of the things about brainwashing deep desire to please you, insatiable loyalty, and helpless obedience into coders is that your code gets better and better over time. Lily had told me that when she went under, not the first but early in the line, the process took twice as long and sometimes even needed multiple sittings.

At that point it was supposed to take about fifteen minutes, with the final five being as effective as the first ten. It’s obvious why, I suppose; the first couple of minutes are spent laying groundwork without being spotted, and somewhere toward the ten minute mark, the software doesn’t have to hide its subliminals anymore.

Pat sat down and she was presented by the software with her first choices; things about herself. What age was she; where was she from; had she gone to work from school or stayed on to college; what did she think was her most important skill; what gender would she prefer to be.

I was stood somewhere I wouldn’t see the screen. I don’t know what it would do to me, as I wasn’t making any choices; I didn’t want to take any chances, though.

“Huh,” Pat said, midway through the second wave of choices. “I think this thing learns about you, you know?”

“Mmm?” I didn’t want to lead her. The process, I’d been told, can break if you lead them.

“It asked me if we’re part of a big farm or a small one. Now it’s asking questions based on the fact it’s just the two of us. Like who calls the shots.”

If I hadn’t been watching for changes in her reactions, her speech, her behaviour, I’m not at all sure I would have noticed anything. There was just a little more time in between each word; it wasn’t that her speech was slowing down - words still sounded the same - but there was a little longer between words than there had been. As I watched, I saw that in between each word, her eyes widened; I could see a thin line of white on all sides of her irises, then it was gone as she continued to speak.

That told me that the program was already having an effect, and I really should have moved on, but I couldn’t resist asking. “So who does call the shots?”

“I’m not… sure… yet,” she answered, and she seemed less thoughtful and more… I don’t know how to put it… absent, I guess? Pat wasn’t paying enough attention to me to answer, but something in her felt the need. Wherever the real her was, its attention wasn’t on me.

Which, OK, fine, honestly. I was pretty sure the program was working, and I had other stuff to be doing anyway. I had my phone out, and I fell back out of Pat’s field of vision - I wasn’t sure whether she’d be paying attention to anything that wasn’t the screen, but I didn’t want to risk distracting her, and I had reason to think that when the video call opened it might be pretty distracting.

I called the conference room computer at the office on their app, and Lily answered me quickly. The entire company except myself, plus Mimi and CeCe, were all gathered together, and if I hadn’t known each of them were getting triggered anyway, I would have been able to tell simply by looking at the screen, even at the regrettably low level of detail on my phone.

“Good afternoon, ladies,” I said, although I was only barely right; my trip back home had also carried me a couple of hours closer to the end of the day.

“Good afternoon, Master,” they chorused. Each one of them was keen to greet me, but you could definitely track differences in them by how excited they were to speak in unison, ranging from ‘enjoying a weird accidental parody of student/teacher interactions’ to ‘fully submerged into the harem mindset’.

Well, they were all different people, they’d all responded to the programming in different ways, and the choices they made had customised them over their treatments. I’m sure I was smiling already, but I was smiling a lot wider after that.

I glanced across to Pat, wondering how aware of all this she might be, but I saw and heard no reaction. Her focus seemed to be on the screen completely; I could see her eyes widening and settling back to normal at a steady rate, the moments where her eyes widened showing up as flashes of light.

“Well,” I continued, “everyone - present.”

There was a flurry of movement and only a couple of seconds later everyone on the screen had their tits bared. Tops had been pulled down, shirts opened, other tops pulled up to spill the tits out beneath, but everyone had obeyed, and I smiled.

I put the phone down, tilted at a slight angle to the table, took a step back, and pulled out my cock. We were about to test a theory we’d been worrying about.

You remember me talking about how desperate Miriam had been for Mimi to come out when I got there? Honestly I think the only reason I didn’t see that same level of frustration and near-despair from some of the others was that they knew, by the time I’d met them, that I’d worked it out, and that I was willing to go along with my brother’s wishes.

But there was no way I could abandon the farm, and they were on a coast and the farm isn’t, and so there were going to be times that they were away from me.

I wanted to make sure that longing to be triggered, for an opportunity to serve, was something they could always sate. Between us, them seeing how much their shared obedience turned me on had felt like the best way to do it.

And if you think it must have been strange to stand there and masturbate over my employees just yards away from where a laptop was brainwashing my wife, all I can say is it was far, far weirder to experience than you’ll be imagining.

All the same, I could see my staff respond - there was delight on their faces, but more than that, there was relief in the set of their shoulders. For the first time I wondered what my brother had put himself through by assembling this collection. Did he make use of a special diet to be able to perform for them all?

There was an intriguing sound from the table, a drawn-out mewling whimper that sent a shiver down my spine. I glanced across, and Pat’s expression was one I’d never seen on her face before; but I could hear the click of the touchpad and knew the software was still working, and I didn’t want to interfere any further.

I turned my attention back to the call, and in fact to what Mimi was doing to stand out from her competition - she had a hand on one of her own tits and another on DeeDee’s - and I was properly enjoying myself when Pat’s whimpers came back, intermittently at first, then becoming a steady, needy sound.

By and large farmers are the least romantic people out there about animals; we know why we rear them and if, like me, you grew up on a farm you learn very early on that some animals are for eating. You won’t find anyone who has as much time on a farm as Pat or me who acts like animals are humans who go on all fours or anything like that.

I know this seems like I’m digressing, but I bring it up because it’s important that you understand: I know that human beings don’t go into heat and I don’t usually have any time for the illusion that they might have done. So when I tell you that the way Pat sounded made me think she was going into heat, I’m not exaggerating and I understand how strange that sounds.

I moved a little closer, and I nudged the phone along with me, and my hunch was right; the moment they could hear her, all the girls in the conference room started grinning and I knew they remembered when this was them.

I looked across at Pat, and she was bolt upright in her chair, staring at the screen with an intensity I hadn’t seen on her since Mavis at the feed store tried to overcharge us two years ago, her teeth biting at her top lip to try and keep whatever was going on in her head in.

She tapped the touchpad a couple more times, then hit Enter, and then, unblinking, unthinking, she said “True Profile created. User, please identify.”

“I guess that’s me,” I said, and wished there’d been a manual for that. But I was, I guess, only the second man ever to operate this program for himself. I’d assumed that my brother had chosen never to write the full process down, to make it harder for someone else to steal; it was occurring to me only as this happened that probably he’d written it down just once, in the notebook, and heavily disguised.

Not for the first time, I wished I’d spent just a little longer thinking my way through my next steps than I had.

“User identified,” Pat said, and it really hit me that the process was working, because she didn’t sound like a computer program but she also didn’t sound like Pat, not exactly. “User, please save True Profile under new name.”

I hadn’t expected this per se, but CeCe had been quite clear that I’d have to name her new reality, her ‘true self’, and I’d spent most of last night getting very little sleep as I turned it all over in my mind and tried to make the right choice. I didn’t think I’d get to rename this version of her afterward.

This had become the point where I really understood why my brother’s options had all been as corny as they had. It gave him a little bit of fun in a part of the process where there was, otherwise, every opportunity just to get swallowed up by choice paralysis, and maybe more importantly, it made them easy to remember.

I wasn’t quite my brother; I didn’t think of repetition as the best way to change a name, not that ‘Patpat’ was anyone’s idea of a good answer in the first place; but in wanting to honour him, I’d remembered a nickname that I’d tried out for Pat, before we ever married, and which had been dropped because, when you got right down to it, it didn’t suit the person I was falling in love with.

“Pattycakes,” I said. Her eyes rolled back up into her head; I had a new idea, and I walked over close to her, and I put my phone down resting on the laptop keyboard so that the girls in the conference room could all see what was happening to her.

The result was a happy background wash of sighs, squeals, and even excited moans as they saw someone else coming over, all behind Pat - or, rather, Pattycakes - asking, “User, please enter activation code for True Profile.”

“Pattycake, Pattycake, Master’s Maid,” I said, and I guess, yeah, I’ve got to admit that reruns of old sitcoms when I was growing up, where they’d pick a cute blonde or a hot Latina and pack her into a maid outfit and just have her in the background getting things done with her legs on show, I guess they were kind of a thing.

“Pattycake, Pattycake, Master’s Maid,” she repeated. I stepped behind her and slipped my hands under her shoulders so I could grab her under the breasts and lift her up; she kind of unfolded halfway to standing, her knees only unbending as far as I lifted her, but holding steady enough that I could sweep the chair out from behind her. I heard DeeDee giggle, and knew she’d already realised what was coming. “Acknowledged,” Pattycakes said, and the difference in her voice from Pat’s was fully-formed now, but just as welcoming. “End induction program, yes-or-no?” she asked.

I flipped up the robe behind her ass and gently spread her legs further apart. Testing with a finger, I wasn’t surprised to find that Pattycakes was wet and ready already; like the others, I suspected she always would be.

“End induction program, yes-or-no?” Pattycakes asked again. I was inside her before I said yes, and her thumb hit the Escape key and the laptop screen went blank, and I was fucking my wife from behind when she officially met the rest of my inherited harem.

*

Obviously, there’s a lot more to it all but that, but honestly, you don’t need all those details yet. I just wanted you to understand a few things:

First off, what I’ve told you is true. I’m okay with you knowing it because there’s no good way you could prove I wasn’t just telling tall tales. Sure, you met Mimi on the way in, but for all you know she’s just like that, and Pat likes having her around almost as much as Pattycakes.

Second, that I’ve made a bunch of mistakes along this path. I wasn’t the first one to, either; Marcus goofed a few times that I know of, and like I say I suspect there’s a few more that the others can’t tell me about even if they know.

Lastly, though, the main thing is this. You came here because someone suggested it would be useful to you. Well, it could be; I’m planning to solve this problem with know-how and money.

I’m pretty healthy but I don’t want them going through the same thing they did when Marcus died again. And while some of the programming’s now being done in the new barn, under the new apartments, we still need multiple locations.

I actually have three now, because unlike my brother or me, Pat is good at long-term planning, and she had some notes about getting out ahead of the problem. And a fairly key part of that was getting some more cocks involved, as distasteful as Pat finds that - don’t worry, Pattycakes is delighted.

Of course, we still need to vet those cocks. So, there are two ways this can go; you can get a lift back to the airport, go home, and always wonder if this was a mad story you got fed or if you missed out, or… well…

That door behind you leads to a private office. There’s a laptop in there. All you need to do is sit down and run the newest version of the software. Telling you about it first means we don’t need to go slow or hide anything.

It’s your call. But one way or another, the server farm needs new plugins.