Otylia adjusted the headphones again, uncomfortably conscious that they weren’t her own earbuds, and that they didn’t fit under her hijab. It didn’t provide much sound muffling, but the pre-talk for the experiment had made it clear that the visuals and sounds had been very carefully designed and selected. She wouldn’t like to think that her clothing was going to ruin her part in the experiment.

Still, she reminded herself, it didn’t sound plausible that a couple of layers of cloth could affect it so significantly. For one thing, it didn’t seem likely that the right tones playing in your ear would stimulate your memory significantly.

She had some vague idea that maybe the trick was that they’d play the music again when they started the follow-up test; she definitely felt like she could remember things better if there was something going on to get her in the same headspace as before.

Mostly she felt like this was interesting, and could be fun; and she didn’t want to go home at the end of her degree without having done everything you didn’t really get to do outside your time as a student.

When she went home, she was going back into a family business. Her mother had pushed hard to get Otylia the opportunity to get a degree, and especially to get a degree in America. American universities were renowned - at least the ones people had heard of - at home, and having her degree would be the best way to make people listen to her when she got started. She and her mother both knew that would be a hard challenge otherwise.

The experiment was something she didn’t have to do, but it would be interesting to do. And Harmony, who had always believed so strongly in Otylia that she had gotten by on the other woman’s confidence alone from time to time, was sure this would be worth doing. That this was an opportunity to be heard.

Otylia wasn’t always sure what Harmony meant when she said things like that. There was often more passion behind the words than there was a recognisable point, and she wasn’t convinced even Harmony knew what she meant. But the woman had such energy…

(Privately even from herself, Otylia was sometimes jealous of Jenni, Harmony’s girlfriend. She told herself it was the same admiration she felt for Harmony, and mostly she believed it.)

She fiddled with the fit of her headphones again, glancing around the other test subjects with an uncomfortable feeling of unnecessary guilt. Nobody else seemed to be worrying, so perhaps she should stop worrying herself.

It was ultimately an experiment by students, she reminded herself. This wasn’t some official faculty thing, and it wasn’t going to change the world if their results were skewed a little. It was only Otylia’s own love of precision and accuracy driving her frustration. She’d want better, she’d want more accurate. It seemed fair to give the students conducting the experiment that.

But if something minor were to get in the way - well, it wouldn’t change much. She sat up straight, cleared her throat, and looked directly into the screen, waiting for the experiment to begin.

*

Phoebe knew her focus was entirely shot when she went into the experiment. Unlike Otylia, she didn’t see that as a negative. She hadn’t actually thought about it, but if someone had asked her whether she was worried her lack of concentration would hurt the experiment, she’d first have been bewildered the question had even come up, then brushed it off by saying someone should probably not be trying too hard for the experiment to be fair.

Like many of the other women in the room, Phoebe wasn’t there for the advancement of science; she was there for the small payout she’d get for completing it. One of the problems with being a student-athlete was balancing training against working for a wage; she’d often had to drop shifts, and any extra cash she could find a way to pick up was a good thing.

That day she’d trained most of the evening, then raced off to the bar where she worked and put in another five hours. She hadn’t got to bed before three am and she’d had to be up for six. And as much as that was messing with her ability to concentrate, it wasn’t the only issue.

Somewhere in that gruelling evening, Luke had dumped her, finally too frustrated with never getting to see her to keep their relationship intact for the (minor) prestige.

It felt like getting kicked in the gut. True, Luke had come third or fourth in her priorities, after her scholarship, enough money to keep the bills paid and food on the table, and maybe after her studies, but one of those - maybe two of those - were her future, and the other was survival to get there. She would have expected that anybody reasonable would understand.

If there had to be a split, she felt, the split could at least be conducted like they were both responsible adults. That wasn’t so much to ask, was it?

But of course it had been. There had been harsh words and worse body language, and when, toward the end, she’d said, a little quietly, a little gobsmacked, “I thought we were doing okay…” he’d actually rolled his eyes before he turned away. As if her remark hadn’t even been worth dignifying.

It chilled her a little to realise that things could have gone so wrong without her ever registering that there were issues. It was hard to just accept that Luke hadn’t been entirely unfair. That he’d been frustrated, right up until he’d snapped. That he’d lingered on, wondering whether it was worth asking her to try to make it work. That the communication breakdown had been partly from both of them.

Much easier to see it as Luke refusing to talk, refusing to be reasonable, refusing to let her have any dignity in their final clash.

The whole conversation had been replaying in her head all day. When she sat down in front of the screen, she had no focus at all.

She wasn’t honestly expecting to register anything that happened during the experiment, but she was hoping that maybe - just maybe - it would give her something to think about for a while that would distract her.

Fucking… Luke. Fucking asshole.

*

Otylia was one of the first to react to the experiment. Her determination not to let the testers down brought her to engage fully with what she saw, to listen as closely as she could to what she heard. The audio was far less important, she decided early on; the visuals were so strange, so lovingly detailed, that they must be the centerpiece.

The music was probably just to screen out any other audio that might affect memory, she decided, and stopped paying any kind of attention to it.

So it was that the preparations Nick had engineered into the audioscape seeped into her head quickly and effectively, her attention elsewhere. As the women around her started to find their gazes caught and held by strange eddies and currents in the visualisation, their eyeline dancing around the screen as if on puppet strings, Otylia was already caught in a current of her own making, and she had no idea of it.

Years later, the almost-forgotten sense memory of this event would become her touchstone for imagining how it might feel for the divine to reach out and bless her in response to her prayers. Under her hijab, her scalp tingled, part of a deliciously pleasurable sensation rolling through her head.

The world around her fell away. There were only the pretty patterns, there was only the music. It was wonderful, euphoric.

Otylia’s family was too large and too centralised around the two houses and the business for any member of the family to have privacy. The few moments she had experienced of true solitude, as a teenager, had stayed with her. They had seemed magical in some indefinable way, and Otylia had craved them. She had expected, leaving the country and travelling to study at college abroad, that solitude would be easier to find.

But there had been roommates, and study groups, and commotion on the dorms, and her parents had refused for her to move into a house with others. It wasn’t as if she’d live with a man not of her family without marriage in any case - but there was now this extra rule, and her father was suspicious, and it wouldn’t be hard for him to confirm she’d broken the rules if she did.

It was only now, in front of the screen, that Otylia felt solitude again. She was alone, alone with the images, with the music, the world around her screened out.

She had the vaguest sense of something else around her. A sense that words existed in this space, words she had not spoken, and words she could not make out. It was as if someone were talking to her, somehow. As if they were casting a spell on her…

In another situation, Otylia might have shook her head at that. Her way of dismissing such a ridiculous fancy. She didn’t, though. She couldn’t; her head wouldn’t move.

And the more she watched, the more those needs she had to pretend to her father she didn’t have were pushing to the fore.

Her hands were almost the first to move from where they rested. To dance jerkily toward her waistband and her shirt.

Otylia was, when she felt she had the privacy, a very sensual woman who often felt a little guilt about how much she enjoyed it. But just as the screen took away any sense of others around her, it took away any risk of guilt or shame.

Left to her own devices, Otylia gave herself up entirely to enjoyment.

*

The image on the screen was twisting, rolling, and shifting, and for some reason Phoebe couldn’t get out of her head the idea that it churned in sync with her stomach, that the queasy unpleasantness she felt was matched somehow by the screen. She’d watched it only idly at first. It had crept somehow closer and closer to the centre of her attention as the experiment had rolled on. Now she studied the screen as avidly as she paid attention to her coach.

…which was strange, her earlier discomfort and upset over her boyfriend being matched on screen. Was that the experiment, somehow? But she’d signed up for this before she was a single woman.

Provoked by the question, her thoughts, which had until then been slowly drifting down through the eddies of her brain to rest in the silt below her own open mind, suddenly stirred back up into a flurry of activity.

Something about this was wrong, Phoebe decided. She felt the uncertainty, the nerves, the adrenaline coursing through her body and as she continued to watch the screen, she felt it neutralising. Her gut still seemed synced to the visuals in front of her; as those continued to be slow, steady, and dreamlike, she wasn’t feeling the same rush and energy that she should be in such panicky situations.

The screen was doing something to her. She had to stop that.

So she looked away.

…

Except she didn’t. Her eyes continued to follow the ever-shifting patterns around the screen. The sensation that something was wrong grew and grew. Yet her worries, her background frustration with Luke, and even the growing feeling of fear as she realised more of the situation, all seemed somehow more distant by the moment. Not unimportant but inaccessible.

She’d meant to look away, hadn’t she? Something must have interrupted her. So she looked away, for real this time. Except she didn’t. And the second time, she realised that it hadn’t been an interruption, hadn’t been a distraction. Phoebe knew now that she could not look away. It must be something about the experiment. The screen and the music.

If she couldn’t look away, could she do something about the music?

She lifted a hand to knock her headphones off. It was after a good thirty seconds of trying that she realised, despite her intentions, her arm had never moved in the first place.

Phoebe was trapped. Her body, the root of her power, a huge part of her identity as an athlete, was refusing to respond.

She should be horrified. She should be screaming, sweating, raging against this. Fighting with everything of herself.

But the horror wouldn’t stay. The rage wouldn’t stay. Her mind was almost as still as her brain, and try as she might, her struggle against that didn’t seem to change anything.

She felt as if her grip on the world around her - Phoebe’s world; the training, the success, the team, her coach, her friends, her ex, her classes, her work, her family… everything that mattered to her - was shaky now. As if these things were slipping through her fingers with painfully little resistance. Her focus had been lost before the experiment ever began. But now it felt as if it were gone forever.

She would only be able to focus on other things in the future. Her old life was of no interest.

*

Nick watched Joey out of the corner of his eye, thinking through the situation they both found themselves in. He wasn’t at all sure that Joey was going to stay handle-able.

Joey was just way too excited about their backer calls, while Nick…

…Well, it was definitely too late to back out. But if it wasn’t, he might well be trying, if only for Felicity and Abigail.

(There were others he was enjoying, but those two had really come to the forefront of his attention over time. Something about the way they behaved just fitted in wonderfully with his own outlook on life, and both of them seemed to give him a strange sensation of peace.)

Still… if he kept Joey from taking charge…

“So,” he began. “I hope our results to date have proved satisfactory?”

“Actually? Yes.” Their contact gave him a quick smile, and it almost looked genuine. “We’re pleased enough with the results so far, and I’m certainly keen to see what happens with the refresher session. Everyone’s on course to return, yes?”

For the first time since the calls began, Joey shot Nick a look of concern, rather than the other way around. Nick had spent some time thinking about how difficult it had become to contact Grace - her behaviour had entirely shifted since the experiment, so her friends couldn’t point him in the right direction, but he didn’t have the data he’d need to calculate it - and was somewhat prepared for this question.

Joey, on the other hand… well, the couple of times they’d discussed Grace at all, Joey had been weirdly panicky about it. It had taken quite a while before Nick realised that his friend had started to believe the process was infallible - and the stark reminder that there were still issues with it was proving too much for him.

Amazing, really, to think that not so long ago they’d both been terrified that it wouldn’t work - or rather, that it would work just a fraction, just enough that the victims (a term he shied away from now) would notice. Now they were only concerned with how effective a given word imprint was on a given subject.

“That’s what our data says,” Nick said, realising suddenly that a silence had stretched out for a few moments. He offered a slight, wan smile. There was no way their handler hadn’t made a mental note of that pause, but if they were lucky it wouldn’t become an issue.

“Alright. Fine,” was the answer. Something in the tone told Nick they were going to have to deliver for the second session. He shot Joey another look, quelling him, and realised to his faint terror that Joey didn’t need quelling. Joey was already deeply uncomfortable. “I’ve got a different kind of test for you today,” their handler continued. “Possibly not even a test.”

“Okay…”

“We have a number of foreign students in the pool of test cases, yes?”

Nick nodded. “Right,” Joey blurted. They both felt they were on safer ground now.

“I’ve had one of our psych boys reviewing the data to date,” the handler continues. “He’s very excited.”

Nick relaxed fractionally. That sounded pretty positive. “That’s good,” he said. “Right?”

“I’m hoping so. But he’s got a lot of questions for you. One of them might be a test. I don’t know.”

“What is it?” Joey asked. He was already sounding a little more confident than he’d seemed while they were near the topic of Grace.

“How plausible is a sleeper agent?”

“Uh…” Nick and Joey looked at each other again. “I don’t…” said Nick. “Maybe if…” said Joey. They both fell back into silence.

“We might need to stop and think about that one,” Nick said, stepping in hastily before Joey could say something. “I don’t have a test in mind yet.”

Joey shook his head. “Me either. It feels like there should be one, but…”

“How soon could you design and implement a test?” their handler asked.

Walk the line between fast and something we can do. “Design? Soon,” Nick said. “Test? Uh - might take time. I mean, a sleeper has value in how long they can stay primed for. That’s tough to test fast.”

“Let’s review this at our next call, then,” the handler said. “I’ll leave you to it, gentlemen.” He gave them a curt nod and the video call ended.

The breath went out of Nick in one long exhalation as he realised he was no longer being monitored. “Fuck,” he said.

“Yeah,” Joey agreed. “Uh - good line, though.”

Nick nodded. “We need to put something together. And we need a candidate.”

*

Otylia really had no idea what was coming for her.

She’d been happier, the last few weeks; some of the peace and well-being she’d sought in her spiritual life for years was finally starting to properly come through to her. She felt much, much better for it, and the happiness and contentment that this peace was supposed to bring had really lifted her spirits.

She didn’t think about the experiment much. Like some of the other girls who weren’t in contact with one another, she considered it simply a thing she’d done and been paid for, with a follow-up booked that she would in time be paid for again. Aside from that, it didn’t really matter to her.

She was seated in the cafeteria, enjoying a coffee and her sense of connection to something greater, when a man dropped into the seat opposite her. Otylia was both thrilled and concerned; thrilled, because such things represented a portion of her favourite fantasies. Concerned, because when a white man decided to talk to a woman of colour wearing the hijab, often the best option available was that they have exoticised her. And she wasn’t all too keen on that.

He looked vaguely familiar. Had she seen him around campus? Looking at his face and trying to place it, she had the idea in her head that she’d heard his voice, that it was warm and comforting, gentle and commanding (and she seemed to be more accepting of an authoritarian male, she thought fleetingly, when it wasn’t her father). She couldn’t place the voice, though. They couldn’t have spoken much, if they’d spoken at all. If she wasn’t half in a daydream.

She seemed to spend a fair bit of time like that at the moment. As if there were something better about the places her imagination took her than reality.

Still - if he was halfway familiar, the risk of the worst options for her meeting were greatly lowered…

She set down her knife and fork. “Can I help you?”

“Otylia,” he said, and he said it with the same cadence she had. She had a sudden image of him painstakingly asking her to say her name, repeating it back to her, dialling in over and over on the right pronunciation.

Except… image wasn’t quite the right word, was it? Because she had no visual memory of any of that. What was in her head was the voice, the conversation; and it was halfway obscured, and a dim memory in the first place.

“Otylia,” he said again, “are you enthralled?”

She was furrowing her brow, mentally preparing to apologise that her English was only so good, when her hindbrain caught up with what he’d said. Otylia felt that peace and calm unfold in her mind like a flower’s petals opening up after the rain.

“Yesss…”

The answer came naturally. She spoke without thinking, smiling dimly, hazily.

“Good,” Nick said. “Do you have somewhere private we can go?”

There was never anywhere private. The thought floated through her bliss, a twist of bitterness in an otherwise unbroken sea of euphoria. But the closest thing would be her dorm room; at lunch, her roommate was almost never there.

She nodded slowly.

“Let’s go,” Nick said, and he began to stand. Then he hesitated, paused, and said “Actually - don’t get up yet. Finish your meal.”

Otylia, mind enthralled, feeling in the presence of a higher power overlooking her in a spiritual sense, obeyed. She sat and finished her meal, including the parts of the salad she’d usually leave behind. She hated raw onion, but it went down like everything else, in a quiet silence that ignored the rest of the cafeteria.

“Come with me,” Nick said when she’d finished, and she rose and fell into step behind him.

There were several women across the cafeteria who watched Nick as they watched Joey, too, now, with a curious caution, wondering what was going on.

Otylia didn’t wonder. Otylia waited to be told.

*

Phoebe had experienced none of the placid contentment after the experiment that Otylia had prized so highly. Once she had realised what the experiment had done to her, she had never quite lost that awareness. She had felt, to a degree, what it was doing to her. When Joey had come to her with the questionnaire, she had heard everything consciously. The word which had stood out to her - well, she hadn’t been devoted enough to keep everything going as it should be. No wonder, really, that she’d seized the help.

Initially she’d thought of it, perhaps worryingly, as a judgement on her for losing Luke. If she wasn’t working hard enough to keep her boyfriend as well as her scholarship and her job, well, maybe she didn’t deserve to call the shots on herself. She hadn’t been willing to tell anyone, to complain, to worry. Not until she’d realised why the basketball team was gossipping about Keeley so much. Going behind her back to do it. It was hurtful, but it also told Phoebe she wasn’t the only one.

She’d thought about telling Keeley for a while before she summoned up the confidence. It had been a while now and her devotion to the geniuses behind the experiment had finally dwindled away to the level she’d have felt before - which is to say, to nothing. Finally she felt free enough to go.

But Keeley wasn’t available. She’d made her way over to Keeley’s home, she’d been careful - to the point of paranoia - to avoid being spotted. You never knew when you might be waylaid, she felt. You never knew when you’d have to deal with one of those controlling bastards.

She made her way up the drive and glanced into the window before she reached the door.

Then she froze in place. She could feel herself shaking.

Inside the room, Keeley was naked. She was on her knees, her back to the window, and her hands behind her back, crossed at the wrist. Her head was low, and as Phoebe took in that Nick was in there, she realised why.

Why had she come here? To get Keeley on her side? Keeley was just as much a captive as she was.

Despite herself, she watched the two of them. Watched as Keeley gave in completely. It… resonated, somehow. She’d not had to deal with either man’s attentions yet. She didn’t find either of them attractive. But the way Keeley was acting…

There was a devotion there which Phoebe wouldn’t have thought possible. And seeing it - without also being it - had created a dull, deep ache inside her.

She wanted that.

She didn’t want to, but she did. The desire was primal. It filled her body. And just knowing it had been imprinted into her - brainwashed into her - that didn’t stop it.

She crept closer to the window. She knew what she had to do, but she didn’t want to do it, didn’t want to do it at all.

Nevertheless she lifted her hand and knocked on the window.

Nick jumped; she could see Keeley’s head buck and bob to compensate, to keep from choking on his cock.

She didn’t react in any other way. Just left her caller in Nick’s hands. But Nick…

Well, once he’d looked up and met her gaze, he smiled. He held up a single finger on a hand. Telling her to wait?

Then Keeley was sitting back on her knees, listening to him. Phoebe couldn’t tell what was being said, but she wasn’t even thinking about it; instead, she was thinking about the expression he’d been wearing before.

How often would a guy be getting his cock sucked and still look like he had the weight of the world on his shoulders?

Keeley rose, still naked, and left the room. Phoebe kept watching Nick. She was trying not to stare at his cock. The part of her that wanted to feel devotion again was trying to work out why he looked so sad. A true test of devotion would be to change that.

Keeley had to say her name three times before Phoebe realised the front door was open. The nude form of her fellow test case stood in her front door, leaning forward slightly to talk to Phoebe.

“Nick told me to tell you to come in,” Keeley said.

Phoebe wanted to turn and run, but she knew it was already far too late for that. She was on Nick’s radar now.

So instead, she went inside, hoping Nick would remember her trigger, prepared to remind him if he didn’t.