Dr Candace Kraft was weighing up, for the third or fourth time, whether long enough had passed that she should assume something had gone wrong when she heard the door to the hotel room open.

She shot to her feet hastily, propelled by her own uncertainty, and then snapped into a stance of full attention, heels together, legs ramrod straight, back straight, shoulders slightly back, chest projecting, head upright, arms down by her sides. This was not an action she took with intention; this happened simply because there was a great deal of programming woven deeply into Candace’s psyche, and she was occasionally nothing more than its puppet.

Bimbeau made his way into the suite first, but hanging on his arm was the actress. Candace took in immediately the lovey-dovey looks the two were giving one another and found herself bristling.

There was no logic to that, she knew; all the same, it was what she felt.

Rikki followed them in, her smile a thin line of satisfaction, and Bimbeau looked up from his new conquest. His eyes met Candace’s and he smiled warmly. “And this,” he said, “is Candace Kraft. My first.”

…She was being introduced? Bewildered, she looked across to the actress, who smiled with apparent warmth. “It’s a pleasure to meet you,” she purred. “I feel as if I know you already.”

There was something very odd about this. Candace was determined to find out what. “Should Rikki and I prepare her for transport, Doctor?”

“Transport, Alphonse?” The actress looked at the Doctor with a bewilderment of her own. Candace took it on herself to inform her of the plan.

“We’re shipping you back to the Doctor’s home,” she said. “Rather than leave too many records, we have a large box to place you in.”

As the woman’s eyes grew rounder, she pressed on, savouring the reaction. “You’ll be in a hypnotic state, in order to ensure you don’t make any noises or move in any way that might alert baggage handlers while they’re loading or unloading the storage.

“In fact we have a small headset to continue your programming while you’re in transport.”

Candace gave the other woman a broad smile; there, she thought. Now you know your place.

Annie, her eyes wide, turned to face the Doctor. “Is this really what you intended?” she asked slowly, visibly shaken. Candace frowned again; she was sure that if the same approach had been taken to her, she would have accepted it all meekly in the end. After all, it was the Doctor’s decision. Their duty was to simply obey.

Just as concerning was that the Doctor’s own expression showed concern, perhaps even remorse.

“It… is,” he conceded, “though I had been thinking on our return here that something better needs to be chosen instead.”

Candace’s eyes opened wide and she stared. “Master… is all well?” she asked.

Bimbeau looked at her with a smile she hadn’t seen before. “I think so,” he said. “Why?”

“I just…” She took a deep breath. “I think something’s awry, Master,” she said. “Not everything is as it should be.”

She watched him exchange curious looks with the actress, before they both looked sympathetically back toward her. That, Candace thought, that definitely rankled. She was his first; she had helped him perfect his techniques; this new girl shouldn’t be the one he was exchanging half-confidential glances with.

Yet she could say almost none of this, for he was her Master, and her programming underlined for her that he could do no wrong.

She settled for “Master?”

The Doctor looked back toward her, his eyes conflicted and confused. “I need to rest,” he said. “We have time to decide yet, Candace. It doesn’t have to be done this moment.”

She bowed her head in acknowledgement, and Bimbeau went into the suite’s main bedroom.

Candace and Annie eyed each other cautiously, but as yet, neither spoke. Both saw in the other only a challenge to the way they believed the world should work; someone who recognised around whom the world revolved, but who thought it did so in completely different ways.

Eventually Annie spoke. “Alphonse had a plan for me, did he?”

“I am sure he still does,” Candace returned, though she was sure of nothing of the kind.

The other woman moved closer, going from a point near the doorway where she had stood to take a seat on one of the sofas. She patted the seat beside her.

Candace stood uncertainly. Was this something her Master would wish of her? Was there a trap?

It was hard to say. She compromised with herself by, instead, sitting on the opposite sofa, facing Annie, and she waited.

"You know his plan?” Annie asked. Candace nodded. “Should I ask you to tell me?” Annie followed up. “And if I did, would you answer?”

“Only if I thought it would please him or suit his plans,” Candace said. “Will you tell me what happened when he entranced you?”

Annie smiled gently; Candace had a sudden sense that the smile was genuine, that the woman was trying to build bridges between them both without lying or deceiving, and she reminded herself with an effort of will that this was an actress, and that presumably, deception was one of her skills. “I think it was mutual,” she said.

“Explain,” Candace frowned.

“If you tell me his plans?”

“I cannot,” Candace answered, and the other woman seemed surprised.

“Why not?”

Candace considered what could be said. “I mentioned that you would receive further conditioning,” she said. “Saying that doesn’t violate the rule. So please understand, I have already received this additional conditioning.”

Annie nodded, listening intently, and Candace found herself wanting to impress the woman. “Many times over,” she added, looking at her intently, wanting to impress on her how important this was but knowing there was a very real chance it would make no sense to her listener.

“I understand,” Annie said.

“But you don’t,” Candace answered, suddenly filled with passion. “That’s not how this works. What was done to me afterwards, what will be done to you, isn’t just a bigger, more intense version of what you’ve already experienced. It’s on a completely other level.”

“…And how does it feel?”

Candace, surprised, cast her mind back to that first experiment.

*

Her arms and legs already lay in line with the restraints, her body against the table’s contact points.

Bimbeau smiled. “You’re locked in place,” he told her. “You can’t move. Not until you’re told to.”

She wanted to acknowledge his command as she should. To tell him what she thought. But she couldn’t move. The moan that escaped didn’t carry the meaning she wanted, but it gave him the confirmation it was looking for.

She was again surprised by just how firmly she’d been locked down, held into place. Another example of how deeply her mind had twisted into its new shape, its new role.

She’d squirm with pleasure if she could.

He set the tiara into place on her head. She waited for it to power up, for a tingle to freeze her thoughts into place, ready to be remoulded.

The Doctor settled himself at the console and started working back through the activation checks. She made a note to make sure some kind of standby got added. If they were going to process enough people for the Doctor’s ambitions, they’d need to make this simpler and quicker.

The hum of the machine changed tone, and something lit in her head, numbness crackling across her brain.

Everything that was currently Candace was focused on what she felt. It still wasn’t much. She was a core, and everything around that core was mutable. Changable. And, she knew, about to be changed.

She thought from the way she tingled that her core could change, too. She wondered what that might feel like.

It seemed like a long time before the Doctor spoke. Maybe her time perception was off. Maybe he was trying to decide how he wanted her. When he did speak, he went in strong immediately, with a major change. Or at least a full confirmation.

“I am your Master.”

“You are… Master,” she responded. It was so basic, so automatic, to confirm that it cut through even his orders. She hadn’t done that. The idea must have come from him.

“You are my willing slave,” he continued.

“I am your willing slave, Master,” Candace breathed excitedly. She could feel it? That strange tingle across her head was uprooting thoughts and ideas, pushing them into new shapes, and she could actually feel herself changing.

It was a change she’d been looking forward to, even wanting, since… when?

“Your overriding goals are my pleasure and my comfort.”

“My overriding goals are your pleasure and your comfort.”

Wait. Hadn’t that always been true? Candace wasn’t sure why he’d bother saying something so obvious. His pleasure and comfort had been her goal since they’d met. Her own priorities were nothing in comparison.

She was programmed already to want him to conquer and to take.

She wanted to smile, but her body wouldn’t move.

There was another pause as the Doctor settled on the words he wanted to bind into her brain. “You want my goals even more than I do,” was his eventual choice. It was a revelation; this one she actually felt hit her. She felt her very core twist and change.

“I… want your goals… unh… even more… than you do… Master.”

Every command seemed to removed more of the occasional voice of conscience from her old self. Every command reinforced her chosen path and removed the parts that made her struggle against it. It was bliss; absolute bliss.

*

“There’s no feeling to compare,” Candace said softly. “Nothing in the world feels so good. Nothing in the world creates so many positive memories either.” Was memories the right word? It felt like it.

She’d seen with Lulu how changing someone’s memories helped to remake them as a person. Candace was, following the Doctor’s treatment, far better than the scientist and family woman she had been before. And it was in no small part because she remembered the changes made to her, the changes made by a machine she had helped her Master to construct.

Annie’s expression softened slightly. “Did your friend have the same thing?” she asked, glancing at Rikki.

Candace had stopped paying attention to Rikki, as she often did - Rikki was, to Candace, a tool, one of the Doctor’s purpose-selected slaves, chosen for a specific set of skills or for the potential, the skills to be programmed into them - and was slightly surprised to realise she was still there.

The ex-Marine had taken up position by the door to the bedroom Bimbeau had gone into, where she now stood at attention, waiting without question or thought. She would wait as long as it took, standing guard over her owner.

*

Erica swam back to consciousness. Her head ached, a dull pain behind her temples. Hangover, she thought at first, and then, not just a hangover.

It was at that point that her shoulders registered their own protests. Her arms were raised so that her hands were above her head, stretched out to either side of her, and had been for long enough that the strain was starting to tell on her shoulders. She tried moving to compensate for this, and discovered that she was bound at the wrists, likely suspended by them.

She opened her eyes and turned her head to look, and dizziness from her headache turned her vision into a kaleidoscope.

…Her feet were bound too, strapped together at the ankles. She couldn’t even move them as one; something was anchoring them. A short, stout pole, perhaps?

“She’s awake, Master.”

A British voice. A woman’s voice. Scotch or Irish, the accent, whichever of those Ewan McGregor was. Erica turned her head toward the sound and this time noticed that there was something on her brow. Something cumbersome and heavy.

“Hm? Ah! Good. Thank you for keeping an eye out, Candace.” British again. Male. Didn’t sound as well spoken, and she thought the distraction had been genuine.

“Of course, Doctor.”

Erica decided it was time to interrupt this, especially as she clearly wasn’t going to be able to do that physically. “What the fuck is this?”

She blinked rapidly and her vision swam back into focus. The woman turned out to look like a marvel of cosmetic surgery, tits of a size that might be found in nature but if it was it wouldn’t be that perky. Long red hair. Eyecatching hips. Her outfit was a parody of an office worker’s, a blouse too small and tight to conceal anything, a pinstriped charcoal grey skirt that only concealed at all because she was standing perfectly upright.

The way she stood had Erica tag her, mentally, as ex military. Nobody who hadn’t gone through Basic carried themselves with that level of precision. But nothing else about her made sense as a former military woman.

The man, on the other hand, stood slouched, not upright. He had one hand in his pocket while the other one was fiddling with some big gadget - it looked like a computer had been built into something the size of a small bedside cabinet, and wires emerged from the cabinet and ran over toward Erica.

“This?” the man said. “This is the first day of the rest of your life.” He smiled. It wasn’t reassuring and she didn’t think it was supposed to be. He was confident.

Erica decided at once she wasn’t going to like this guy. She’d be responsible for his downfall, she promised herself. That might be something that happened at her hands, or maybe she’d get him in trouble with the authorities. Either would work fine. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I wouldn’t worry about it.” He threw a switch on the machine he was working with, a loud mechanical clunk. Erica felt a shiver of something throb through her head, from one part of the odd weight sat on her brow to another.

Someone moaned in desire, and Erica was so busy thinking about what a coincidence that was when she felt so aroused all of a sudden that it took her longer than it should have done to realise it was her moaning.

“Candace,” the man said, “take over the controls.”

“Of course, Doctor.” The redhead moved over to the console. Erica realised the cables running from it didn’t just go near her; they must actually connect to the thing on her head.

“This is so fucked up,” she said. Or at least she intended to, but the redhead - Candace -touched a key when she was halfway through, and what came out was “This is s-“

And then her mouth was just hanging open, still shaping the ‘o’ of ‘so’, but fixed rigid. She had no control over it. Her arms, too, seemed tensed into place; she couldn’t so much as try to pull against the restraints.

Nor did her legs respond when she tried even to twitch them.

Erica felt herself shift in a heartbeat from angrily defiant to fearful. It took a lot to cause that; she’d thought herself fearless before her time in the military, had been cured of that illusion, and had gone on to feel, once again, that she had overcome fear.

It turned out that a total proof of helplessness gave the lie to that idea effortlessly. A whimper escaped her throat, but even that sounded half-hearted with her body not willing to throw itself behind it.

“She’s ready,” the woman said. “Physical activity suspended beyond autonomic function. Mental activity ongoing. Energy levels suitable for modification, not overwrite.”

Erica saw the man nod to the redhead, acknowledging what she’d said. “Can you hear me?” he asked.

Which was dumb, Erica thought. This whatever-it-was they had her in had paralysed her. She couldn’t- “Yes,” she said, and wondered how she had. Her jaw was immovable again, had only moved to answer him.

She didn’t remember deciding to answer him either.

“What is your name?”

She was filled with a fierce desire not to tell him. Nobody gave her mouth that memo, though, and she heard herself obediently answering “Gunnery Sergeant Erica Scott Maynard.”

…obediently? Where the fuck had that word come from?

“What unit?”

“First Batallion, 3rd Marines.”

“Well, that all checks with the research,” the man mused to himself. “Is she trying to lie?”

“Yes, Doctor,” the redhead said. Erica tried to frown, to as little avail as her other struggles.

They knew who she was. They’d chosen to grab her. Erica figured to think of it as ‘grab’ for the time being and to try and work out what they’d done later. Given the headache and some fuzziness in her attempts to think of her most recent memory, she was working on the assumption she’d been drugged.

“You can’t lie to me, Erica,” the man said. “Do you understand?”

She understood clearly. “Yes,” she found herself saying. “I understand.” God, but she needed him to believe a lie. Just one lie; the right one, at the right moment.

“You don’t lie to me, Erica,” he said.

“I don’t lie to you,” she answered.

“Let’s try that again, Erica. Address me with respect this time.”

Which was outrageous. She didn’t lie to the man, but he wasn’t her boss. She already had a CO.

“Sir, I do not lie to you, sir!”

The redhead laughed, startled and delighted. Erica wanted to glower.

“Well, that’s a good start,” the man said. “Erica, you won’t be going back to your unit at the end of your leave. How does that make you feel?”

“Sir, not good, sir.”

“And why is that?”

She found herself genuinely at a loss for words. “Sir, semper fi, sir!”

Always faithful. Always loyal. It was as close as she could get to explaining the horror she felt at the idea of abandoning her people to a civilian.

“Ah. You feel your place is with them?”

“Sir, yes, sir.”

“Your place is with me,” he told her flatly. Erica considered the idea for a moment. It had the ring of truth to it, even if it didn’t make sense, even if she didn’t understand why.

The redhead tapped a key on her console and Erica said “Sir, my place is with you, sir.”

Despite their strain in her restraints, she felt a weight lift off her shoulders as she thought it. She was no longer caught between two obligations.

“Very good,” he said. “So how does it feel now to know you’re not returning to your unit?”

“Sir, if I may ask a question?”

“You may.” He sounded amused.

“If I will not be returning to the unit, will I remain with you?”

“Correct.”

“Sir, then it feels fucking great, sir!”

“That’s my girl.” He chuckled. “You are my girl.”

“Sir, I am your girl, sir.”

“Oh, and you’re not army any more. You’ve heard how Candace shows respect. Fall in line.”

Erica wasn’t sure what that meant but, once again, her mouth was up to speed. “Yes, Doctor.”

“Very good.” He smiled. “It turns you on when I approve of your actions.”

“It turns me on when you approve of my actions, Doctor.”

“You want to please me.”

“I want to please you, Doctor.”

“You are my willing slave.”

“I am your willing slave, Doctor.”

“You will keep me safe.”

“I will keep you safe, Doctor.”

“You will be my bodyguard.”

“I will be your bodyguard, Doctor.”

“You will serve me.”

“I will serve you, Doctor.”

“You will love me.”

“I will love you, Doctor.”

Erica could feel herself changing with every sentence. Each change, too, seemed to make the next one easier.

“Your body is mine to use.”

“My body is yours to use, Doctor.”

“Your mind is mine to change.”

“My mind is yours to change, Doctor.”

“You love to be changed.”

“I love to be changed, Doctor.”

“You love to be reprogrammed.”

“I love to be reprogrammed, Doctor.”

“You’re a good hypnoslut.”

Erica wanted to say she had no idea what that was, but as she answered “I’m a good hypnoslut, Doctor,” she realised she knew.

“You love to be fucked by me.”

“I love to be fucked by you, Doctor.”

“You love to suck my cock.”

“I love to suck your cock, Doctor.”

“You’re completely mine to use and change.”

“I’m completely yours to use and change, Doctor.”

“You answer to Rikki.”

“I answer to Rikki, Doctor.”

*

“A variation, yes,” Candace said. “We’d refined it by then.” She relaxed slightly on the sofa.

“And it… affects the body, too?” Annie asked, almost nervous.

Candace blinked, then laughed. “It can.” She reached up as if to cup her breasts, but instead of touching them she slid her hands further up, lifting her hair and piling it over her head, as she shimmied her shoulders, setting her chest swinging in a way only the most amply bosomed women ever did, and then only to prove a point.

She wasn’t sure what point she was proving, but she saw a nervous excitement in the actress’ eyes. Whatever point it was she’d clearly made it; she grinned at Annie’s discomfiture. “All biological,” she said, “if not natural. And well-used; I have the honour to be the mother of the Doctor’s firstborn.”

*

Annie stared between the two other women. She worked hard at keeping herself fit, and she had trainers and consultants who were well-paid to help her stay as attractive as a leading lady should be through her TV and film schedule. It wasn’t often that she felt dowdy.

In this room, though, she wasn’t sure there was another way for her to feel.

She wondered how it was for them. Candace’s smirk suggested she was enjoying this.

Annie closed her eyes and concentrated. It was an exercise she’d developed over years of playing different characters; sitting in a room near someone who did the same role, or the writers, or (on one lovely occasion, when she was playing a dramatisation of real life) the actual person she would be portraying, she closed her eyes, tuned out any atmospheric noise, and just let her attention diffuse out.

She thought of it as a meditative exercise. A way to bring her consciousness into parallel with the character she was playing.

In this case, she wanted instead to put herself in the place of one or other of these women. It was easy to believe her dear Mr Alphonse had done more to them than had been done to her; they were behaving very differently, and it seemed likely they thought very differently.

Bit by bit, concentrating closely, she put herself in their places. Saw the world as they saw it. Imagined herself as the servant to some kind of mad scientist who’d turned one of them into a doting, ready-to-fuck bodyguard and the other into the attentive, obedient lover and mother of his child, who was now interested in Annabelle Franklin - about which his first conquest felt some sharp jealousy - no, not about that - about -

- about -

Annie swallowed. Clear in her head was the idea that this redhead, the scientist, was concerned because the Doctor wanted Annie for her genetics allowing her a powerful psionic effect.

There was nothing in anything she’d known before meditating she could have drawn that from. No script for her to have read between the lines.

Her eyes snapped open and she met Candace’s eyes, and there was a sudden jolt of mental contact. Both women jumped; Annie could see the other woman knew, too.

Mr Alphonse - Dr Bimbeau - her lover - whoever - he had known Annie was a powerful psychic, and Annie had not.

Instead, Annie had created elaborate explanations for herself, hidden the truth from herself, even as she plunged into a career made far easier by her abilities.

And now this man had hypnotised her - she still felt that strange impulse to go along with his desires, lazily and without question - and wanted to steal her away and use her.

This was too much to take in.

Annie fainted.