Beedee paused with the mask at chest height, cupped in her open hands. It was only a stiff bit of lace with some glass jewels worked in but it was the most beautiful and priceless heirloom, an antique, and Mother had told her she must be extra careful with it. Sometimes seeing it on its stand, next to her bed, daydreaming about wearing it out somewhere, she’d let her eyes stray, tracing some little intricacy in the pattern of the lace. And then the next thing she knew it was morning. Whenever she took the mask to put it on she felt that same undertow of fascination trying to carry her away, and had to concentrate to resist it.

Once all the tiresome business of settling her inheritance was finished, she’d begun to feel like the idea of “Beedee Harris” had kind of played itself out. Like it was last season’s dress. Mother joked she’d been made to affirm so many times that she was who she was she’d developed identity fatigue. It got into her porn habits. She stumbled across some stuff online about depersonalization kink and pretty soon it was off to the races: straitjackets, sensory dep, latex and dolly porn, all of it was good. It fascinated her to watch women processed until they turned into things, till they weren’t anyone anymore. It was her steady diet. No movement, no agency, nothing left of them but the craving, anonymous holes between their legs. She thought how it would feel, being carted and posed and fucked like those girls, in that indifferent dark. The emptiness would crush you.

She’d come imagining the moment the light got sealed out.

Beedee took the piece delicately by its corners and held it aloft between her and the mirror, a few inches in front of her eyes. She looked through and pretended she was seeing herself with it actually on. She pretended it was on and she was seeing her eyes right at the moment when it hit, and she forgot who Beedee was.

She cried when she received the mask. Beedee knew Mother wasn’t really disposed to indulge the new hobby: she was skeptical by default of what she liked to call Beedee’s “fetish fads.” They didn’t have words over it—Beedee had outgrown any need she might once have had to be disagreeable with Mother—but there was some coolness between them for a few days. The mask was a gesture. It said, I’m not there yet, but maybe there’s room for me to come around. It was sweet of her—generous even. But the gift was lace, literally, where Beedee wanted iron. Even in her gratitude it was hard not to feel at least a tiny bit mocked.

Beedee held the mask where it was and waited. She wasn’t allowed to put it on herself. That was the game. She focused, let her thoughts go, and when the mask chose to it put itself on. And no more Beedee. All she had to do was believe in the mask. In her head Beedee made up the legend of an old enchantment, crafted to steal the will of a weak, vain princess. She pictured the beauty snared by the beauty of the mask and coming unspooled, strand after golden strand, her very self raveling up into the lace and the dark purpose written there.

The game, more than the mask, was Mother’s real gift. Beedee was a good believer of things, but when she started playing she asked Mother for a tranceword, just to make it a little easier for her to slip away when she needed to. She never used it anymore. She doubted she’d even remember it. Sometimes she could almost convince herself the legend of the mask was real.

Her fingers trembled. She sensed the mask gaining hold and her will draining from her. It was the moment of the game where she tried to fight it, tried to wake herself up: but only to prolong the thrill of losing. Mother’s games were all about losing. They were the only ones Beedee cared to play anymore.

Drone unit BD-1 awoke in its host. It noted its Reticulum status MOUNTED and ENGAGED and confirmed host as DORMANT. Awareness of Task filled its mind. It would execute, render itself to Mother at the programmed point of service and acknowledge. The figure in the mirror it recognized as the lingering artifact of a superseded command mode, and extraneous to Task. Drone dismissed it from awareness and proceeded to exit the room.

Valerie was a social climber, a bigot, and a natural-born bootlicker. On the other hand, she was also a religious hypocrite and a talky rich bore. Miranda had been finding excuses all day to put off calling her.

She pulled up her messages again but there wasn’t really anything there. Nothing but Renate’s text of a couple hours ago, still at the top of the stack and unanswered. I made a trailer for our little side project: just that and a video attachment. Sure, Reen. No idea what she meant by “side project,” and it annoyed Miranda she’d have to watch whatever this was now to find out. She hated it when Reen played cute. Miri darling, what did you think of my directorial debut? I think you should just tell me whatever you’re fucking telling me, is what I think.

Trailer, though. That sounded ominous. It couldn’t be her way of announcing something new? They had Val’s girl to finish training; that was still hands-on for her, Renate knew that. If she had some idea of running Beedee independently? Hell no. Way too soon. Miranda resolved to be firm about that.

She was in one of those moods where she felt like she had a bone to pick with the whole world. Fuck it, Miranda said to herself, I’ll use the girls. It was getting late, she had her wine, why not yank Val’s chain a bit. Reen only wanted her to take the bitch’s temperature but what the hell, Val was a big girl. Time to blow off a little steam. She pinged Beedee, put her feet up, settled back and cast herself onto the big overhead screen. The couch camera, a fancy AI-driven model, racked in on her automatically, and Miranda shrugged her peignoir down a scooch to see how the new lighting made her shoulders pop.

She’d never even bothered to reinforce the woman on staying available nights. Miranda sent the call signal, poured one for herself and rested her eyes. Could be a wait, though if she knew her mark it wouldn’t be. Val lived in expectation.

Prost, Miranda toasted herself, and raised her glass to the moment of peace.

A girl was kneeling in submission near the door of her cage even before the beautiful Attendant’s foot touched the stair. She didn’t know what had called her to the spot. Sometimes she thought she saw lights, or heard voices. Sometimes the air felt tingly, like it was full of magic. However it happened, one moment a girl was on her cot, the next on the floor. Waiting, attentive, ready for use.

A lot of her life was like that now: feel summoned, find yourself in a place.

A good girl shouldn’t have to think to know where she was supposed to be. A good girl shouldn’t have to think at all. A good girl like Mia was too busy pleasing and being used to care about what her brain was doing.

If a girl’s eyes were free she could have looked up and to her right, and she could have seen the Attendant come down to her. That would have been so beautiful. In Mia’s mind wherever the Attendant walked there was a haze of light. She had the most perfect body. Sometimes when Mia saw her she was fully nude, but also she had all these teasing little outfits she liked to wear, and they drove Mia crazy. She tried to remember them when she was masturbating, that filmy seethrough red top, the checked microskirt that didn’t make it all the way down her hips, a thing that was only white leather straps around her arms and legs: and other things too. Mia could never keep more than the last three or four outfits in her head at one time. No matter what the Attendant wore it always put her pussy on display. Mia loved how delicate she looked there, the neat tuft of hair like a barely visible puff of blonde cotton candy over those tiny, dewy pink lips. Only Cruise Staff, girls with Rank, had the privilege of being displayed at all times like that. With a steerage slut like Mia, if she was ever called from her cage her pussy went covered.

The door slid open. A girl lowered her head further and reminded herself to breathe. The Attendant kept herself outside.

“Its attendance is required Above for sunbathing,” she announced. The slow, bored monotone sounded almost exactly like Beedee Harris, though the Attendant was not Beedee Harris. “It will accompany this unit to report to the Quarters.”

Mia noticed the patch of blue at her crotch. Passenger Blue, they called the color. It was her Above thong. It gave her a weird déjà vu seeing it already on. But then the impulse to crawl swept it away, and the rest of her mind, and she came to the Attendant to Accept Command.

A girl paused just this side of the door sill, bending low to kiss her beautiful Controller’s stockinged feet.

Even as she raised herself again and raised her chin, to present her collar for the leash, Mia held her gaze down. The Controller had on the black lace mask she never appeared without, and her eyes Mia knew would be black behind it—onyx black, depthless, undisclosing. Like the eyes of a panther. Eyes with no recognition in them, eyes that would never see you except as prey. Sometimes they came to her in her dreams. They turned to gaze at her and she took fright, a feeling indistinguishable from deep, abject adoration.

A light pull on the leash brought a girl to stand, though everything in her begged to go on hands and knees. The beautiful Controller pivoted and made at once for the stairs, and a girl followed, losing herself in the rhythms of that bare, perfect ass.

“… oh and I agree one hundred percent, what that article you sent me was saying about deference? and I think that’s why we see all this,” she paused and lowered her voice, “this waywardness with our young girls, you know, we just don’t teach the proper female role anymore! I mean, when I think about my poor Mia …”

Getting weepy about the cruise already, and her dear absent troubled daughter. That was alright. Wayward, Miranda supposed, was Val’s latest circumlocution for lesbian. Nothing she thought was ever far from Val’s tongue but it was nice to see her well primed. Move things along quicker.

She might have been waiting for Miranda’s message, for all the time it took for Valerie to come back. No more than it would have needed to arrange herself in that nightie she barely had on—and that’s if she was already undressed. By any standard of the Valerie of a few weeks back it was shockingly revealing. Miranda was a little thrown to see it. These old broads though, sometimes even just a dab of the sex magick hooked ‘em deeper than you knew. Reen could tell I wasn’t keeping good tabs on her. Still, at worst she might turn into an oversexed whiner; Val didn’t have the strength of spirit to cause any actual mess.

Some remnant instinct of modesty kept Valerie’s fingers busy plucking at a pile of unfortunate frills ladled over her breasts. At her crotch the lace was opaque but thin, and betrayed damp.

It was the girls who were longer than she wanted. Miranda started getting antsy from all the Valspeak, and found her attention back at the text. She pulled up Renate’s video attachment and without deciding to set it going: title cards in Russian, some grating metal soundtrack she instantly smashed mute on. The titles moved too fast for her limited Cyrillic. Swoopy, arrhythmic cuts of fetish gear, some duck-lipped young bimbo with a septum ring; what looked like a camgirl’s bedroom, same bimbo on her knees on the bed begging at the camera. Nothing that offered any context. She saw movement out the corner of her eye and the vid went back off.

Thank god for droning, Miranda thought; lately it was the only way Beedee could get her hard. She tracked the robot blonde’s almost ceremonial approach down the hall. It was something in the way the mask looked on her, the girl’s utter lack of self-consciousness wearing it; that dark cloud louring ridiculously over a wisp of sheer half frock, bare pussy and tied pink leggings. Not a thought in her head but to be its vehicle. The drone came to the threshold and a single smooth, uncanny motion shifted it from walk to kneel.

The Room at the Top of the House. What Beedee knew as the Quarters now had been the girls own room, under the ancien régime. Built out for her special. When she was little she’d made up stories about the princess that lived in secret there. Somewhere they probably still had the handmade book she drew of them.

Find out who someone’s pretending to be when they look in the mirror, Renate said once, and you’ll know where they break. Like cleaving a diamond. The secret castle upstairs had been Beedee’s first and biggest point of fracture. Miranda got a nasty little kick out of it even now, the dispossessed princess begging entry to her own place, and not so much as a memory left of it ever being hers.

She unmuted herself. “Val, hon”—Miranda gestured Beedee forward—“sorry to break in on you, but I think there’s someone here who wants to say hi.” She hadn’t broken in. Without Miranda attending, Val’s talk had just sort of run aground: she was sitting slumped forward, staring at nothing, all passive, bovine confusion. Fuck if she didn’t already put herself in trance running her own bullshit, Miranda thought. When her daughter entered the frame Val’s eyes went wide. Nothing else in her affect changed though. Slowly, as if drawn by an invisible hand, she straightened in her seat.

Incongruity shock, Renate called it. Never failed with these rigid types. The sight of her all but naked daughter on an all but naked Beedee Harris’s leash on a livestream from the cruise ship in Miranda’s living space was just too much wrongness all at once for poor Val. The woman looked like a whole board full of blown circuits.

The drone knew to set Mia down where there was camera coverage for a kneeling body and a good eyeline for Miranda. The girl settled into Submission and the drone, still holding the leash, suspended itself. Mia was a pale, soft-looking brunette, wide-hipped, with small pert breasts and a pleasant fleshiness still, even after a month in training. That her bikini bottom was way too small for her only enhanced the look. She had a round face with a small pointy chin and big puppy-dog eyes—bigger than they used to seem, now there was so much less going on behind them—and Miranda thought, not for the first time, how cute it might be to put an anime spin on the girl.

Get Val into it. They could do cosplay. Be worth it just for the giggle of hearing her call her daughter “Mia-chan.”

She revised herself: “Mia-sama.” Val was going to learn a little respect.

Valerie had just enough presence of mind to choke out some kind of greeting. Mia had no mind at all, and stayed mute. Her eyes were on an auxiliary screen set at head height, and she rested them on Mother as if she’d been taken by a hypnotic focus. Jesus slut, you’re not supposed to go that deep on her, Miranda said to herself. She gave the girl a somewhat irritated prompt. “Tell your mother how you’re enjoying your vacation, child.”

The girl broke out in a big smile and seemed to animate. “The cruise is perfection, Mother. Thank you so much for sending me on it. Everyone is so lovely. I’m feeling wonderfully relaxed.”

“That’s lovely darling, lovely,” Val chimed. She was dazed yet and searching for thoughts but Miranda saw some stress working in the jaw. “Where are you now exactly? I bet it’s pretty! Have you had any good sightseeing? Found any girl— you know, any new friends yet?”

Too goddamn many questions. Mia went stupid again. After a slightly embarrassed pause Miranda put in, “She can’t really tell you, Val. Where they are.” She chuckled to herself. “There’s ah, it’s a security deal. Pirates and such. One of those mind-net devices you’ve heard of? Blocks passengers knowing where they are when they communicate off-ship.”

Val’s face twitched. “Mind-net. I’ve heard of it,” she repeated. She nodded her pseudo-understanding, but the expression behind it bordered on disconsolate. The waters were getting choppier, Miranda thought, and she couldn’t tell why. She fortified herself with another drink. More sharply she said, “Mia: tell your mother what you’re doing here.”

“I’ve been brought above deck, Mother. It’s so bright and so warm here.” She said everything with the same smooth, loopy conviction. Every statement a great truth newly realized. “There is nothing in my mind but sunbathing. When the Director instructs me to I will begin.”

Val’s left hand was plucking at her nightie like she was trying to get sound from it. The right though was on her thigh, palm up, and she was stroking herself awkwardly and unawares with the backs of her fingers. Her face was contorted. She looked wildly towards Miranda and hissed, “Sunbathing,” and launched into a strange whispery ranting aside, she sounds like a moron, what are they doing to her brains, is that what I’m paying for, sunbathing? Miranda was struck dumb. It was like Captain Queeg raving about the strawberries. I won’t think about it, she almost spat it out, then incoherently all the things she wouldn’t think about spilled out, girls, her daughter, the sun, oiling themselves, salt on their skin; what they did to each other. “I only want to know if she’s fixed,” she said fully aloud, beseechingly; after that the dam broke. It was all her baby and her pretty baby and wanting her baby back, till at last she was nothing but a mess of blubbering and tears.

Well this is a shambles, Miranda said to herself. But it didn’t seem to involve her somehow. She seemed to be witnessing the scene from above, from some point on the ceiling. Mia was gazing up at her, dark eyes shining. She shouldn’t have been able to do that without command. She should have still been fixated on her mother, on her screen.

Without any alteration in her demeanor, as if it were a single gesture, a single smooth transformation, the girl’s eyes went crossed, her tongue fell out of her mouth, her hands came up like marionette hands to make a pair of limp paws. It was impossibly weird. Completely on her own, a begging little ahegao puppy. Miranda felt like the tether had parted, the one keeping her from floating off. Like, how could she have read my mind about the anime thing?

It shook something loose in her. In a flash of insight she saw how they would salvage the situation.

“Mia,” she snapped, and the girl came to attention. “Your mother has concerns about your therapy. Correct her thinking for her.”