The last thing Emma remembered, along with a faintly nauseating wave of dizziness and a sensation like her eyelids were stuck together, was Ryan sighing to himself and muttering, "This is so inconvenient." Then the lights went out in her brain for a while.
When she recovered, it was dark. Not in the sense of 'the sun had gone down', although it might have-Emma couldn't tell, because she couldn't see anything. Something covered her face completely, a heavy helmet that blocked her sight and muffled her hearing. She reached up to take it off, but her hands stopped short after moving only a couple of inches. Emma felt something pull on her wrists as she tried to move her arms again; there was some give to the stiff material, but not much. She had a sudden, vaguely terrifying mental image of the straps they used on hospital beds in the movies, the ones they used to restrain difficult patients. As she gave in to a bout of panic and began to struggle, she realized that another set held her ankles. That only made her writhe even harder as her terror built.
"Hello?" Maddie's voice cut through Emma's growing sense of panic, restoring a tiny bit of stability to her chaotic thoughts. Not that Maddie sounded calm-in fact, she sounded as scared as Emma felt-but at least her friend was here too. Emma wasn't alone, tied up and blind and naked (oh God, she was naked, where were her clothes when did she lose them what else happened while she was unconscious) in a strange place. She had her best friend with her. They were both...tied up and blind and probably both naked too, in a strange place. Emma's voice cracked into a sob on her first attempt at speech.
She pulled it together, though. "I'm here, Maddie," she said, trying to project as much reassurance as she could through her voice. "It's-it's gonna be okay." She really hoped Maddie didn't ask her what she was basing that statement on.
Luckily, Maddie had other things on her mind. "I, I remember..." There was a long pause. "I remember thinking that there must have been something in the drinks. You were shaking me, trying to get me to sit up, and I couldn't move." Emma could hear the fear in Maddie's voice getting stronger again as her friend tried to sort through her disjointed recollections of the previous evening. "I felt so heavy and dizzy, and...and then you sort of slumped down onto me. That's the last thing I remember. Did you...did he...?"
"I think it was Ryan," Emma said, raising her voice so that Maddie could hear her clearly despite the helmet covering their ears. "I think you're right, he drugged our drinks." She felt strangely detached from her own words, like she was giving advice over the phone to a friend in a difficult situation. Emma knew it was probably just a coping mechanism to keep herself from screaming, but she accepted it gratefully. "It's okay. He can't keep us here forever. So many people saw us at the party last night, they'll be bound to ask questions when we don't show up at work tomorrow."
"I...you're right, Ems." Emma heard it in Maddie's voice, a desperate attempt to cling to the reassurance Emma provided and echo it back to her. "He can't keep us here for more than a day or two. We can get through this together." Emma heard a sudden, choked sob. "Oh, God, if you hadn't been here..."
Before Emma could respond, the darkness in front of her eyes suddenly changed. It didn't go away, but it became strangely vivid and luminous-the difference between a television set that was off and one that was showing a black screen. Emma jerked in her restraints, instinctively trying to shrug the helmet off, but it was strapped on securely. A faint humming noise sounded in her ears, the sound of speakers broadcasting silence.
Then she heard a third voice. "Well, exactly," Ryan said, sounding exasperated. "If she had just taken a hint like everyone else, we wouldn't be in this mess, now would we? You and I would have a nice leisurely weekend to spend getting to know each other, and you'd head back to the city on Monday all nice and happy and ready to quit your job and live with your rich new boyfriend in the countryside. No one would have even thought twice."
He sighed, and Emma felt him give her an oddly playful smack on the shoulder. "And then you, silly girl, could have come and visited us in a week or two and gotten your treatment then! You have no idea how difficult you've made things, with your inconvenient questions and your entirely unwarranted concern. Just rigging up the second interface helmet took almost five hours-I had to give you both a second dose! You've made this very difficult, and I'm really afraid I've not left enough time to do it properly." It was so surreal, hearing threats in Ryan's understated, oh-so-British tones. Emma felt like any moment, James Bond was going to come in and start quipping at them.
"So I'm going to have to improvise a bit," Ryan continued. Emma heard him tapping at a keyboard, and suddenly her eyes were filled with pulsing waves of color. The hiss of the speakers in her ears turned into a dull throb, a wall of ambient sound that Emma's brain tuned out with unnatural speed. She knew it was there, but there was simply nothing for her thoughts to latch onto. It became part of the background of every other sound, of the swirling lights that she saw everywhere she looked. Of her thoughts.
"As you might already have surmised," Ryan said, still sounding like he was narrating a public-television science show, "this is a brainwashing device. There are subliminal messages, both visual and auditory, in the sensory input you're now receiving. These subliminal messages are designed to reduce your ability to think critically and to lock in a strong mental association between receiving suggestions from me and experiencing physical pleasure. At this point," he went on, his voice abruptly becoming forceful, "I would like to remind you that screaming will achieve absolutely nothing. The staff has been given the rest of the weekend off, and you're in the sub-basement's wine cellar. Nobody could possibly hear you."
Emma bit back a scream she hadn't even realized she was getting ready to make. Instead, she said, "It's okay, Maddie. We can fight this. Just close your eyes, don't let it in. Listen to my voice instead. We'll fight it together." She took her own advice, squeezing her eyes shut tightly so that the patterns became merely a blur of light strobing through her closed eyelids.
"Together," Maddie replied, her voice tight with barely suppressed fear. "Okay. Yeah. We can do this. Just push it all away, right? Shut it all out. Everything but you and me. Together."
"Ah. Well. About that." Ryan sounded almost apologetic, as though he was just waiting for a polite gap in their inspirational resistance speeches to give them some awkward news. "You see, I was a trifle worried about exactly what you've described-normally, I give myself a good forty-eight hours of uninterrupted brainwashing time, and I fear we've got slightly more than half that before I'll need to return you. And of course, normally my girls are very much alone when they undergo the process. Abandoned, even, at least as far as they're concerned. It makes them far more...receptive." Emma found herself wondering how many times Ryan had repeated the process, and just how many of the beautiful women at the party were secretly in his thrall.
