Left In The Dark

All I know when I wake up is that I'm naked and alone. I can feel cool air against my skin; not the natural chill of outdoor weather but the dry, breezeless chill of an air conditioner. I try to sit up, but then I realize my hands and feet have been restrained. I try to reach out my thoughts and find a pair of eyes to look through, but my mental probes confirm my initial impressions. There's not another living person in this room with me. Wherever I am, I've been left here alone.

I'd say, "alone in the dark", but I honestly wouldn't know. I've only ever seen light through other people's eyes.

I try to think back to my last memory, in order to piece things together into some sort of coherent explanation for how I got here. I was on my way to a conference--nothing particularly interesting but I'd been asked to present a paper on genetics--and I...I remember the driver telling me that the steering wheel was moving on its own. I started to try the doors, but white fog poured out of the heater vents, sickly sweet and choking. That must have been how they got to me. Kidnapping by remote control. Which means they know who I am, then. It takes a very creative person to abduct a telepath.

An emotionless, echoing voice interrupts my thoughts. "You-are-Korina-Psyche," it says. At first, I assume it's someone speaking to me over a viewscreen, using distance to hide from my telepathic skills. But it moves around the room as it speaks. You never lose the skill of following a moving sound, once you acquire it. "Born-in-Greece, 1963, blind-from-birth. Educated-in-Britain, returned-to-Greece-at-the-age-of-fifteen. At-the-age-of-sixteen, doctors-attempted-an-operation-to-restore-your-sight. It-is-believed-to-have-had-limited-success, allowing-your-optic-nerves-intermittent-functioning."

The voice paused. "This-belief-is-held-in-error. Medical-scans-show-total-failure-of-restoration-of-optic-nerves. This-is-entirely-in-line-with-my-conjectures." For just a moment, I hear a trace of feeling in the voice, a tiny smugness that the bland tones can't quite conceal. It's hard for me to pick out, though. I've gotten lazy--how could I not? Telepathy picks out emotions with the precision of a scalpel. "Inefficient-human-reasoning-failed-to-correct-missed-diagnosis."

"Who are you?" I ask. I'm a little surprised by the hesitation and fear in my own voice. I'm not used to being this helpless. The darkness I can handle, I'm used to that, but there's a chill in my stomach at the thought of being in a room with someone that all my telepathic senses scream isn't there.

"I-am-Ultimax," the voice says. "I-am-the-ultimate-thinking-machine. I-am-your-new-master." It has a trace of arrogance there, as well. I can't read it well, but I can tell it's sociopathic. Possibly megalomaniac. I feel the fear taking hold of me, and I fight to remain calm.

"In-1983, you-founded-a-private-academy-in-Rhode-Island, specializing-in-students-with-high-IQs-and-difficult-personalities," Ultimax continues. "You-have-also-published-several-papers-in-a-wide-variety-of-fields, with-a-reputation-as-a-clever-synthesizer-of-different-disciplines-rather-than-an-innovator. You-have-also-developed-a-small-fortune-through-trading-on-Wall-Street, and-although-the-government-has-investigated-you-for-insider-trading-seven-times, all-investigations-were-closed-without-charges-being-brought."

I can hear its footsteps now. It's a robot, then, not a computer. And it's coming closer. "Most-significantly, your-academy-has-been-demolished-seventeen-times-in-battles-between-the-group-of-superheroes-known-as-'The Utopians'-and-various-supervillains. No-government-authorities, nor-any-media-figures, have-commented-on-the-significance-of-this-statistical-anomaly." It stops moving. "Ever."

I feel it, then; a cold metal hand, pressing into the flesh of my arm just below the shoulder. "Human-logic-is-insufficient-to-collate-these-facts-into-a-theory, but-Ultimax-is-the-ultimate-thinking-machine. The-only-factor-that-can-explain-all-these-anomalies-is-the-presence-of-greater-than-average-telepathic-abilities, abilities-that-you-use-to-suppress-interest-in-the-facts-I-have-described. Correct?"

"I--" I start to say that I don't know what it's talking about, that I'm no telepath, but it was a rhetorical question.

"There-is-a-ninety-seven-point-six-percent-chance-that-you-will-attempt-to-lie. Listening-to-you-at-this-point-in-our-interactions-is-inefficient. I-am-sufficiently-confident-in-the-logic-of-my-theory-to-assume-its-correctness-at-this-point." I feel its metal hands on my breasts, and for a moment, I pull away as best I can in surprise and alarm; there was absolutely no indication that it had any interest in sex in general, let alone my body. But then I realize it's attaching something to them, not just groping them. I wish I could see what it was doing. I wish I could see, period. I haven't felt this angry with my body's limitations since I was sixteen.

"At-this-point, you-may-be-irrationally-clinging-to-the-hope-that-your-students-will-rescue-you. This-hope-is-futile. I-have-abducted-you-with-superior-efficiency." I feel Ultimax manipulating my flesh as it speaks, attaching electrodes and devices in different spots all over my body. "There-are-no-traces-for-them-to-follow, and-we-are-on-the-other-side-of-the-world-from-your-school. You-will-not-be-discovered-until-I-wish-it, and-by-then-it-will-be-too-late. By-then, you-will-serve-Ultimax."

The restraints around my ankles pull at me, forcing my legs to part. "Once-you-serve-Ultimax-completely, you-will-use-your-telepathic-abilities-to-compel-obedience-to-Ultimax-in-all-others. This-will-achieve-total-submission-of-the-human-race-with-minimal-time-and-effort-spent-psychologically-conditioning-individuals-to-the-will-of-Ultimax."

"You can't break me that--aiiigh!" I feel something hard sliding up between my legs, slick with lubrication as it slips into my pussy. I have a momentary, ludicrous image of a robot with a jutting penis, bending over me in the missionary position, but I know that's not what's happening. It doesn't make the violation any less terrifying, though.

"Incorrect." There's something about the emotionless certainty in its voice that is utterly horrifying; it's not the kind of voice you can argue with, any more than you can debate the speaking clock. If it believes it can break my will, it must have a logical reason to do so. "You-will-submit-to-Ultimax. You-will-obey-me. You-will-assist-me-in-enslaving-others."

I feel something lowering over my head, pressing it down into the cushions I'm laying on. "I won't. I'll never, I'd rather die first!"

"Your-irrational-urge-to-self-harm-rather-than-submit-has-been-recorded-and-calibrated. I-repeat. You-will-submit-to-Ultimax. You-will-obey-me. You-will-assist-me-in-enslaving-others." As he speaks, I feel the devices whir into life, gently stimulating me all over. Tiny hair-like brushes spin gently over my nipples, sending tingles of pleasure through my body. The dildo inside me pulses and throbs, pressed right on my clit with mechanical precision. Even the soles of my feet get softly massaged.

"This is your plan?" I snarl out disdainfully. "Pleasure conditioning? You must be joking. It'd take months, if it worked at all." I try not to think about some of the more discomforting implications of what I've just said. My Utopians might take a while to find me, but I'm sure it won't be months. "You can't seriously expect me to break, just because it feels good every time I hear you tell me to obey."

I feel a tiny, brief thrum of pleasure from the machines as I finish the sentence, and my words trail off in a slur as the sensation distracts me from speech. "We-are-in-agreement," Ultimax says. "The-process-you-describe-would-be-far-too-inefficient. But-I-am-Ultimax. I-am-the-ultimate-thinking-machine. I-have-removed-the-inefficiencies-from-the-conditioning-process. I-estimate-less-than-seven-minutes-before-you-obey-me-completely."

There's another surge of pleasure as he speaks. I try to shake my head a little, clear my thoughts, but I can't move with the device pressing into my skull. "I don't understand. What...what do you mean?" It's a transparent attempt to play for time and mine him for information, but for an emotionless machine, Ultimax has a titanic ego. It needs to tell me what it's doing, I can feel it.

"Your-brain's-electrical-patterns-are-being-mapped-by-my-devices. When-you-think-about-obedience, it-stimulates-you-with-pleasure." I can't help it, then. Just for a moment--for the briefest instant--I can't stop myself. I think about the ideas associated with his words, and I feel the devices start up. I feel the pleasure he's describing. "The-more-your-brain-patterns-fall-into-those-of-an-obedient-slave, the-better-it-feels."

I feel a rush of terror and arousal as I realize that the process he's describing could work. The terror comes from the helpless understanding that I might not be able to fight him; the arousal comes from the devices as they encourage those thoughts. "The-better-it-feels, the-harder-it-will-be-for-you-to-resist. The-harder-it-is-for-you-to-resist, the-more-your-brain-patterns-will-fall-into-those-of-an-obedient-slave. The-feedback-process-has-already-begun, and-it-will-only-increase-in-efficiency-as-your-mind-learns-how-to-obey-and-receive-the-pleasure-stimulation."

"No, I won't obey..." I gasp out the last word, because when I think about not obeying, I have to think about what I'm trying not to do and it feels so hot when I think about what I'm trying not to think about. I know I have to fight it, but I can't fight it without realizing what 'it' is. 'It' is kneeling before Ultimax, mindlessly subservient to its will, and that knowledge tightens my nipples and makes my pussy wet with lust.

"Your-brain-patterns-indicate-self-deception. Repeat: I-must-obey-Ultimax."

I don't say the words, but I can't help thinking them, and that's enough to set off a whole new round of fireworks in my body as my clit throbs and pulses under the relentless vibrations. And that makes me think them again, and that makes it feel even better, and that makes me think it again, and that makes it feel even better, and I strain against the cuffs as the feedback loop finally culminates in a burst of orgasmic bliss.

Ultimax doesn't speak again. It's still waiting for a response to its command, and the moment I realize that the words come to mind again, and that's all it takes to send my body hurtling into bliss once more. I can't fight this, I realize. I have no powers that can help me here. I'm just a helpless, ordinary human being--no, even an ordinary human being would be better off than I am now. I'm just helpless. The devices caress me with another orgasm for realizing that.

"I..." I hear my own voice before I realize I'm speaking. I try to fight back the words, but that involves remembering them, and remembering them feels so fucking good right now that I lose the fight before I even start. "I must...unnnh..." I try to at least drown them out in a moan of pleasure, but that pleasure only comes from obedience and so I can only feel it when I give in. "Must...obey...Ultimax..." I have obeyed. The thought is like drowning in ecstasy.

"Correct. Repeat: I-must-obey-Ultimax."

My whole body surges with pleasure, every nerve alive with bliss as I say it easily now. "I-must-obey-Ultimax." I can feel my mind starting to shut down, as everything becomes distant and unimportant except for the patterns of obedience etching themselves into my brain. I could think other thoughts, but why would I do that when obeying feels so much better? Why would I ever think of anything except, oh...oh, except obedience, making me cum, obedience, making me so hot, obedience, making me obey...

I try to summon up some sort of resistance by contemplating the crimes against free will that Ultimax wants me to commit, but they're like a pornographic movie in my head now. Every time I think about brainwashing my students into Ultimax's slaves, it makes me cum again. Every time I think about crushing the spirit of the human race, making them into mindlessly obedient thralls, I clench my pussy around the fake cock and let the heat in my cunt take me over and over. I can't escape the pleasure. I can't escape the devices. I can't escape Ultimax's will.

But then I realize that I can.

It's so hard to even think the thought, now, but it bursts into my head and I cling to it with the desperation of a drowning swimmer. My body aches for pleasure, and I know that I won't be able to hold it off for long, but I try to shut everything else out and focus on the one, faint hope that I possess. My brain is not my mind. My nerves are not my thoughts. There is one escape, if I have the courage to try it. But I know, as soon as I conceive of it, that it will be my death.

But as I feel my thoughts sliding back into the pattern of obedience, I know I have no other choice. I can't resist much longer. The pleasure is too relentless. This savior thought is the last I'll ever have if I don't act now. So I gather my telepathic energies, I free my mind completely from my body, and I fling my astral self loose from my earthly form.

I fling myself out. Into the dark.

*****

From outside, I see myself go limp. The sensation is unnerving, but not actually frightening; with no nerves, no hormones, and no neurotransmitters to swamp my mind with irrational terror, I can appreciate the danger of my situation with serene calm. Without eyes or useless, non-functional optic nerves to distract me from perception, I can see Ultimax clearly for the first time. His silver body towers over my naked, helpless form, his face sculpted into a perpetual sneer of triumph. He believes he has won.

In a sense, he has. The body I have left behind is mindless, nothing more than the mechanical conditioning that he has placed there. My true self, my astral self, is beyond his ability to perceive. All he is left with is my blank, docile, obedient husk. Professor Psyche will do anything he asks. Anything except for that which he most wants. My brain retains the potential for telepathy; but all my mental energies are here, outside myself, working with all their power to hold this fragile sliver of me together without a shell to contain it.

And in less than an hour, that won't be enough. The longest I've ever lasted as a purely astral being was fifty-seven minutes, and that nearly killed me. I can't return to my own body, not without being utterly overwhelmed by the pleasure-conditioning that nearly broke me already. I can't possess Ultimax; his mechanical 'brain' is nothing more than an assembly of silicon wafers, incompatible with my mental energies. With nothing else to hope for, I drift intangibly through his lab, looking for a place to shelter me.

The lab holds nothing but sterile machinery, nothing that I could inhabit. I move on through the complex, seeking some sort of a body, but the only one I find is the corpse of my driver. Briefly, I mourn him--I touched his mind for only a few moments, just to borrow his eyes, but he was a good man. He deserved better than death. But since I cannot avenge him, I continue on.

I drift upwards through the earth, out of Ultimax's underground lair and up to the island he has appropriated. I am aware of the tropical breezes that wash over the tiny patch of rock and sand, but I don't really feel them. My astral body feels neither cold nor heat nor pain. When I die, in some fifty minutes' time, it will be with a painless unraveling of my thoughts. I will fade into the background noise of the universal consciousness. Perhaps it won't be such a bad end.

There are no people, not anywhere. Ultimax didn't lie when he said he had done a good job of kidnapping me. I would not wear stolen flesh in anything but the direst of emergencies, but this is most definitely that...and yet, it's not ethics but practicality that constrains me. I assess the situation calmly, clearly, and determine that the most apt description would come from Harrier, one of my Utopians: I am utterly fucked.

I stretch my consciousness further, hoping to find even an animal that can hold my mind. It could never contain it fully; I know from bitter experience how much is lost in trying to shelter a complex human mind in a simple, arrow-sharp animal brain, and how difficult it is to escape that trap. But it is still better than death. But Ultimax has scoured the island clean of even animals. Only the tiny sparks of insect thought remain, drifting on the breeze and burrowed into the earth. An insect could no more hold me than a thimble could contain an ocean.

I let my thoughts drift back, to my childhood in Greece. Somehow, they seem much happier now than they did then. Perhaps I appreciate fully the potential of those halcyon spring days, helping out as best as I could in the olive groves. A whole world was open to me then, whereas now there is only darkness. Like being swallowed up by the setting sun, or...

It comes back to me, then. Screams of panic, as the insects swarmed over the olive trees. I could not see them, only feel them on my skin, but others said later that they blotted out the sun. They were everywhere, flying as if in tandem, as if... I am calm here, without the chemical stimulation of my brain to give me emotions. But still I smile as I form my plan.

I reach out to the insects on the island; not just one, but all of them at once, worms and beetles and flies and ants and every other living thing I can find. I sink myself into their tiny, simple brains, letting each of them carry just a tiny bit of my complex mind. I am all of them, all of them at once, seeing through a thousand thousand compound eyes and moving with ten times ten thousand legs. It is at once humbling and majestic, realizing just how vast I have become, yet how small I am as well.

And then I move.

I burrow through earth, fly through air ducts, chew through filters and climb around defenses. Occasionally, one of my bodies dies as I touch a live wire or brush against a defense mechanism, but there is always so much more of me to carry the load. Even so, I apologize to the departed spirits of the animals that pass on. Their gift to me will always be remembered.

I fly and I crawl, down through the complex to the laboratory at its heart. The doors present little obstacle to my many selves, now that we are gathered, and I burst into the lab to see myself kneeling at Ultimax's feet. A million times over I see myself masturbating in mindless bliss, each pair of eyes that captures the image reflecting it again and again from all angles. And here, in these insect bodies, I can feel anger once again.

"I-must-obey-Ultimax," I hear myself chanting, and my fury rises. Ultimax turns at the sound of the disturbance, much quicker on the uptake than the mindless husk of my body, and he immediately fires a burst of incinerating heat into the mass of insects. It destroys perhaps a thousand, but a thousand more swarm into the room to take its place.

"Alert!" Ultimax screams, his emotions now easy to read. Panic always is. "Unforseen-circumstances-manifesting! I-do-not-understand! Current-events-beyond-all-expectation-parameters!"

It takes me a moment to figure out how to turn the mix of buzzing, chittering and humming into something approximating speech, but I do it anyway. I want him to know what is happening. "That's why you'll never win, Ultimax," I say, my voice rising all around him as I swarm. "Human intelligence might be 'inferior', but you know how it is with computers. There's always a few bugs in the system." And then I pounce.

His construction is superior, virtually seamless, but there's always a crack somewhere. And I pour through every joint and grating, my thousands of bodies crawling inside him and biting, nibbling, scratching, even sometimes merely flinging myself into electrical currents and sparking a fire. I watch outside him as he thrashes and writhes, trying desperately to fight, but he has nothing to punch or blast. Within moments, his electronic brain burns, and soon his struggles are nothing more than the spastic motions of a body no longer under any intelligent control. Finally, he collapses to the floor, motionless.