The Process Pt 05

They come for her at night.

Suddenly Astrid comes to fetch her and leads her to the bedroom, where she is handed a bag with the clothes she has been given and her coat is placed on her shoulders. She is taken out to the front door, where a large, dark car is waiting in the drive. She keeps turning her head around, looking for her handler, but he does not appear.

A man is waiting next to the open car door. He takes the bag and places in the boot, then motions for her to get in, which she does, unnerved. There is another man sitting in the back of the car, who suddenly grabs her wrist and pushes up her sleeve. Before she can react, he injects her with something, and the last thing she remembers is the door being slammed shut next to her, and her hand frantically trying to scratch the window, through which she can see the light in his window.

From the library, he watches the car drive away, then sits behind his desk, turns off the lamp, and sits in the dark.

***

Ache. A dull, throbbing ache in her face, her nose, her lips. Then the numbness in her limbs, and the artificial brightness of a neon light above her. She tries to bring her hand to her face, but can't. Nor can she move her legs either. Something similar to a groan escapes her lips, and someone walks up to her, a harsh vertical to her horizontal.

"Awake already?" asks a tall, grey-haired woman in white scrubs. "You must be hurting."

She nods. Her face feels so numb and incredibly swollen - in fact, as she raises her head to speak and can't, she realises she is wearing a mask. She gasps, suddenly panicked.

"Shush," says the nurse, picking up her arm, where a drip has been inserted. She removes it. "It's all right. You've been out for more than forty-eight hours. Dr Farris wants to see you now". She quickly undoes the fastenings at her wrists and ankles and helps her up to a sitting position. She is in a hospital room, she realises. Wearing just a gown tied flimsily at the back, nothing beneath. As she sits on a bed, she catches a quick glimpse of herself in a mirror at the end of the room - a pale figure in the grey, sheet-like gown. Her face covered in thick, black, padded leather, with only an o-shaped opening for a tube where the mouth should go and holes through which her eyes stare out in fright.

"Come now," says the nurse, and helps her off the bed. She is as weak as a kitten, and almost falls to her knees, but the nurse deftly catches her and handles her onto a sitting position in a wheelchair, where she straps her wrists down again.

The nurse pushes the wheelchair down a long, neon-lit corridor, lined by thick white doors. At every door there is a small square window, every one of them shut. She expects to hear sounds or voices, but everything is eerily quiet, with only the slight creaking of the wheelchair breaking the silence.

Finally the nurse stops before a door with no window and knocks. A voice within says "Enter" and the nurse pushes the wheelchair in, leaving it facing a large desk behind which a tall man in a white coat is standing, leafing through a document. The nurse shuts the door and quietly stands next to it.

The man - Doctor Farris - looks up from behind his glasses. "476?"

"Yes, Doctor Farris," says the nurse.

"Hmm." He sits on the armchair behind the desk, still reading. "How long since the operation?"

"Two days, sir. The stitches have already been removed. The healing mask is in place now."

"Good. Has it been any trouble?"

"None whatsoever, sir. Very docile."

"So it seems. However..." he leaves the sheaf of papers on the desk and stares at her piercingly. "It looks as though there is plenty of work to be done. Has it been fed yet?"

"No, sir. Intravenous drip only."

"Ok. Keep it on barbiturates intravenously for the time being, and start with the feeds tonight. Actually, I'll administer the first one myself. Is it shaved?"

"Yes, sir. Shaving seems to have been implemented systematically before arrival here."

"Well, at least they have done something more or less properly," says Dr Farris in a voice heavy with sarcasm. "Keep it that way. Of course, it is not allowed to handle the body in any way. So apply the standard restrictions, at night time and during the day. Also enemas, of course. I think that will be all for now. Take it back to the room. I'll be there shortly." He looks again into her eyes, sharply. "Is it wet now?"

The nurse takes a couple of quick steps and slides a cool hand between her thighs. "Very." She cannot help but groan beneath the mask.

He keeps gazing at her, coolly, clinically, and she cannot look away as her juices seep onto the nurses hand. "Therapy in the morning. Intensive. Behavioural in the evening. I'll give you the details tomorrow. I'll get some coffee now and see you in the room in ten minutes' time." He stands up and walks out of the room, past the nurse.

Before exiting, he turns and stares at her again. "This might feel like punishment," he says, and she knows that this will be the only time he addresses her. "It is."

***

She is taken back to the room and tied to the bed again. The nurse then disappears and returns with Dr Farris and two rather burly male janitors who carry a long, transparent plastic tube and a bag filled with something fluid. Dr Farris picks up the end of the tube and inserts it in the o-shaped hole in the mask. The o-hole is lined and protrudes into her mouth, so that it is impossible to her to close it but must be permanently open. She feels the end of the tube slide through the hole and deep into her mouth. She expects that the feeding will start then, but Dr Farris keeps driving it down, into her throat, hitting her uvula so that she gags and her pharynx seizes, choking. She thrashes desperately in her bindings, panicked, trying to free herself, but the two janitors seize her and hold her down until her convulsions subside.

"Still has a gag reflex" mutters Dr Farris disapprovingly. "Whatever have these people been doing?" He slides the tube down again and the nurse starts to pour a thick sludge from the bag through a funnel. It drops directly into her stomach, heavy and tasteless, with only brief stops to allow her to breathe.

When the feed is over, Dr Farris removes the tube. The janitors start to clean the sludge which was spattered when she resisted, but Dr Farris halts them. "No. Leave it like that until the morning." Then the nurse slides the drip into her arm and takes out of her pocket a thick black padded leather blindfold which she brings down over her eyeholes, so that she is blind. She hears steps moving away as the drowsiness starts to take her, but before she leaves, the nurse lifts the coverings over the ears, inserts two earbuds, and closes the head mask again.

She lies in the dark, covered in sludge and her own juices which have flown freely despite herself, despite the violence and the shock. She remembers her handler's cock in her mouth and desperately wishes that she could bring her thumb to her mouth to appease herself to sleep, as she used to do in the house, but can only lie restrained and weep.

She cries herself to sleep, gradually soothed by the soft hiss in her ears, the blurred voices seeping into her mind as the drugs slide into her veins. _A thing... an object... used... no self... no will... no desires... used... no mind... nothing_.

***

She is woken up in the morning by a male nurse, who wordlessly and unceremoniously releases her, hoist her onto the wheelchair, straps her down again, and pushes the wheelchair to Dr Farris's office.

She is left once again facing his desk. She hasn't been washed this morning, and suspects it has been some time since she has - her body is sticky with sweat and her own juices, and she still has dried sludge on her gown. She wonders what her skin must be like beneath the mask. She feels disgusting.

Even though this is ostensibly "therapy," Dr Farris does not address her even once. He reads out from a sheet. "476 has displayed remarkable susceptibility to hypnosis, operant conditioning, and slave and sexual training. However, the trainer in charge of 476 expresses his view that her conditioning is not yet full and recommends deeper probing." He lays down the sheet of paper. "Deeper probing," he sniffs. "What 476 needs is breaking. This is a refractory slave that we are dealing with here."

It is odd, sitting immobilised in her chair, listening to Dr Farris talk about her in the third person, when there is no one else in the room. She feels suddenly woozy. Her cunt clenches.

Dr Farris looks at her as though he had heard - or smelt - her. He opens a drawer in his desk and brings out something large and white that he places on the desktop right in front of her. A metronome. He sets it in motion, a slow, regular, tempo, a small white light shining at the tip of the rod, leaving a slow trail of light in its arc.

He starts to talk. "There are different kinds of mind. For most of mankind, their minds are average, relatively well-adapted. Nothing too striking, either pathologically or in terms of brilliance. Run-of-the-mill. Driven by the usual range of human desires and needs: family, friendship, children, material needs." She is becoming increasingly dizzy. Dr Farris has a deep voice, although not a particularly soothing one - it reminds her for one crazy second of David Attenborough, describing lion hunting on the savannah. Although this voice is colder, more detached. "Other minds, however, are driven by more unusual needs, which are systematically much deeper and focused than those of average minds. Very often, these desires are related to power. Some people crave power in this all-consuming way. Others crave exactly the opposite: loss of power. This desire is equally burning in them."

He stops to drink from a glass of water on his desk, as if he were a lecturer. "These are slave minds. They ultimately yearn to lose all power and placing it in another's hands. They struggle against the very free will and powers of decision that being a human mind affords them. They often seek punishment, hoping that scourging the flesh will free the mind from its bonds. What they ultimately desire is to lose themselves. To become free of the burden of being themselves, of being human, often returning to animalistic states. To become mindless in pure, unquestioning, blind obedience to someone who is able to harness their thoughts and render them empty and null. Oblivion."

The metronome seems to be slowing down, or perhaps it is her perception that is becoming slower, sluggish. Dr Farris's voice becomes more and more slurred, as if he were drunk, yet still, amazingly, the words seem to come sharp and piercing, entering her.

"A normal or a dominant mind would be able to stare at this metronome and not be affected, except perhaps for becoming bored. A slave mind, however, is irresistibly attracted to the slow, swinging light, the slow ticking, as its heart rate slowly drops to match its pace, the sure, steady voice in its head as its thoughts fade away, telling it what to think, what to feel, what to desire. What to be. A slave is instantly transfixed by the stimulus, like a moth to the flame. It's in its nature. It can't help itself. And instantly, like Pavlov's dog drooling, it starts to juice. And as it juices, its thoughts liquate and slide down its legs, and its mind is left empty and blank. As it should be. The slave will cum - now."

The orgasm shatters her drug-riddled body and mind, and she plunges into the darkness.