AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!" The end of Pamela's exhalation was hoarse, like someone who'd seen women scream a lot in horror movies but had never realized that someone was standing nearby with a glass of water on the sets of all those films.
"Done?" Ethan asked, a bit peeved. He'd rehearsed this moment a lot, in his dreams and fantasies, and he was a little bit irritated that Pamela wasn't responding the way he wanted her to. Only the knowledge that this was an entirely temporary and correctable situation kept him from getting genuinely angry.
Pamela let out a brief, experimental yelp. Then another, like the last drips of a faucet after you've tightened it that last quarter-turn. Finally, she nodded.
"Good," he said magnanimously. "Scream all you want," he continued, with the amused tones of someone who realized that the line sounded even better when the other person had actually done it. "There's nobody who can hear you."
Pamela yanked against her restraints for a few moments. She opened her mouth to scream, then stopped. She looked around wildly, taking in the drab green walls, the heavy metal door, the lack of furniture apart from the bed she rested on. The total absence of hope. She looked back at Ethan, and he imagined her trying to discern kindness from his pinched, craggy features and his beady eyes that poked out from beneath two thick, bushy eyebrows. Ethan was under no illusions about his own appearance. It was part of the reason he'd devoted his life to engineering this moment.
Finally, she spoke. Her voice was tiny, barely above a whisper, but she said exactly what he'd imagined she would say. "Please don't kill me," she whimpered.
Ethan allowed his mouth to quirk into a half-smile. "I'm not going to kill you," he said. He allowed the specter of hope to cross her features for a half-second before he continued. "In fact, nobody will even have time to notice you're missing. You'll return to your old existence, you'll smile and nod in all the right places and say all the right things to all the right people...and nobody will ever know you've become my mindless, obedient sex slave."
He brought out the Weapon, then, as her eyes widened in surprise or amazement or incredulity...or just possibly, he fancied, a bit of excitement at the thought. "It's my pride and joy," he said. He ran his hand along the polished wood barrel, traced a fingertip across the gleaming brass and watched the moisture from his sweat fog briefly on the warm metal before evaporating. "Not just a breakthrough but a work of art. When I pull the trigger, the energies of the Weapon will course through your living brain, instantaneously earthing themselves in the very heart of your mind and permanently eradicating all resistance to my will. Your memories, your skills will remain...but all trace of the woman you were will be gone forever. You will be a helplessly obedient drone, a mindless thrall subject to my command and unable to even conceive of a single thought without my permission." He paused for effect. "Just the way you always wanted to be."
He saw it, then, the tiny flicker of shock and recognition in her already-wide eyes that told him she knew exactly what he was talking about, even if she didn't know how he knew. "Oh, yes, Pamela," he whispered, leaning in a little bit closer. He saw that her eyes were fixed on the Weapon, locked in horrified fascination like a mouse staring at a cobra. He felt his cock pulsing rock-hard inside his pants. "I know all about you. I've been watching you for a long time, Pamela. I know about your other identities, the people you become when you're online. I've read all your stories, all those women turned into mindless sex slaves. I've been in the chatrooms late at night, watching you act out all those fantasies time and time again and pushing your Masters to try harder, push farther, make the dream more real." He patted the Weapon with one hand. "This is when it all becomes totally real, Pamela. This is exactly what you wanted."
Pamela responded with a tiny shake of her head, her eyes still focused tightly on the Weapon. Ethan felt his cock surge with lust as he continued. "Oh, don't try to deny it," he said smugly. "We both know you're lying. You can try to pretend that you value your mind, your thoughts, your free will. You can try to pretend those were just fantasies, that you're not really that kind of girl. But I can see the truth in your eyes. More than that, I can see the arousal you're trying to deny." He couldn't take it anymore, he reached down and began stroking himself through his pants. "That's why I went to the trouble of kidnapping you first, so you could see this. So you could anticipate the moment when you became my slave. Admit it, Pamela. This is what you want."
Pamela shook her head again. "No," she whispered, her voice echoing off the linoleum in the silence. "No, it's not."
Ethan chuckled. God, it was even better than he'd imagined. "You're going to try to tell me you haven't fantasized about this? You haven't dreamed of losing every bit of yourself and becoming a true thrall, not just a pretender like all the other girls? You're going to try to claim that your dead-end job and your tiny apartment is worth fighting for?"
"No," Pamela said, her voice steadier than he expected. "I want to be brainwashed, just...not like this."
"What?" Ethan felt like a dancer who'd just heard the record scratch to a stop. He struggled to find the next thing to say to bring the conversation back in line with his fantasies, but every time he groped for a word, it was always the same one. So he said it again. "What?"
"It's the struggle that's sexy," she said, sitting up a little as her eyes lost some of their fear and gleamed with the enthusiasm of a woman who'd finally found someone she could open up to. "I always loved the idea of the slow, sensual takeover, you know? Trying to fight, even though you know it's no good because the brainwashing is a slow, inexorable tide eroding your resistance with the relentless bliss of obedience."
Her breathing sped up a little as she got into the fantasy. "And then you reach that moment where you don't even remember what you're resisting or why you should be resisting it, where the struggle becomes mindless and instinctive because your thoughts are all turned to pleasure. And then you realize the pleasure is too perfect ever to resist, and your thoughts collapse because in the end, you want to give in. You want to obey. The...the machine, the power, the whatever-it-is, it takes you to the very brink...and you step over yourself because you can't imagine doing anything else." She was shifting rhythmically now, rubbing her thighs together under the blankets. Ethan suddenly wished he'd undressed her, but he had wanted to watch her strip once she'd become his thrall.
"That's what I want. To be seduced into obedience. To struggle against the endless, inexorable undertow that submerges my mind into an endless sea of blank, dreamy pleasure. To lose myself in Master's will..." She inhaled sharply and threw her head back, her nipples stiffening as she came. Finally, she opened eyes he didn't remember her closing and looked at him steadily. "But a ray gun that just goes, 'Zap, you're my slave, now let's fuck'?" She snorted. "BO-ring!"
"I. Um." Ethan stared at Pamela for a long moment. The pounding of his heart seemed very loud in his ears, felt even louder in his cock. "Could you excuse me?" he said. "I'll be back in a little bit."
*****
Ethan burst through the door in a rush, almost spilling the bag of groceries he carried. "Hi!" he said, his voice a gasp of relief trying to masquerade as nonchalance. He'd imagined coming back into the room to find Pamela gone, waiting for him with an improvised weapon, waiting for him with a squad of police, dead from some sort of brilliant suicide plan rather than live as his sex slave...
But instead, she just stared at him with a vaguely petulant look on her face. "I'm hungry," she said. "It's been almost twelve hours."
"I know," he said quickly, placatingly, "I'm sorry, I got back as quick as I could. I really didn't expect to have to keep you here this long, I didn't have any food here for you, and oh man was I busy, I had to go find another bed and I had to recalibrate the Weapon and--" He dumped a few packages of food into her lap and started back for the door. "Sorry, I didn't know what you liked so I just got you a bunch of stuff." Ethan darted back out of the room to get the bed.
When he wheeled it back in, Pamela was sitting there with an expression of exasperated amusement on her face. Her hands groped for food that was just a few inches out of her extremely restricted range of motion. "Ahem?" she said.
"Oh!" Ethan squeaked. He darted over to her bed and put a cup of applesauce into one hand and a plastic spoon into the other. She gestured as if to dip one into the other, tugging theatrically at the restraints.
"Oh!" Ethan said again, by now thoroughly flustered. He'd never been very good with women. He was always nervous, always doing the wrong thing and saying the wrong thing and spilling the wrong thing and stepping on the wrong thing. That was why he'd invented the Weapon. He wanted a girl who would always understand, who would never be cruel or disdainful. He felt completely off-balance dealing with a Pamela who actually had feelings of her own.
And yet... He scooped some applesauce onto the spoon and put it to her lips, watching her gratefully suck it off. Was it just him, or did she seem to actually...like him, just a little? He poured a trickle of bottled water onto her tongue, watched her swallow gratefully. It was probably his imagination. He wasn't generally good at getting women to like him. They usually tried to run.
