Her Contract Enatails

The darkness of the room was not truly penetrated as the door opened, but the corridor outside was filled with a shading of deep shadow rather than an absence of light and so a portion small degree of that dark was replaced with shades of grey instead. A vaguely human shape flitted through the gloom and made for the bed, followed moments later by a far larger figure that could have been mistaken for a hunched bear. While the smaller figure moved with purpose and without pause, the larger constantly glanced back over one shoulder as if fearing discovery at any moment.

"Stop that," Ward spoke in a low, but audible voice. "Get over here and help me before you stumble into something and wake the entire wing."

"Alright," Henry was not happy, "just keep your voice down!"

"Don't be stupid," Ward gestured to the room that was rapidly becoming easier to discern as their eyes adjusted to the darkness. "These walls are soundproof and I made sure that the dose of anaesthetic they gave your friend will keep her under for far longer than we need to get what we need to do done."

"I just don't like sneaking around in the middle of the night, that's all."

"I would have thought someone in your line of business was used to this kind of thing."

"Well," Henry paused, "that's as maybe...but I've gotten fond of her."

"For god's sake," Ward pointed to the door, "just go and get the gurney. We need to have her finished and out of here as soon as we can. Pickford's getting twitchy and I don't want him sticking his ample nose too far into this one."

While Henry ambled back into the corridor, Ward produced a small torch from his inside pocket and proceeded to make a rudimentary check over the occupant of the bed.

The beam of his torch revealed Carla Largo, still unconscious from the effects of the anaesthetic that she had been given earlier in the day. Peeling back her eyelids, he noted that they showed no conscious reaction to the intense light as he shone the torch into them. Satisfied that she was intact and that there was no chance of her waking, he turned in time to see Henry return with the gurney.

Together they gently transferred Carla from the bed to the waiting gurney. She wore a plain nightshirt and her lower body was covered by a garment of tight grey material in much the same manner as it had been after the first day of her operation.

As quickly as they dared, the men wheeled Carla out of the room and away into the night.

It was cold in the bare concrete room, but while Henry shivered despite his heavy overcoat, Ward seemed to be unaffected by the low temperature. Instead his attention was fixed solely on the form of the woman now laid out on the makeshift operating table in front of him.

Ward would have been more comfortable working in his usual theatre for the tasks ahead of him, but he had taken pains to equip this basement room with everything that he would need to work his art. He had also chosen this location on account of the fact that it was known only to himself and represented a place where he could operate in total secrecy.

Armed with a scalpel from a nearby table, he sliced Carla's nightshirt away with nothing more than a few flicks of his wrist. As her breasts were exposed to the chill air, the nipples stiffened against the cold, drawing an amused smile from the doctor.

Henry made a move to object, but then seemed to realise the futility of such an action and visibly resigned himself to simply watching.

Ward lifted the edge of the stocking covering Carla's lower half and sliced that away as well, moving from her waist to the point where her feet might have been without a moment's pause. He opened the garment up and revealed the slightly iridescent landscape of scales and find which had replaced her legs, turning her from an ordinary woman into a creature of myth.

Now Henry could not stop himself taking a step forwards as he tried to take in the reality of Carla's new form. He had simply never seen anything like it in his life. A woman who he had grown attached to in his role as minder was spread out before him and changed utterly, challenging the bounds of what he had thought possible.

He was a simple man by nature, aware of mermaids as something that existed only in children's stories and other childish mediums. The idea of such a creature in the flesh had never crossed his mind before and now that he was presented with the sight of such a familiar face married to the body of an exotic and baffling thing, he could hardly make sense of what reactions were stirred within him.

The last thing that turned Henry on was the thought of fish, live or dead. But this was not a fish that he had ever seen. Above the waist she was the same old Carla, the woman who he thought was very pretty and dared not to look at in a certain way for fear of his employer's wrath. But below the waist she melted away into a silvery tail that mesmerised him in a way that he was not prepared for at all. He could see the shape of the legs that she had once possessed; trace with his eyes the curves he had snuck a look at while she danced for Aubrey Lister back in the club. The fact that the shape was now a scaled tail that ended in a broad fin oddly did not seem to bother him in the slightest, but rather made him want to forget his fears and put his hands on the thing to feel its texture. He knew that he was not looking at the cold wet tail of a fish, rather at the shapely and inviting body of a creature that experienced the world in the same way that he did. A creature that felt passion and longed to be touched by the hand of a fellow being that understood her needs.

"The surgery should be the easy part," Ward's voice shattered the other man's contemplation of the mermaid and brought him back into the room, "it's what comes after that we have to hope will work without a flaw."

Both men gazed at the banks of equipment that dominated one corner of the room, a baffling array of computer terminals, diagnostic screens and other undefinable pieces of technology that hummed with a life of their own.

"I just pray that your employer knows what he's doing with that thing," Ward shook his head.

"You aren't on your own there," Henry rubbed the back of his massive head. "All I know is that Mr Rubin trusts that thing, Mr Lister trusts Mr Rubin and I trust Mr Lister; so that's got to be enough for me."

"Sounds like a tenuous chain you've got yourself, but as the contract we signed places the consequences of that infernal device squarely in the lap of your boss," Ward shrugged and let the unspoken words sink in as he prepared his tools.

Henry remained silent, dividing his attention between Ward, the machine and Carla.

The first he did not trust, the second he was afraid of and the third baffled him in a manner he did not understand.

From his own point of view, the work that was required of Ward was a simple exercise of his skills as a plastic surgeon. While Aubrey Lister had promised Carla that she would not be transformed what she would have described as an inflated bimbo on the operating table, he had no intention of keeping to his word.

Lister was a man used to getting what he wanted, and when he had described his wish to turn her into a mermaid in terms of customising a car to make it unique, he had not been far from the literal truth of what he intended for her.

Like many men who were immersed in a world that was shaped by their own power, he had no concept of how to appreciate the beauty that existed in a thing. Instead he felt the inescapable need to reshape a thing that came into his possession so that it better reflected his own persona and his conception of how the world should be.

In this way, women were no different to him and while he had desired Carla Largo as she danced for him so many times in the past, all the time he had gazed at her his mind had been making note of the subtle or rather more vulgar changes that he would have made to her body. Lister had no shame in his desire to alter what an object or a human being was in order to bring them in line with his own vision, his arrogance and egotism simply assumed that his was the only desire that mattered.

Another man might have looked at Carla's face and commented that she was beautiful and aging well despite the fact she was taxed by the demanding life she had chosen to leave behind. But Lister only saw the hints of lines that were creeping into the corners of her mouth and the faint wrinkles around her eyes. And so Ward was commanded to obliterate them and inflate her lips with collagen, turning her smile into an exaggerated pout.

Her breasts were far from small, still pert and she had often laughed at the way in which they seemed to catch the eyes of men as they walked by. Carla had never been able to understand why her husband had so loved to simply feel their weight in his hands, for minutes at a time while they lay together on a night. But they were too small for a man the likes of Lister and so the doctor obliged him by filling them with implants until they had almost doubled in size, sitting on her chest with all the natural shape that had been impossible with artificial enhancement in the past.

Carla's buttocks continued the curve of her body, generous and full and almost as distracting as her breasts had been under the right circumstances. Of course this was not enough for her new owner, who instructed Ward to enhance the size and shape of her backside to the point where she would have been noticed for its curvature over almost anything else had she still been a human being. As he worked, the doctor wondered if Lister would really make a point of testing his work to discover if his mermaid truly did have a posterior that he could rest his drink on. All things considered, he decided that he would not be surprised it that were the truth.

There were minor things to be done once he had seen to her face, breasts and buttocks. He peeled her skin with chemicals and gave her treatments that would ensure she was not worn out by the exposure to the rays of the sun, abrasive sand and saline water that she would be in constant contact with.

He fused fake eyelashes over her own and treated her eyelids to permanently turn them a shade of silver to match her tail. Her lips and nipples received a similar treatment, becoming an exotic silver so that they stood out and could not fail to be noticed.

Ward also used a compact cosmetic laser to denude her body of all hair in the armpits, face and groin on the assumption that it would make matters simpler for her master in the longer term.

Her nails were replaced with long silver covers that could have been mistaken for claws, only adding to the effect of the webbing already linking her fingers together.

Ward's final touch was something not specified in his instructions from Lister, but a flourish that he was sure the man would appreciate based upon his existing demands. He tinted the exposed lips and inner folds of Carla's vagina in the same silver he had used on her eyelids, lips and nipples so that the eye was drawn to her now smooth groin. He made the assumption that there would be no reason to hide the nature of the creature that she had been transformed into or the purpose to which the man intended to put her.

He did not know it at the time, but he could not have been more correct.

Now the time had come for the device which had sat in the corner, like the proverbial elephant in the room, all the time Ward had been at work. Neither of the men had a deal of experience with such a machine, but they had been well briefed on what was required and the terms in which their instructions from Lister had been phrased left no room for interpretation. Before she reached him, Lister was adamant that Carla Largo would be hooked up to the machine and her mind exposed to its effects.

Henry wheeled the elements that would be connected to the unconscious mermaid to the side of the operating table as slowly as he dared. There was no way he could back out of the thing, but at the same time he simply could not will his body to proceed with any greater speed.

For his part, Ward sensed the trepidation in the larger man and though he would never let on, sympathised as much as he was able. Unlike Henry, he understood very well the principles upon which the device was based and just how it worked. The information did not dispel his own misgiving, only made him uneasy on a far more intellectual level than he supposed the other man was capable of.

The doctor waited while Henry lifted Carla's head in order to allow him to push the complex apparatus which was attached to the machine over her cranium. It resembled a helmet of some kind and totally isolated her senses from the outside world, or would have done had she not been sedated.

Ward jabbed a syringe into her arm, administering a drug that would bring her some of the way out of her unconscious state and yet still leave her unable to move or function in a significant manner. He understood that the way in which the machine functioned required a basic level of activity to be present in the mind of the subject, for if there was nothing happening in the mind, what could the thing have an effect upon?

Moments later the device became active as its sensors registered the stirrings of Carla's brain, screens filling with indecipherable data and components starting to spin in their housings. This contraption for which Aubrey Lister had paid greatly and called in many favours began to bombard her eyes and ears with stimuli while monofilament wires burrowed through her scalp, skull and probed into the synapses of her brain.

In much the same way he had ignored his promise to leave her body free of excessive implants and cosmetic alterations, Lister also had little regard for any wish that Carla had to remain in mind the woman she had once been no matter how changed she was in body.

The steps he had taken to aid her family and lure her into his power were things that in his own mind only served to deliver him what he wanted. Once he was sure he had her, there was nothing of her own concerns that caused Lister even a moment's pause. He wanted a mermaid that fulfilled his desires and no reservations that Carla could have voiced would stop him getting his own way as far as she was concerned.

There was no way Lister would allow his new plaything to retain the capacity to recall the woman she had once been, to remember the family that she had lost or to retain the capacity to judge himself or his actions. He was paying for a living toy that would amuse him and satisfy his desires when and where he wanted without hesitation. And he was under no illusions that Carla would submit to being his plaything no matter what she may have promised him. To that end he had decided that in reality as well as in terms of her faked demise, the woman known as Carla Largo had to die in order for his pet to be born.

The device would allow that to happen, the probes seeking out the areas of the brain in which the very notions of the self were generated and changing them to suit a new pattern. This was no crude brainwashing or hypnosis, but an actual process that changed the very physical structure of the brain as it went. The alterations made represented a pattern that would fundamentally change the identity, thoughts and actions of the subject according to the instructions programmed into the machine. At one end of the scale a person could be affected in so small a way to make them believe that they had said or done something they had not or lose all knowledge of a single fact, but at the other it could be used to completely change the memories, identity and personality of a subject.

And that was just what was happening to Carla as she lay on the operating table.

Lister would not only change her in body, but in mind as well.

Little by little the effect of the probes sunk into her brain tissue eroded the image of Carla Largo as a woman who had been born, raised and educated in the real world. They scrubbed away at the memories of her past, her childhood and her adult life with her family, leaving a blank slate where the amassed snapshots of her passage through the world had accumulated to make her the person that she was.

With that done, they drove deeper still; attacking the basis of her perception of herself as a human being. The concept of that she held of even being a highly evolved primate that walked erect on two legs was seized and obliterated totally. Soon though she recalled what a human being was, she had no means by which to connect herself to the species or belief that she belonged to it at all.

Now that the space had been cleared, the probes began to restructure the areas of Carla's brain that had been affected. They made new connections and spanned the gaps that had been left with fresh tissue that would cause her thoughts to flow in the direction that her new owner intended without her even stopping to question what she was doing or thinking. In effect, her mind would never know a thing had been changed because it would have only the new structure of its own synapses from which to draw its conclusions.

The elements of the brain that had once given rise to the personality of Carla Largo were replaced at an alarming rate with those that would constitute a quite different creature. Where there had been a relatively strong and independently minded woman, there was now a submissive and simple personality that accepted itself as nothing more than a limited creature in need of an influence to dominate and direct its actions. The new Carla was dependent, shallow and concerned only with her status in the eyes of the individual that she perceived as her master, seeking to please him in whatever she and hoping to keep his attention firmly upon her at all times.

She was a mermaid, and she accepted that fact without question as she had always been such a creature. Her tail and fins were as natural as her arms and her hands to her and she simply knew nothing about ever having had legs and feet, finding the idea unnatural and vaguely disturbing. There was no mystery about the role of mermaids either, they were inferior to human beings and existed on the whim of the one that they called their master, grateful for his attention and willing to submit their bodies to him without restraint or pause.

And who was her master?

The image of Aubrey Lister descended into her consciousness like an angel from heaven.

Here was the man that she existed to please, the master that she needed to be close to and craved the attention of. She knew what while she had his eyes upon her and occupied his every thought then she was truly safe and loved without reserve, anything else was to lose her very purpose and simply exist as a thing without meaning.

He was the most radiant man she could imagine, the most virile and the most brilliant. No other man could ever please her or care for her as he would and she was dedicated to repaying his endless kindness to her by worshipping him with her own body as soon as she was able.

Carla slept; transformed in mind and body the mermaid dreamed of nothing but making the man for whom she was intended happy.

Ward glanced at the readouts clutched in his hand and finally nodded to Henry, indicating that the time had come to remove the apparatus from Carla's head. The big man wiped visible beads of sweat from his forehead as he did as he was told.

Now all he had to do was smuggle his charge out of the clinic before the sun rose and they were discovered.

A private jet would carry them both back to the other side of the Atlantic where the swelling that was already distorting Carla's features from the extensive facial surgery would have the chance to heal.

He hoped that Lister would be patient enough to give her body the time that it needed to recover and at the same time that the changes made to her mind would not drive her insane before she was allowed to meet the man who was now the centre of her altered consciousness.