Wild Dolls

I tend to write stories with a beginning, end and middle, then struggle to get them to fit. I found this sitting on my hard drive recently. It was written around the time of the other submissions but unfinished. Its a bit of a patchwork with some dangly threads I decided not to pull on.

This is an erotic sci-fi of lesbian ravishment and helpless pleasure.

Part I Alice of the Patriarchy

1 Foretaste

The room was dark and empty apart from one padded couch not unlike a dentist's chair - one couch and it's frightened occupant, unless others waited further back in the darkness that surrounded her. She knew they did.

A wall of monitors illuminated the naked girl.

Her name was Mia. Not a central character. Never was a central character in her own life and she knew it; just another soldier-girl.

Don't be afraid. The Enemy loves you.

Wide thick belts of synthetic silk at ankles, wrists, waist and neck, conveyed her captors' firm intention that she make herself comfortable. Headphones that clamped around her ears kept her facing forwards. Sensors taped to her body measured her pulse, perspiration biorhythms. A polygraph? Was she going to be interrogated? She didn't know anything!

Small neural stimulators were taped to the corners of her eyes. Mia figured out what they were for when she tried to blink them off. Small jolts snapped her eyes back open. They would let her blink but she was going to watch whatever they wanted her to.

The monitors flickered to life. Nine different feeds simultaneously that changed from second to second. The headphone's output interpolated smoothly between each feed as her eyes skipped helplessly from one vile ravishment to another. Except, the subjects were enjoying it. They were writhing and panting and screaming but it wasn't pain. The Dolls were all over them, violating every inch of their skin and they were screaming for more. Video Lotus, of course. What else would they be showing Mia? P.O.W. Girls who had gone before and no doubt fought their hardest and lost anyway.

The Dolls had left her nowhere else to look. Mia tried to screw her eyes shut, to block out the satanic play but they had already countered that. Her eyes snapped back open. She tried to drown out the sound with her own voice but it was she that was muted. Her bladder loosened but the chair dealt with it.

The whole thing was wicked yet they wouldn't allow her the slightest discomfort that she could use to distract herself. Her Doll captors had been very careful about that.

She knew what they were doing but she couldn't help her eyes from flicking from screen to screen, or keep her pupils from dilating, telling them everything they wanted to know. Whenever a scene drew her eye, variations on that scene would explode across the other monitors; second long snippets from thousands of hours of Doll-P.O.W. erotica. Already she felt a hot flush of deja vu as the images chanced upon her own sinful thoughts and deeply suppressed dreams. Someone before her had dreamed them too. Instantly the monitors were filled with variations on two naked P.O.W girls tangling and jostling together as Dolls drove them to frenzied motion. A groan escaped Mia's lips. Near all the following scenes had two real girls in them now.

Mia had always known she would not be strong under torture. She had intended to die before capture and screw what the Patriarchy says about the sin of suicide. This was almost worse than torture. They were going to corrupt her and she wouldn't even be able to tell God she suffered. She was going to be just like those other girls. Dolls would simply touch her in ways that she could be damned for even entertaining in her head and nothing she could do would stop them. As image after image of the things they might do to her flicked by she began to cry. Not misery. Just tears she had been holding back since childhood cause now it didn't matter a damn.

A Doll face moved into her vision. It was before the screens instead of on them. Her captors had never left. The Doll contrived an expression of both concern and curiosity. Had she never seen tears before? That could not be; there seemed to be tears in the corners of the Dolls own eyes. Without thinking why Mia smiled weakly to show she was all right. The doll imitated her perfectly and instantly, a mirror, then gave her a quick kiss on the forehead like her mother used to, before her mother had birthed one too many daughters and been sent away. Just occasionally the Dolls would touch her, as if to remind Mia that she had not been forgotten in that chair.

After hours of the feed she was neither awake nor asleep. Her eyes voyeuristically dragged in whatever attracted them without any filters of civilization or modesty. It was almost like dreaming an endless wet dream tailored just for her. She twisted gently in the chair making slight wordless sounds of need. The Video feeds faded in an out slowly now. Themes coalesced. Soon she would be a star.

2 Alice

It was plain as sin what was going on, the instant I pulled back the flap entrance to the darkened tent. I couldn't see the flickering screen of the battle dented laptop, it was facing away, yet I saw the mixed but guilty expressions on all their faces; pale and blue in the screen's glow: the faces of half a dozen young women who should have known better.

As if on queue, a girl's grainy voice cried out from the laptop's small speakers; emotion and static.

Mega Dee reached a finger forward with insolent serenity, tapped a key, and the video feed was gone and deleted. Her other arm rested casually on Cinder's back. Maybe Mega had been holding her down. Cinder was pale as a ghost, or as if she had seen one. My guess was Mega had organized it all, Cinder was the butt of it all, and everyone else told each other they were just there to see how she reacted. But they would be lying.

"You can be court-martialed for viewing that smut." I said this to Meg. I turned my eyes to Cinder. "You too. It might have been her idea, but you could have closed your eyes. You didn't call out either. By the Good Book you are as guilty as anyone here."

"It wasn't Meg, marm," one of the others piped up, sounding like a school-girl addressing a school-teacher. The correct address was Sir – I might be a surplus daughter but nevertheless an officer here. The slight was probably not intentional; the silly young private had just slipped into her excuse-making mode that she had no doubt perfected at convent.

"Quiet," I barked. That worked, no matter how isolated it made me feel.

"There are reasons that stuff is forbidden, if it is not obvious to you after the first thirty seconds. Video Lotus is enemy propaganda. It's faked. It is designed to damage morale. It's designed to make you think about what they are going to do to you if they take you, in that split second when the only thing you should be thinking about is what lies between your sights."

I met each of their eyes in turn. "It is designed to make you weak. Get out of here. All of you. I want you on the parade ground and praying until I come for you."

The girls filed out with heads hung down, except Mega of course. I stopped little Cinder with a hand on her shoulder and waited till the others were out of earshot.

"You are better than this, Cin'. Talk to me."

She just stood there. She couldn't speak. She was crying and it was not my reprimand that had done it. She'd had it pretty tough. First there was her bunkmate Mia. With a name like that everyone had joked her odds weren't good but then it really happened. Mia became M.I.A. Missing in action. Never found the body; they never do. Then there was that weapons misfire that had scarred Cinder's face and hand; the inquest that hinted at attempted suicide, but what worse could they do to a damaged girl than this? She was 'career' now; a euphemism for never going home, for no man would have her.

I wished I could hold her head to my chest but it was bad enough that I had touched her shoulder for so long. Damn the commandments. Hell, now I was the one who needed confessional. I removed my hand and waited for her to gain control of herself.

"It, It was her." she finally whispered. At first I thought she was talking about Meg. "On the Doll broadcast. On Video Lotus. It was.. Mia."

What could I say? I wanted to make up a million blasphemous lies, say anything to make it better. I would have. My virtuously dull farm-daughter's brain saved me. I said nothing at all. Maybe Cinder wouldn't have heard anyway. Cinder finally spoke again. "Watching her... she was so, so.." her voice died almost to nothing "..beautiful."

I let her go to join the others on the parade ground. The best I could do for her.

I felt so unclean, yet it was not our sinful natures that sickened me. I needed confessional immediately. Officers have that privilege. It felt good to be able to open my heart. Anything can be said there without fear for your soul, except lies. It's all polygraphed. Mostly they don't say much at this point because you already know what is right and you pretty much spell out your own punishment. When I had bared my soul enough the Monk told me to undress. I pressed myself up against the grill so he could examine me for evidence of self-abuse as he asked the standard questions. I hate the scratchy sound the polygraph makes.

Confessional over, I had intended to make my way to the parade ground and release my girls from their prayers. Fate pressed other orders into my hands the instant I left the booth. Strange orders. They would lead in the course of this story to my questioning everything I once believed, and the forfeiture of my soul.

The orders were simple: Sergeant Alice Samuelsdaughter. Report immediately to Minus Six.

Although we squatted in tents on the surface, giving the appearance to hungry satellite eyes of a mere staging encampment, beneath the tents, beneath the parade grounds and prefab hangars, there lay something else: many levels of which I had seen only the first, and only once. Today however I was asked to report to a level deeper than I was aware existed. I was shown my enemy.

3 The Doll House

The reinforced cell holding the Doll was brightly lit. I was the only one in the darkened observers bay. She (it) sat on the edge of the bed like a mannequin, head tilted and staring at nothing. She wore a long white paper shirt that was so clean and unwrinkled she must have just sat there since they had dressed her in it.

Her skin was pallid and shiny; her eyes, dark holes. Cold-blooded, she looked; amphibian rather than mammal. Once someone had told me there was not a natural gene in one of them. Then someone else had insisted the Old Geneers had started with snake DNA and grafted on what they needed. There wasn't anything human in a Doll, 'less you counted human ingenuity and human folly.

The Doll did not react to my presence. The toughened glass separating us was mirrored, but that was not why.

"Deactivate the Hazer-coil collar," instructed the doctor's nasal voice though a grainy speaker. I pressed one of the metal studs of the black rubberized collar at my throat, the way they had shown me. My biomagnetic aura was no longer concealed.

The doll did not react instantaneously. Then she turned to face me and stood in one smooth motion, a beautiful smile on her face. "You lit up," she said. The glass was bulletproof and sound proof. I heard her through the same grainy speaker.

"What is your name?" she asked. It seemed impolite not to answer but I had been warned to say nothing. She approached the glass casually but her glistening black eyes never left me.

"Soldier girl, aren't you. I can tell. You look real fit...." She had a baby-doll voice. Immature.

Her voice aged, became a young woman's. "..Bet you are an officer too. Bet you're a leader type. Girl's 'd do whatever you ask.."

Lower, confidential: "..if only you weren't too afraid to ask. Ask me. Ask me anything. You need to know things for this, this big.. big-important-upcoming.. mission...."

I felt my pulse quicken. I could almost feel her suck the information out of me. Her senses were so precise she was a biological polygraph. Maybe the Doll had merely extrapolated my rank and purpose from obvious clues but now, watching me, she knew. Yet she might not comprehend or care what she knew. Intelligence did not demand sentience. Her Doll brain might be concerned entirely with identifying variables and cues to my reactions. I have heard Dolls can do things to you just by speaking, if you allow yourself to listen. They act, you react, they learn. Feedback; like the shriek of a microphone. I heard of a girl once who was trapped in a crushed tank with a Doll outside. The Doll just talked to her, all night long, asking her to come out but she couldn't. She went mad.

My Doll was still speaking. "You never know what you might discover if you just--"

Something diverted her in mid sentence. She looked down at her paper shirt in naive puzzlement become curiosity. What was it? I could see nothing there. She pulled a corner of her collar down; pulled and pulled so the paper fabric slowly ripped and she emitted a childlike gasp as her other hand discovered a perfect breast, the aureole swollen and dark, firm against her fingers.

Her eyes were not on her breast anymore; they were on me, watching me as I watched her touch herself. I jerked my eyes away, face burning.

"Come in and talk," she suggested reasonably, her smile friendly and without guile.

I jumped as ugly static burst over the speaker. It was the doctor clearing his throat. "Reactivate the Hazer-coil collar," he instructed.

I did so and the effect was subtle but profound. Her smile lost whatever made it seem so human. It stayed on her face as if her face had simply been forgotten. "Come in and talk," she repeated, monotone and dull, pressed up against the glass and still watching me though now-dead eyes. "Come in--". The speaker cut out but her lips still moved.

"That is enough," the doctor said. "You may go."

I gratefully turned my back on the doll and retreated. Before I reached the door an almost subliminal thudding or perhaps a flickering of the light made me look back. The doll's room was trashed. The bed was broken into many pieces. The bulletproof glass was starred from where she must have pounded the bed planks against it with great violence and there was a black smear on the glass that might have been Doll blood. Her paper shirt was nothing but still-falling confetti yet she was back where I had seen her last: her slender naked white form a black skeleton in the glare, pressed up against the glass silently mouthing to me.

I pulled the steel door to hurriedly.

---

Emerging from the decontamination shower, dripping and freezing, a scream dying on my lips, I stumbled, almost fell into the blessed warmth of the heated towel held out for me by a beaming elderly nurse. That is what I assumed her to be in any case, till I thought back on it later. She wore a plain white lab coat. I don't think I could have let her touch me if the ugly word 'scientist' had entered my imagination at that point.

She helped my numb stumbling fingers unbuckle the strange device I had worn around my throat during my encounter with the doll, the black rubberized collar with chrome studs they had called the Hazer coil.

"This makes me invisible to dolls?" I asked, turning it over in my hands.

"Oh, they'll give you a glance" said the nurse. "...then surf for another channel."

She smiled at my confusion. "It blocks their radio-empathic sense. The human spinal column behaves as a broadcasting aerial. The Doll's functions as a receiver. To a doll, you are a walking TV station. Discovery channel and adult channel all thrown in for free." The nurse cackled to herself. "But I guess all that was before your time."

She was a little strange but hard to dislike.

"Don't think they are attracted to you because they like you," added the nurse as I dressed, "They just want better reception."

A harsh male voice intruded over the intercom, reminding us that we were always observed. "Sargent Alice Samuelsdaughter. report to conference room 3 immediately."

---

I wish I could say what followed over the next four hours was the worst experience of my life. It consisted merely of listening to men speak as they drank tea, answering the few questions put to me dutifully. Sipping cool water. Suffice it to say that all the whip scars, the burns, the broken fingers I had earnt before that day were as nothing compared to what I learnt in that room: what was to come. Then they congratulated themselves and against all precedence myself, a woman, for saving their hateful world at only the cost of everything in it I loved.

---

When I finally reached the parade ground my girls were still there, praying as I had instructed; kneeling with palms together at lips mouthing pleas for forgiveness, angelic faces upturned to the diminishing light. How I loved them. Even Mega's face, when I searched it, was free of any trace of ego or pride or irony. Her earnestness was touching. I wondered what she was praying for.

I called them to attention. When they were assembled I began. "Listen up Gals, somethings come up. The brass have told me they need the best team to do it. Thats you, however," I found it hard to spit the next words out, "..however, I will not be joining you on this one. Mega will receive a temporary promotion for this mission. Step forward Sargent Dee."

---

Later it was Cinder that caught me crying. She cornered me where I was hiding in one of the latrines. I couldn't come out and let her see my face.

"I know something's wrong, Alice - sir, what is it."

She wouldn't go away. Cinder was stubborn in her own ways. I could not tell her though.

"Orders..." I replied.

"Orders that will take you from us?"

"Yes. No. Maybe."

Cinder laughed. "That's decisive!"

"I can't talk about it. I can't tell you."

For a while that stopped the conversation.

When Cinder spoke again it was sharply. "We're not your daughters you know. You're not even the eldest. There isn't one of us that wouldn't give her life in the name of God's war, even her soul. They were fucking cut-rate souls to begin with. In the end we still answer to a higher authority than you, sir. You'll do your job, God have mercy on us all."

I thought she would storm away. She didn't though. Eventually we walked to the mess tent side by side.

Part II Alice and the Beanstalk.

4 The morning of the mission

Three hours before dawn I woke, showered, and scrubbed myself down with the antiperspirant powder the scientists had provided. My powdered skin was white as a Dolls', not that a doll would be fooled. I peed, shaved with the razor provided, and let the nurses tape me up. The merest scent of a woman would certainly betray me.

Two hours before dawn I was escorted to the tactical airlifter and helped up into the cramped space concealed in the forward undercarriage. Then came the longest wait of my life.

Footsteps, eventually. Combat boots and more than a pair. Mega's voice. "All aboard girls. Remember: first in last out. That means you're last in, Cinder and Janice, with the scatter guns. You won't have time to aim."

A moment's silence. I couldn't help but smile.

"So who's first in?" asked someone. Jane: the one that had called me 'marm'. Mega wasn't really suited to command. I would have chosen anyone else. So would Mega. I could tell she wasn't enjoying this. She would know the sort of mission this was. She didn't know about me, hidden mere feet away, but she knew that none of them were coming back.

The steel partition that separated me from my squad was thin. Even in flight, after the initial rattle and roar, I could hear their chatter. I could tell who had cottoned on to the sacrificial nature of this mission and who were blissfully oblivious. Mega did better than I had expected of her. She kept them focused. Cinder didn't speak.