Captivity

The two gaunt figures in flowing gowns, their the pulsing, bulbous heads perched on their improbably narrow necks watched as the images on the transparent screen in front of them dissolved. The cavernous bedroom, its furnishings, and the women it featured disappeared, revealing a lone figure suspended in a status field. The figure was a naked and obviously humanoid male. It was missing both legs and an arm. The body was grotesquely disfigured and covered with burns.

"You did an impressive job Marza," the one on the left said to the other one through a telepathic process that included both the meaning and a true sense of admiration.

"Thank you, T'nay."

"It's a wonder he survived at all," continued T'nay." Even with everything we've learn about human anatomy, psychology, and physiology from studying Pike and Vina, given the way his ship crashed onto our world, saving his life was not assured. When we found him, three of his limbs had been crushed on impact, he had been blinded, deprived of hearing, and was in excruciating pain from the burns. It took us five rotations just to get him stabilized.

"And yet, I wonder if I did him any kindness. Of all the species we've encountered, his takes worst to captivity. Without the ability to contact his people on his behalf, we were left with an impossible choice. We could have let him die—our moral code forbids that—we could have patched up his injuries and left him to go insane within the confines of his body, or we could have done what we did. As it is, he's now confined here for the rest of his life."

Marza hesitated before replying. "Pike faced the same dilemma. When we first captured him, he was beset with hate and anger that eventually enabled him to escape. But later, after the accident that confined him to the medchair, he chose to live in captivity here —quite happily as it turned out—for the rest of his life. There's no way to know what our subject would have chosen had he been given a choice. But if he was like Pike, given a choice between captivity and life on the one hand and insanity and death on the other, he surely would have chosen the path we put him on."

"He's lucky," said T'nay," that while we didn't have the ability to ask him telepathically, we could probe his mind deeply enough to divine the kinds of circumstances that, for him, would lead to an acceptable state of captivity. It's also lucky that there was enough of his mind left for us to build on his own experiences and dreams. I wonder if he even realized that he craved a world in which he would live in deep sexual subservience to females. We never saw anything like that in Pike."

"And that was probably what went wrong when we first captured Pike," Marza replied.

"Indeed. The worlds we gave Pike, based on his own fantasies and memories, allowed him to believe that he retained a degree of agency that would eventually allow him to return to the life we wanted him to leave behind. For our current subject," T'nay mused, "you were wise to construct a world in which no such agency exists. You appear to have constructed a palatable world for our subject, based on his own memories and dreams, in which captivity is linked to life and pleasure. He has no incentive to resist or seek to escape."

"Yet, there is the matter of human dignity to consider," Marza responded. "I perceive that deep down, he is resistant to the idea that he no longer has agency, that it is inappropriate for him to be a pleasure object for another, while, on the other hand, deeply desiring it."

"It is for us to break him of that ambivalence," T'nay replied, "though ever so gently by using the levers of pain and pleasure we have. And it shouldn't be that hard. From what we have learned of his civilization, these creatures, while defending the value of independence and freedom, remain slaves to their appetites. Throughout their history, these creatures have willingly exchanged their freedom and independence for subsistence, regardless of whether they realize that they have done so. Before his unfortunate accident, our subject followed the commands of others to bring pain and death to those opposed to his commanders. Why is it better to be a purveyor of violence and death at the whim of another than to be an object of pleasure, particularly when pleasure is offered in return?"

Both entities stood with quiet minds and watched the creature sleeping peacefully in the stasis field. After a while, they willed the illumination to dim until all that was visible was a faint glow emanating from their subject.

And then, as if by unspoken agreement, they turned and walked soundlessly down the cavern's long dim corridor to the next inhabited compartment in their menagerie.