Fall Of Women - In The Darkest Hour

Strangely, I wasn't afraid. I just felt... clarity. Now I knew the score, you see. I don't have to be afraid anymore.

There are a few key conclusions I have drawn. The first is that, thankfully, I'm still payload-free, as are Maria and Tasha. That means Ember hasn't infected us, or exposed us to it, if nothing else; at least not yet.

I am unsure about Jenny and Margaret. After all, if Ember was exposed on the voyage, there is a high likelihood--but by no means a certainty--that they were, too.

I have no intention to wait and find out, however.

I have taken possession of the key to the requisitions locker. I know this will precipitate the situation tomorrow, but I'm not taking any chances. I intend to call the main hub and ask for a helicopter to come pick us up, and by us, I mean Maria, Tasha, and myself.

As for our guests? They can have the ice lab to themselves, if they want to.

Look, it's simple, the calculus has changed. I didn't want to even be near WiFi because it was a risk, but now I know, for a fact, there's a woman sitting mere metres from me whose feminism is currently leaking out of her cunt, pardon my French, along with her critical thinking skills. Who knows what she's capable of? What she's going to do with no men around to collar her? How she's going to behave towards us free women?

Of course, I could ask for them to leave the ice lab, but let's be honest, I don't have the means to coerce them, and where do you see that discussion going?

Besides, I anticipate resistance and hostility even to the idea that we're leaving unilaterally. If Margaret and Jenny believe me, they'll probably insist on coming with me, leaving Ember here alone. But they, too, might have been exposed on the ship. No, fuck that.

Of course, getting to the main hub doesn't magically fix all my problems. Ultimately, abandoning the ice lab means giving up on that guarantee of safety, but with our perimetre breached, so to speak, that guarantee no longer exists anyway. I can ask for the main hub to isolate one of the buildings and reserve it for our use, maybe. We'll see.

But one step at a time.

I hum the lullaby to myself, your lullaby, to find the courage I need to wait for the morning. It will be a dark morning, with no dawn, and the merest hint of distant light from the obscured sun, but it'll be morning nonetheless.

Who knows, maybe I'll actually be able to finally talk to you, from the main hub. Get the chance to ask how you're really doing. Get to thank you for reminding me that, no matter how dark things may get...

Day always follows night.

VII -- The Heart Of Darkness

IT'S NOT EMBER.

Oh, she has the payload in her brain, alright. You should see her, unable to sleep properly, quivering through the night, shivering at phantom touches of male hands that do not exist.

But then again, that probably sounds very familiar to you, right now. Doesn't it?

You're a monster. You deserve to burn in hell for what you've done. You really think I'm stupid, that I wouldn't figure it out eventually?

It's funny. It always sounded all manner of cheesy to me, that whole "once you eliminate the impossible" thing. But it's true. Whatever remains, however unlikely, must be true. And it's true, isn't it, friend?

It was YOU.

Even after figuring out that Ember was showing clear signs of carrying the payload, something kept bothering me. The puzzle didn't fit. Why aren't Margaret and Jenny fidgeting in their sleep? Why aren't they compulsively masturbating, their expressions softening into a dumb sex kitten look, studied to communicate to men that we're fundamentally something less than human?

There is, I suppose, the remote possibility that she simply had her phone on, and they didn't. Maybe it was out of charge, or whatever. But they were together throughout the entirety of the voyage, and it's kind of hard not to notice your friend being brainwashed in front of your eyes by their own smartphone, isn't it?

Alright, I told myself. Maybe Ember was just lying, and the other two were covering it. That doesn't really explain their insistence to come to the ice lab, though. And that was only the first of many puzzle pieces that just refused to slot into position...

Because if we consider the possibility, for example, that Ember was NOT, in fact, exposed to the payload on the ship, then that leaves only one possibility: it happened here. But how? There's no signal here. If their phones didn't receive the payload on the ship, they sure as hell didn't here, either.

Besides, even assuming that someone here is in possession of an electronic device not accounted for, with the payload there and ready to go... wouldn't the person in question be even further along than Ember, or at least showing some overlap of symptoms?

Say, for example... difficulty sleeping, and reveries of a future where the world is men's to run, and we are pathetically grateful to be allowed to pretty it up for them, like the little decorations we are?

And that, my friend...

That's when I realised the terrible cruelty of the truth.

But how? How could I possibly get the payload? And even if I did, why didn't I consciously notice or remember it? Nor do I remember exposing Ember to anything, either.

But, like I was saying. Once you eliminate the impossible, what remains, however unlikely, must be the truth. Because I've been listening to the news, I know the payload is primarily visual, right? It's a hypnotic malware. You see it on a screen or a monitor, and boom, you're well on the way to being seen and not heard, a simple creature made to moan and gasp and bend and kiss and suck...

But nobody who creates something as ingenious as the payload would be sloppy. What about all the women that, due to whatever reason--physical disability, low internet connectivity, lack of digital literacy--would not actually see the payload with their own eyes? There must be a contingency to account for them, too.

And, yes, it sounds outlandish, but... no more so than the mere fact that this evil mind virus even exists.

Who says it's limited to sight alone?

How better to place traps for the unwary, how better to reach remote locations, than find ways to compress the information of the payload into the smallest possible size you can, and find a way to push it through, all the same?

Sure, the results may be suboptimal, maybe less marked, or slower to build up to a critical mass... to bring the woman to the brink of addiction, force her to kickstart the spiral of self-replication by feeding the monster of addiction once, and then never looking back.

But it's certainly a lot better than nothing, isn't it?

And that's when, finally, finally... it clicked. Because there is one moment when everything changed. I've reread my letters, and I can pinpoint it exactly. My speech grows incoherent, less sophisticated. The spiral begins.

It's after I tried to call you.

That's an interesting voice mail you have, my friend. A catchy little jingle. Where did you find it, I wonder. Some dark corner of the internet, one catcher space or another? Maybe whoever created this abomination carefully planted it somewhere where the right sleazes would find it.

Maybe, in your desperation, rubbing yourself over and over at the thought of a man staking his claim on you, you went to a catcher space, and saw a post addressed to dumb sluts like you. Maybe the post claimed it would feel absolutely divine--that it would be most pleasing to men all over the world--if you betrayed the women in your life to the payload.

Maybe the text told you what a good little broken feminist you'd be, if you threw the movement and your own gender and your own friends under the bus. You'd do just about anything to be patted on the head by a man, right? So complimentary. It would lubricate you like crazy, better than sex ever used to, because you're no longer a person. You're a dog now. Their dog.

Maybe this isn't an accurate reconstruction. Maybe the programming itself told you to do it. Or you were just trying to feel the high again. Or maybe, just maybe, this was your master's orders, if you have one...

Tell me. Is it Jason? I almost hope so. I can't help but imagine you on your knees, so small and puny, desperately bobbing up and down on his cock. After all he's done to you, after all the creepy messages in the middle of the night, the lies he told his friends to undermine your reputation, here you are now...

At his feet, collared like a bitch, his foot placed squarely atop your neck, your lips working diligently to apologise to his dick, for not yielding to his needs sooner.

It's a horrifying image. It's a beautiful image. Much like this place... it is an enemy, but a gorgeous one.

But of course, I only see it that way because of your lullaby.

The lullaby I kept singing to myself, over and over and over. Of course, it can't carry or convey anything close to the level of information that must be in the actual app... but given enough time, water erodes rock.

Every time I hummed it, my brain was growing softer. Mushier. My emotions intensified as my rationality dimmed. Unable to sleep properly. Lost in reveries of our vanquished gender, conquered at last, and for good this time, destined to never, ever rise again.

And of course, I wasn't just humming it to myself. Was I now, my dear friend?

Don't you think it's weird that Maria, Tasha, Jenny, Margaret--all four display lethargy and either apathy, or insecurity and fear? Oh, I put this down to depression at first, and the sheer trauma of the taming of women across the world, but that makes no sense. We've been here far longer than they have, and yet from virtually the beginning, Margaret and Jenny were just as passive as Maria and Tasha.

Lounging in bed all day. Unable to find motivation in anything else. Given enough time, they, too, would have succumbed to the impulse to start rubbing their clits, let them do the thinking for them, it's not like we need much brainpower anyway. Just what it takes to say yes sir, no sir; to bend our knees and look pretty and form a warm seal of worship around dick.

But what about Ember?

Ember couldn't sleep, one night. Maybe it's just coincidence, maybe not, but she heard me hum the lullaby. She did so while being right next to me, in the dead silence of the night. And she heard it over and over and over, as I tried and failed to fall asleep.

She was so right to be angry with me... poor girl. I always suspected her... and yet, I was the source of her destruction. The harbinger of her downfall.

Sleepless night after sleepless night, she listened. And the tune wormed its way into her mind.

She's been very responsive to it, progressed so fast, hell, she started compulsively masturbating even earlier than I did. But I did start eventually, thank you for asking.

I hope it was worth it, traitor.

Whore.

I don't even know if you have the spare mental capacity to understand what you've done, so let me spell it out to you in terms that even a fuckdoll can understand. Humans--and I don't say we humans, not anymore--are formidable when they group together. You don't bring down a mammoth on your own. But a tribe can.

Look at us. Look at you. We will never, ever be able to trust each other again, because when given the choice between another worthless piece of female fuckmeat, and the addictive, thrilling, rewarding rush of pleasure in our brain, we'll choose the pleasure, every single time.

Making women betray women to the payload... this isn't just serial recruitment, or self replication, or humiliation of the individual woman, oh no. This is about making it impossible for women to ever do anything collectively, ever again.

Unable to cooperate. Unable to organise. Ineffective. Vestigial. Impotent.

It's the end of women as an independent force in the world. Unable to rely on each other, all that will be left to us is... them, of course. Our masters. The only ones who will be left with the underpinning capacity to run the world... and to rule us.

This is what you've done. This is what you've contributed to. And you know what?

So have I.

Wanna know what my first reaction was, when I first realised what you'd done to me? Bingo. I masturbated myself silly to it, of course, while the girls slept, or tried to, or pretended to.

The levee broke. Months of subtle programming exploded in my brain, all at once. This is different from the way the payload works normally, I know. That's an intense first exposure, followed by a prolonged struggle, and finally by defeat... orgasmically pleasurable defeat.

But this... this was erosion. And finally, when the structure of my mind was too porous to stand up, it came crashing down with a deafening explosion.

That's when I knew it, in my bones, that it was all true. I could feel it, in me. This intensely womanly experience of weakness.

We were meant to be pinned down, redirected, restricted, taken. We can't give or deny consent. We consented by virtue of being into the world. The rapture we feel, as men's innate ability to deconstruct and domesticate us can finally be applied in full, is proof that they have won. That we'll never be allowed to rise from our position off our knees.

God, that's hot.

Wanna know what the second thing I did was? I gave Ember even more reason to hate me. A lot more.

You should have seen it, you would have loved it. Somehow, when I grabbed her by the hair, she found it in her to scream, to try and resist me. But I'm stronger than she is. Ohh, let me tell you, the sight of her back arching as my knee pressed into it, the way she exhaled out in outrage and betrayal...

It made me think of how much fun men are going to have with her, for the rest of her life. She's going to be a good, loyal servant to the patriarchy.

She kept screaming, as I dragged her off the bed. The others were looking at me with muted stupor. I don't know if it was the payload, or just the shock, but none of them intervened.

I shoved the phone right against Ember's ear, and called you. And then called you again, and again, and again. I pressed my face so close against hers that our noses were brushing, that our lips were touching, our breaths mingling.

I wanted to look deep into her eyes, as the lullaby broke her. I wanted to see her eyes roll back into her skull, as the patriarchy fucked her in the deepest way that any woman can be fucked, stripping away all the ornaments and the pretensions, and leaving just the true her behind: a feminine shell of sexual meekness and limited intelligence, fit only to grovel and beg.

It was... beautiful.

Eventually, I let her go, though I did make a point of stepping over her as I moved towards Maria...

You just can't imagine the feeling. There is nowhere to run: it's just ice and death outside. There is nowhere to hide, not in the ice lab. There is no withstanding me, either, because it's not really me the girls would have had to withstand... I'm just as much of a pathetic, spineless female subhuman as all women are. No... it's the erosion. The water, eating away at the rock.

But none of them could, and where's the oddity, in that? We're all just women, after all.

I enjoyed their screams, their feeble struggles and ineffectual flailing, the way their gazes became unfocused as the lullaby emptied them out. The only thing that should be filling women is cocks and cum anyway. Better make room... out with the thoughts...

God. The amount of female talent that's just been annihilated inside this ice lab... that I've annihilated inside this lab.

All the money wasted to educate us, the years spent forming us, all that effort, gone. Erased by the overhwelming will of men. They, at last, have seen fit to repurpose us, and all we can do is conform to the pressure, and be remade anew.

I know all that makes you pant and swoon. But don't worry, my former friend, now sister in slavery... I've called the helicopter. After all, there is no reason left for us to hide in here any longer, is there? And when I come back, we're going to meet in person.

And I'm going to grab you by the hair, too. I am going to push you to your knees before the most despicable male acquaintances I can think of, I'm going to impale your face on their dicks myself, I'm going to regulate your pace, I'm going to earn all their radiant praise and bask in their attention, all the while belittling and demeaning you.

Hey, it's my way of thanking you. Isn't this what you were hoping to achieve, anyway? The wait is almost over. My thanks are on the way. They won't be long in coming.

But before the helicopter gets here, I better make sure to work my five fellow slaves here a little more thoroughly, just in case. And yes, that means I will be calling you.

Please, don't pick up.

It's dark outside, you know. The sort of dark you only see down here... all-encompassing, total, long-lasting. But I've never been afraid of the dark, because I always told myself that as surely as night follows day, then day also inevitably follows night.

But not this time. Not exactly.

I'd ask you to imagine it. It's not difficult: the payload provides us with all the imagination we're ever going to need. Close your eyes, and picture it.

We are so used to a society where the fight for our rights is legitimate, but there is no such thing anymore. As far as our new reality goes, it might as well be fantasy. Women will never impact the world again... just make it prettier for men to look at. We have been relegated to the irrelevance we deserve. This world was not meant for us, and now, we have to accept this.

This new world... it's incompatible with female self-determination or empowerment. If this is how much damage has been done so far, imagine what ten years will do to us. Twenty. Fifty.

We're not even going to be legitimately worthy of the label of human beings anymore.

Perhaps we've never been.

I'd ask you to imagine how glorious and impossibly arousing it looks now, the final sunset of the female gender. It casts long shadows, a hauntingly beautiful twilight, beautiful like the bent legs of a kneeling woman, beautiful like her vacant eyes and soft gagging sounds and warm lips as she looks up at the master that's facefucking her into utter stupidity.

It's haunting. And beautiful. And hostile.

I know you see what I see. I know you fear what I fear.

But you also know what I know.

Admit it. Admit that you want it, that you crave it, that you need it.

Admit that you loved betraying me, and who knows how many of my friends.

This is the real you, and the real me.

As you kneel and pray, as you rub and beg, as you suck and whimper, as you give up more and more and more until you have nothing left to give, and yet men take even more anyway... every fibre of your being attunes itself to our cosmic role. Service. Worship.

Slavery.

For all things there is a season, right? This is women's winter, and the spring of men. Dawn will follow night, but it will be our night, and their dawn. Our future is right here, in the shadow of the patriarchy, cast down from our station, down and down and down, far beyond the light's reach.

In the heart of darkness.

THE END