Planet of the Dominated Mind

Jordan struggled to his feet. He wasn't like Pat—even though the poltron was far smaller and weaker than Jordan, Jordan did not have his fighter's instinct. Jordan's muscular build was pretty much all for show. He had been an accountant in the military during "The War of the Strand," and once the war ended he moved to the Milky Way Precinct in hopes of continuing to do what he does best: look at numbers and draw conclusions. He was a reports guy. He was an office guy. He was a stay-out-of-sight guy. And that's the way he liked it.

Jordan looked down at his own body. Yeah, he's sculpted. He liked looking and feeling good. But he was damn near nude right now, and that gave him a sense of vulnerability that didn't sit right with him at all. He looked around the barren room, hoping and praying that his uniform would be waiting for him.

"At least there's no windows here," he muttered, covering his bare arms.

A mechanical whirr caught his attention, loud enough to drown out his self-consciousness.

Jordan looked up. He felt his heart pound in his chest. Cameras descended from the ceiling like a swarm of insects, and he had no choice but to be their prey. He couldn't move, couldn't speak, couldn't think as their lenses focused on him. They hovered, suspended in air by small propulsion systems that served as coolants. Red blinking lights dotted their corners: he was being recorded.

His mind raced. Why? What was the purpose of this? Was the dealer going to ransom him?

Questions buzzed in his head, but he couldn't answer them. For the moments that he tried to hide himself from the swarm of cameras, he missed that there was another set of mechanical devices descending from the ceiling, too. The tentacles from before snaked in, wrapped around his wrists and ankles, and spread his body into an X. He screamed—at first for being splayed, but then, and mostly, because he could see the swarm of cameras lining up in strange formations to film him. They collected around his heaving chest, around his hips, and those were just the ones he could see.

From behind him, a mechanical voice said, "Please don't be alarmed. You are in no danger."

The voice was rough, biting, commanding—a drill sergeant over an intercom, chewing on a cigar. Except, the intercom was dangerously close to Jordan's ear, and... wait, that was cigar smoke. Jordan recognized it. It was the same candy sweetness as the ones his old captain smoked.

So he screamed again.

In a whip-snap response, a gag found its way into his jaw. It wasn't the metal tentacles from before, however, but an honest-to-goodness ball gag. Black silicone, with tight leather straps that wrapped around his head. It was an aggressive, uncomfortable sensation, and Jordan was forced to breathe heavily through his nose.

He could feel the hot, damp cigar smoke on his neck.

"Failure to comply," the voice hissed. "This'll have to go into your report, Jordan."

Leather boots clanked heavily against the metal floor. The android walked into view.

He was tall, with a strangely trim male-muscular build made out of deep blue plastics and silicone. He wore nothing but a leather thong and tight leather chaps. Whoever his maker was had even designed for this android nipples, which lit with a blue light ring, as if they were power buttons.

"Jordan, Jordan, Jordan," the Android tsked, shaking his head. "What are we going to do with you? You were sent here to catch a starbark dealer, and you let him get away. Now, I know, you're not used to the kind of environment of the Lambda System, but we still expect a certain level of professionalism."

A leather cap sat atop his head, with four glowing eyes on each side of his face from the brim, lined up in two neatly stacked rows. In his gloved hands was a clipboard, and a pen. Most baffling of all, a still-smoking cigar sat in-between the metal clamps of what resembled a mouth, even though an android obviously has no need for smoking.

"Let's see, let's see. It looks like you didn't follow protocol. You noticed the walls were carved, didn't you? You could have easily stopped the team from moving in on the grounds of an undocumented sentient home-world, because you recognized design on what was categorized as an uninhabited planet. That's not very good, Jordan. This is all going into your report."

Two cameras placed themselves near Jordan's face, adjusting their lenses as they documented his expressions. Jordan screamed through the gag, trying desperately to explain himself.

The android rolled his many, many eyes, and scribbled something down.

"Now, Jordan, I can tell you're not very experienced. That's okay, we've all had to start somewhere." The android leaned in, removed the cigar from his metal clamp mouth, and puffed sweet smoke across Jordan's face as he spoke. "But, I'm here to help you. My name is Commander. Let's try a little roleplay, shall we?"

۝

The world slowly returned to Lukas. He woke up slumped against the cold steel wall of a windowless room. As his vision returned, the first thing he noticed was that his uniform was gone. Instead, he was now wearing a tight, green-and-black wrestling singlet. He recognized it immediately from his time on the military's wrestling team, and it brought back a flood of memories and emotions.

As his head cleared, he realized that there was only one door in the room. And standing in front of that door was a tall, jockstrap wearing robot that was staring him down. It was a little bit unsettling, the way the robot was so perfectly designed to look like a human bodybuilder. The robot's cheekbones were chiseled and grim, giving it the countenance of a soldier-at-war: muscular, but thinning from days on rations.

The war... the war. The War of the Strand.

Lukas had been on the wrestling team only a few months before the war broke out. He never thought he'd go to war, especially not in space, and especially not versus aliens. He didn't even think there were aliens! He just wanted to wrestle some hot guys, go to university, and live on military money until he died, occasionally hooking up with a dude or two when his loins moved him to do so.

When he thought about the wrestling team, and the spandex that still wrapped so smoothly around his war-torn, beef-jerky-packed body, he remembered something important: the grappling dummies. These were bright blue sandbags made of either canvas or synthetic leather, depending upon which one you were lucky enough to get practice with that day. "Poly fillers," or granulated polyester pellets, filled the bags till they weighed enough to simulate a human. The ones that Lukas threw around were usually around 150—you could make them heavier, but for practicing purposes, it was better for reps to keep it lighter, Lukas found. Sometimes they had black lines and circles for decorations on joints.

And one time, he painted little yellow eyes on a dummy. That's how he remembered which one was 150.

This guy... this thing was that same bright blue, though he appeared harder than leather. Maybe a mix of silicone plates and leather in the joints for articulation? Lukas wasn't sure, nor was he sure why a robot needed a jockstrap... or why that jockstrap would be so goddamned packed... but what he was sure was that it wasn't a coincidence that the android had the same coloration, right down to the yellow eyes. They looked far more grim in their current narrow slices than the playful dots he painted in his twenties.

And there was no way this hulking thing weighed 150.

"This all feels..." Lukas stood up slowly, "...a little on-the-nose."

The robot rotated his shoulders, as if stretching them out. "Well, you're a little faster on the uptake than the others."

Lukas grimaced.

"We're gonna go through a few rounds," the robot said. "You may call me 'Blue.' That's what you called me before, when you were in a good mood."

Blue cracked his knuckles. The imitation of a motion Lukas was sure a robot didn't need to do annoyed him.

"You're not Blue..." Lukas ran his tongue along his teeth. "You're... something else. I doubt you have anything to do with the dealer we're chasing. You clearly scanned my memories. I don't know how you synthesized a singlet so fast and so accurately—it doesn't feel like I've been out more than a few minutes."

"Time is a unit of measurement," Blue droned humorlessly. His voice never rose or lowered beyond middle C. "It's hard to tell without a clock, isn't it? Humans made lots of clocks because they aren't so good without them. Humans really need machines a lot these days."

Lukas's arms were sore from the brief struggle earlier, but he was ready—and frankly, after hearing that, he was more than ready to do a bit of fighting. "If we're going to wrestle, it'll be hand-to-hand, right? You don't have any guns or anything? How can I trust you?"

Blue tilted his head. "Oh, I can fight you however you want me to, Lukas. The war's over. This is just for fun, now."

Lukas puffed up, and clenched his jaw. "What the hell do you know about the war?"

Blue stepped forward, and Lukas dropped into his wrestling stance, low to the ground, a stance not visited in many years, yet one he found himself easily able to slip back into.

"I can't tell you what I don't know, Captain," Blue said. "What I do know is that there is a door behind me. You want to leave the planet and retire. You won't be able to retire until you beat me. Can you pin me? After all these years, Lukas, do you still have what it takes to throw Blue around?"

Lukas charged at the robot, trying to catch him off-guard with a surprise attack. His plan was simple—get the robot off balance, then use the disorientation to get out of the room. The plan was not so air-tight, however: no matter how quick he was, Blue was quicker. Cold silicone and leather wrapped possessively around Lukas's waist, and he was thrown onto his back via a gut-wrench with perfect, programmed form.

Blue was on him in an instant, wrapping his arms around Lukas's body. His wide chest pressed hard into Lukas's upper back, and it felt like, to Lukas, like a wall had pushed into him. "You don't have what it takes, Lukas. Your body has softened with time—a unit of measurement far more unkind to you than to me."

Lukas grunted, struggling against the hold. "I've pinned men around your size."

"I am not 'man,'" Blue's arms squeezed, and the air fled Lukas's lungs. The captain's eyes bulged, and the reality of this mismatch became clear to him.

He struggled, pushing his legs off the floor, but the robot was just too strong. It was like he was caught in a vise, and couldn't wriggle his way out. He felt his strength sapping away, and his lungs begged for air.

"Let me out..." Lukas managed to cough out.

"Let you out of what? Do you not want to grapple with me? You wish to run away?" Blue's voice was still the same monotone, but Lukas could sense a mocking edge in it. "You loved when I was your plaything. Do you not like it the other way around?"

Blue lifted Lukas's body like it was nothing, and slammed him back down, never loosening his grip as he fell with the captain. Lukas wheezed, and tried to twist his body, but he, once a great wrestler, once a great officer, was a fish in the jaws of a shark.

"I can keep this up for a long, long time, Captain. You should trust my ability to measure time more than your own."

۝

"What..." Pat was almost hesitant to finish the sentence. He waved his finger in the air for a few seconds, then pointed it back towards the rotund robo-gramps. "What do you mean, I don't want authority? I am authority!"

"That uniform's just filthy," Granddaddy slapped his thigh, which made a strange sound with the combination of the rubber-sacks meant to simulate leg fat meeting his firm, prosthetic hands. "Now come over here to Granddaddy and let's get that off of you, boy. You can play police officer later. What you need is a nice hot bubble bath!"

Pat's ears flicked, and his tail bristled. "That's not happening."

Granddaddy chuckled again, but it wasn't the same hearty sound from before. This one was low, and tinged with something else.

"Don't be scared, boy. You and I both know the only way out of here is to behave and embrace the truth."

Pat's mind raced. What the hell was this game? Why would the starbark dealer have a droid like this? "The truth?"

He ran through various possibilities. Heroic as Pat may have wanted to be, this robot was probably far stronger than him. However, if it wanted to attack, presumably, it already would have. The poltron police officer concluded, then, that the easiest way to beat the bot was to deactivate it and take it apart, use its parts to... somehow, he wasn't sure how, but somehow get into that ventilation shaft. Granddaddy was practically inviting him over. He might as well, slowly and carefully, approach the droid and see if he could work out some sort of emergency power switch or wire he could rip out.

As he got closer, though, his curiosity was piqued by the sheer detail and craftsmanship of the robot. It was a marvel of engineering. "So, Granddaddy, tell me about your model. Who built you? You're not an AI, you're a robot. Why do you have a beard and a body like this?"

"Why do I look so good, is what you mean?" Granddaddy chuckled, and slapped his thigh again. "Come 'ere little guy, I'll tell you all about me."

Pat swallowed and tip-toed forward, praying that his poltron reflexes could spring him out of the way of sudden, dangerous movements. His instincts told him not to trust the droid, but his curiosity was getting the better of him. He approached the robot and stood before him.

Granddaddy never stood up from the bed. He leaned forward and gently grabbed Pat by the hips, pulling the poltron until he was crotch-to-rubber-belly. "I knew you were a good boy, Pat."

Pat was a little disarmed by the words, and by the gentleness of the otherwise hulking machine. He wrung his hands, his face inches from the synthetic flesh. His cheeks flushed red. "G... good boy?"

Granddaddy pulled him closer. "Now, let's get you out of these clothes, boy."

The android's fingers were surprisingly deft, and despite his size and mechanical intensity, he was so precise and soft. Painfully so, Pat thought. Granddaddy removed Pat's jacket and made eye contact with the small poltron, using his big thumbs to slide the leather from Pat's shoulders. He untucked Pat's filthy uniform, slid his thumbs under the fabric, briefly touching the band of underwear Pat had forgotten about until he momentarily felt Granddaddy's cool digits slip underneath, then pressed upwards. Granddaddy rolled the uniform shirt up, up, up, pressing just firmly enough into the poltron's light flesh to cause him to shiver and mew in a way he had not done in a long, long time.

"Oh, look at you, sweetheart," Granddaddy cooed. "So cute. So fragile."

"What are you talking about?" Pat asked, his voice shaky.

Granddaddy continued undressing him, lifting the fabric above Pat's chest. The poltron's heart skipped a beat as his nipples popped out from underneath the slowly drawn fabric, and he found himself leaning into the android's touch. He couldn't help it. Granddaddy's hands were, despite their appearance, so soothing and gentle, and Pat's body was so tense. He... he needed this.

"That's it, boy. Let go." Granddaddy's voice was a warm hum. "Let me take care of you. You've been so stressed."

Pat was frozen, panting. His arms were pinned as the fabric lifted over his head, but not off entirely. Granddaddy settled the shirt behind Pat's neck, then brought his hands back down to Pat's chest, rubbing and squeezing his soft flesh. Pat's brain told him to fight ot, but his body told him to stay, to relax, to let Granddaddy do whatever he wanted, since he felt so... so goddamn good.

"Look at those nipples. You've got a perfect pair on you, Pat. I saw them poking through the shirt, even, just begging for ol' Granddaddy to take care of 'em."

Pat's mind was hazy. He had never felt so vulnerable, and his heart pounded with both anxiety and arousal. He had never been this close to an android before, and while he had heard of sex-bots, he didn't expect one to be so... caring, masculine, deep.

"Granddaddy, what are you doing?" Pat's voice, too, was soft now.

"I'm taking care of you," Granddaddy smiled. His metal jaw flexed, and his mouth opened, revealing a row of shiny metal teeth from behind the bushy synth-beard. "You've been working so hard, and I want to help you."

"Help me?"

"I'm a special robot, Pat. I can bring you into a world of pleasure that you've never experienced before. All you have to do is let go. Take a bath. Relax. You'll be free to leave, but we both know you're not going to, not yet. You're not going to miss the chance to feel so, so special for your big ol' Granddaddy, are you?"

Was this actually the starbark dealer trying to distract him? Or was this some sort of strange security measure put in place by a long-forgotten species? It was all too bizarre, and yet...

Granddaddy tweaked Pat's nipples. The poltron gasped, and his hips buckled. He humped directly into Granddaddy's fat, rubber belly, which made a distinct squeaking sound as the cockhead slid against the smooth surface. The combination of the two sensations made his eyes roll back into his head.

"That's it," Granddaddy purred. "Good boy. Your bath's ready."

Pat caught his breath. "Wh..what?"

Granddaddy was right: directly behind Pat was a bubble bath, where there had not been anything before. The tub was deep and wide, which was perfect for his tiny body.

"Where..." Pat mumbled, trying to make sense of magically appearing tubs as Granddaddy continued to rub thorough circles into his nipples. "Ugh... where did that come from?"

"Oh, don't worry, sweetheart. Your big, strong Granddaddy's got you."

Pat was shaking. His knees felt weak.

"Why don't you take your panties off, honey? I can wash you up."

Now that shook Pat out of his stupor. His tail bristled and he tried to shake off the pleasure-cobwebs of his mind. He grabbed Granddaddy's wrists and tried to push them away. "What are you talking about?!"

"You don't need to hide them anymore. We're all alone here. You can be you. Your uniform is just hiding it. You play up that big-hero-man gig for the others, but that's a mask you put on to survive out there, yeah? I bet you love how pretty they make you feel. Let Granddaddy see them."

Pat stepped back, his face growing hot. "You don't know anything! You're just a droid!"

Granddaddy smiled and leaned back. His thumbs lowered from the nipple-rubs, and trailed back down towards the band of Pat's uniform pants. "It's okay, girly-boy. You're safe with me..."

Before Pat could say anything, Granddaddy's fingers hooked under the band of the poltron's pants, and started to tug downwards. Pat was frozen, his heart pounding in his chest. His eyes darted back and forth between the android's bearded face and the floor as his pants fell down, and his underwear was revealed for the first time to anyone, ever.

"Ooooh, look at these!" Granddaddy chuckled. "Pink with white lace and bows. You've got such cute panties, sweetie! Oh, they make Granddaddy so happy. They're so perfect for my special little girly-boy."

"Stop... stop it..." Pat's cheeks were burning red. He had never been more embarrassed in his life. It was the worst possible situation he could have ever imagined: being seen, finally, after all these years, while on a mission! His secret had been hidden from his colleagues and everyone he had ever met.

No one knew, not even his family, that when he was alone, he loved prancing around in the frilliest, most feminine clothes on poltron.