Zap

"Zap"

Ethan watched silently as Pamela's eyelids began to flutter. She gradually shifted position, the return to consciousness clearly a slow and difficult process for her. He watched as she began to reach up to try to rub the sleep from her eyes, only to halt in obvious confusion as her arm tugged against the leather restraints. Only when the bewilderment on her face turned to raw panic and her eyes went wide open all at once did he finally speak.

"Scream all you want," he said, savoring each word as it left his mouth. "There's--"

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!"

Ethan waited until she paused for breath. It took a surprisingly long time.

"Scream all you--"

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!"

She finally stopped to suck air into her lungs once more. Ethan looked at her. She looked at Ethan. There was a long pause.

Finally, Ethan spoke. "Scream all you want," he said. "There's nobody who can--"

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!" The end of Pamela's exhalation was hoarse, like someone who'd seen women scream a lot in horror movies but had never realized that someone was standing nearby with a glass of water on the sets of all those films.

"Done?" Ethan asked, a bit peeved. He'd rehearsed this moment a lot, in his dreams and fantasies, and he was a little bit irritated that Pamela wasn't responding the way he wanted her to. Only the knowledge that this was an entirely temporary and correctable situation kept him from getting genuinely angry.

Pamela let out a brief, experimental yelp. Then another, like the last drips of a faucet after you've tightened it that last quarter-turn. Finally, she nodded.

"Good," he said magnanimously. "Scream all you want," he continued, with the amused tones of someone who realized that the line sounded even better when the other person had actually done it. "There's nobody who can hear you."

Pamela yanked against her restraints for a few moments. She opened her mouth to scream, then stopped. She looked around wildly, taking in the drab green walls, the heavy metal door, the lack of furniture apart from the bed she rested on. The total absence of hope. She looked back at Ethan, and he imagined her trying to discern kindness from his pinched, craggy features and his beady eyes that poked out from beneath two thick, bushy eyebrows. Ethan was under no illusions about his own appearance. It was part of the reason he'd devoted his life to engineering this moment.

Finally, she spoke. Her voice was tiny, barely above a whisper, but she said exactly what he'd imagined she would say. "Please don't kill me," she whimpered.

Ethan allowed his mouth to quirk into a half-smile. "I'm not going to kill you," he said. He allowed the specter of hope to cross her features for a half-second before he continued. "In fact, nobody will even have time to notice you're missing. You'll return to your old existence, you'll smile and nod in all the right places and say all the right things to all the right people...and nobody will ever know you've become my mindless, obedient sex slave."

He brought out the Weapon, then, as her eyes widened in surprise or amazement or incredulity...or just possibly, he fancied, a bit of excitement at the thought. "It's my pride and joy," he said. He ran his hand along the polished wood barrel, traced a fingertip across the gleaming brass and watched the moisture from his sweat fog briefly on the warm metal before evaporating. "Not just a breakthrough but a work of art. When I pull the trigger, the energies of the Weapon will course through your living brain, instantaneously earthing themselves in the very heart of your mind and permanently eradicating all resistance to my will. Your memories, your skills will remain...but all trace of the woman you were will be gone forever. You will be a helplessly obedient drone, a mindless thrall subject to my command and unable to even conceive of a single thought without my permission." He paused for effect. "Just the way you always wanted to be."

He saw it, then, the tiny flicker of shock and recognition in her already-wide eyes that told him she knew exactly what he was talking about, even if she didn't know how he knew. "Oh, yes, Pamela," he whispered, leaning in a little bit closer. He saw that her eyes were fixed on the Weapon, locked in horrified fascination like a mouse staring at a cobra. He felt his cock pulsing rock-hard inside his pants. "I know all about you. I've been watching you for a long time, Pamela. I know about your other identities, the people you become when you're online. I've read all your stories, all those women turned into mindless sex slaves. I've been in the chatrooms late at night, watching you act out all those fantasies time and time again and pushing your Masters to try harder, push farther, make the dream more real." He patted the Weapon with one hand. "This is when it all becomes totally real, Pamela. This is exactly what you wanted."

Pamela responded with a tiny shake of her head, her eyes still focused tightly on the Weapon. Ethan felt his cock surge with lust as he continued. "Oh, don't try to deny it," he said smugly. "We both know you're lying. You can try to pretend that you value your mind, your thoughts, your free will. You can try to pretend those were just fantasies, that you're not really that kind of girl. But I can see the truth in your eyes. More than that, I can see the arousal you're trying to deny." He couldn't take it anymore, he reached down and began stroking himself through his pants. "That's why I went to the trouble of kidnapping you first, so you could see this. So you could anticipate the moment when you became my slave. Admit it, Pamela. This is what you want."

Pamela shook her head again. "No," she whispered, her voice echoing off the linoleum in the silence. "No, it's not."

Ethan chuckled. God, it was even better than he'd imagined. "You're going to try to tell me you haven't fantasized about this? You haven't dreamed of losing every bit of yourself and becoming a true thrall, not just a pretender like all the other girls? You're going to try to claim that your dead-end job and your tiny apartment is worth fighting for?"

"No," Pamela said, her voice steadier than he expected. "I want to be brainwashed, just...not like this."

"What?" Ethan felt like a dancer who'd just heard the record scratch to a stop. He struggled to find the next thing to say to bring the conversation back in line with his fantasies, but every time he groped for a word, it was always the same one. So he said it again. "What?"

"It's the struggle that's sexy," she said, sitting up a little as her eyes lost some of their fear and gleamed with the enthusiasm of a woman who'd finally found someone she could open up to. "I always loved the idea of the slow, sensual takeover, you know? Trying to fight, even though you know it's no good because the brainwashing is a slow, inexorable tide eroding your resistance with the relentless bliss of obedience."

Her breathing sped up a little as she got into the fantasy. "And then you reach that moment where you don't even remember what you're resisting or why you should be resisting it, where the struggle becomes mindless and instinctive because your thoughts are all turned to pleasure. And then you realize the pleasure is too perfect ever to resist, and your thoughts collapse because in the end, you want to give in. You want to obey. The...the machine, the power, the whatever-it-is, it takes you to the very brink...and you step over yourself because you can't imagine doing anything else." She was shifting rhythmically now, rubbing her thighs together under the blankets. Ethan suddenly wished he'd undressed her, but he had wanted to watch her strip once she'd become his thrall.

"That's what I want. To be seduced into obedience. To struggle against the endless, inexorable undertow that submerges my mind into an endless sea of blank, dreamy pleasure. To lose myself in Master's will..." She inhaled sharply and threw her head back, her nipples stiffening as she came. Finally, she opened eyes he didn't remember her closing and looked at him steadily. "But a ray gun that just goes, 'Zap, you're my slave, now let's fuck'?" She snorted. "BO-ring!"

"I. Um." Ethan stared at Pamela for a long moment. The pounding of his heart seemed very loud in his ears, felt even louder in his cock. "Could you excuse me?" he said. "I'll be back in a little bit."

*****

Ethan burst through the door in a rush, almost spilling the bag of groceries he carried. "Hi!" he said, his voice a gasp of relief trying to masquerade as nonchalance. He'd imagined coming back into the room to find Pamela gone, waiting for him with an improvised weapon, waiting for him with a squad of police, dead from some sort of brilliant suicide plan rather than live as his sex slave...

But instead, she just stared at him with a vaguely petulant look on her face. "I'm hungry," she said. "It's been almost twelve hours."

"I know," he said quickly, placatingly, "I'm sorry, I got back as quick as I could. I really didn't expect to have to keep you here this long, I didn't have any food here for you, and oh man was I busy, I had to go find another bed and I had to recalibrate the Weapon and--" He dumped a few packages of food into her lap and started back for the door. "Sorry, I didn't know what you liked so I just got you a bunch of stuff." Ethan darted back out of the room to get the bed.

When he wheeled it back in, Pamela was sitting there with an expression of exasperated amusement on her face. Her hands groped for food that was just a few inches out of her extremely restricted range of motion. "Ahem?" she said.

"Oh!" Ethan squeaked. He darted over to her bed and put a cup of applesauce into one hand and a plastic spoon into the other. She gestured as if to dip one into the other, tugging theatrically at the restraints.

"Oh!" Ethan said again, by now thoroughly flustered. He'd never been very good with women. He was always nervous, always doing the wrong thing and saying the wrong thing and spilling the wrong thing and stepping on the wrong thing. That was why he'd invented the Weapon. He wanted a girl who would always understand, who would never be cruel or disdainful. He felt completely off-balance dealing with a Pamela who actually had feelings of her own.

And yet... He scooped some applesauce onto the spoon and put it to her lips, watching her gratefully suck it off. Was it just him, or did she seem to actually...like him, just a little? He poured a trickle of bottled water onto her tongue, watched her swallow gratefully. It was probably his imagination. He wasn't generally good at getting women to like him. They usually tried to run.

"Oh!" Ethan gasped a third time, dropping the bottle of water onto the bed and racing for the door. He heard Pamela squeal behind him as the cool water glugged out into her lap, but he had other things to think about. He flung the door open and darted into the hall.

A few moments later he returned, dragging a slim blonde woman. "Sorry!" he said. "I just remembered, and I didn't want to just leave her out there, and I..." He reached down and hauled the deadweight of the woman up and onto his shoulder. She flopped bonelessly over him, and he struggled to lift her. "Sorry," he grunted again. "I, um...I know, I probably look like a total idiot." He stood up halfway and lost his grip on the woman's ankles. She slithered down his back to the floor. "I just, I've never kidnapped anyone before."

Pamela arched an eyebrow at him. "Oh really?" she said, sarcasm dripping from her voice.

"That's different!" he shouted, shifting the woman back into a sitting position. "You wanted--I mean, I thought--that was different." He grabbed the woman's wrists and moved around the bed. "I didn't just grab you off the street like I did with her. I planned everything, you know?" He pulled hard, then stopped with a wince as he heard the clunk of head hitting bedframe. "Down to the last detail. This is..." He moved back around the bed, letting the woman slump back down to the floor. He sighed. "This was a lot easier without someone watching."

"So what's she for?" Pamela asked, sitting up and leaning forward. She seemed animated, interested despite herself.

Ethan grabbed the woman around the waist from behind, feeling absurdly like he was about to give her the Heimlich maneuver. He hauled her up and flopped her onto the bed, then shifted her legs up. "I needed a test subject," he said. "If I'm going to recalibrate the Weapon to do...what you wanted..." He felt his face grow hotter than could readily be explained by the exertion. "I have to test it. I've already lowered it to half-strength, but I don't know what kind of effect that dosage will produce for certain, not without trying it out."

"How did you test it before if you didn't do any kidnapping?" Pamela asked as Ethan flipped the woman over and began fastening the restraints into place.

"Chimps, mostly," he said absently as he tightened the wrist restraints. "Their brains are basically similar to humans, and they're capable of understanding human language. All I needed to do was test their reactions to commands and give them 'before and after' MRIs." He pulled the ankle restraints taut and stepped away from the bed. "But for this," he said, pulling out a small, stubby brass pistol with a flaring nozzle, "I needed someone who can give me feedback."

He pulled the trigger and a soft blue light began to play over the woman's body. "What's that?" Pamela asked from behind him.

"Sleep ray," he said, a bit of pride sneaking into his voice. "Same thing I used to capture you. If I don't neutralize it, she'll probably sleep for another eighteen hours or so." He watched the woman slowly stir back into consciousness, then leaned into her field of vision to get her attention. "Excuse me, ma'am," he said. "Are you feeling okay?"

"Yeah, I'm...fine," the woman muttered groggily. "What's going on? I thought I told you I didn't do outcall--" She tried to rub her forehead and started in terror when the restraints halted the motion. "What the fuck?"

"Um, yes," Ethan said. He didn't quite know what to say this time. The speech to Pamela, he'd rehearsed a thousand times in his head until he could say it in his sleep (and possibly did, for all he knew) but this... "Um, I was planning to shoot you with a mind-control ray that turned you into my sex slave. Do you think you could talk us through the process, tell us what you're feeling as it happens?"

"Fuck you!" the woman shouted loudly. "Fuck you, you creepy limp-dicked woman-killing fuck of a son of a motherfucking pansy faggot fuckass..." Ethan sighed internally. He'd forgotten to cover 'screaming all you wanted' this time.

He went back out into the hall, the screaming following him the entire way, and grabbed the Weapon from where he'd left it. He came back into the room to find the woman still spitting out obscenities. "That's fine," he said, trying to sound soothing even though he doubted she could hear him over the sound of her own voice. "Just keep talking..." He pulled the trigger.

Almost instantly, the woman's shouts dissolved into a low, wordless moan. Her nipples stiffened as though Ethan had turned the temperature in the room down thirty degrees, and her back arched into a phantom cock. "Nnnnuhhhhh," she whimpered, her eyes staring sightlessly at the ceiling. "Uhhh-uhhh-uhhhnnnnNnn!"

"Can you hear me?" Ethan asked, lowering the gun slightly. "Do you feel capable of resisting my commands?"

"Guh-uhh-uhhn!" Drool leaked from the corners of her mouth as she bucked endlessly, her hips pumping back and forth over and over as the radiation from the Weapon took effect. "Gnuhh....mahhh...fuuhhhhhck..."

Ethan looked back at Pamela. "Did she say 'fuck', or was that just random?" Pamela shrugged.

The woman's low moan turned into the high, endless scream of a woman stuck in the throes of orgasm. Her hands strained to reach her pussy with an absolute single-mindedness unlike anything Ethan had ever seen before. He watched in utter astonishment as the woman pulled, her strength like that of the possessed, until the metal bedframe gave out under the strain and her hand plunged under the waistband of her jeans to dive into her pussy.

"Ooh, ohh, oh yess, oh yes Master, oh oh fuck Master love Master fucking love love obey must obey feels so so ohh ohh fuuuuuuuuuckkkkk..." At last the tremors of activity ceased, and she slumped back onto the bed to lie prone and still. There was a long silence.

"Um..." Ethan coughed nervously. "Excuse me? Miss?" He waved at her experimentally, wishing he'd remembered to ask her name before shooting her with the sleep ray. "Are you, um...feeling alright?"

The woman finally sat up, her eyes perfectly glassy and her face utterly devoid of expression. "I am perfectly obedient, Master. I live to serve your will."

Ethan turned back to Pamela, a sheepish smile on his face. "Lower the dose?" he asked.

Pamela held up her hand, thumb and forefinger less than an inch apart. "Just a titch."

THREE WEEKS LATER...

"Watch out!" Pamela's shout came just as he was adjusting the restraints on Patient Seven, and made him realize why she'd been acting so weird. Well, weird for a woman he'd just kidnapped and was trying to force into a magnetic resonance imaging machine. It was kind of surprising how quickly you got to know what was normal and what wasn't.

Patient Seven hadn't been acting normally. She hadn't been struggling (not that it would have done her much good--he'd tied her down so tightly to make sure she didn't screw up the results by thrashing that she was practically mummified. It would be so much easier to get the 'before' MRI if the sleep ray didn't screw up the results...) She hadn't been yelling obscenities, or pleading for mercy. She hadn't really been doing much of anything. She'd just been looking around. Everywhere, he realized in retrospect, but behind him.

All that went through his head just before he turned around, much faster than he thought he was capable of. After he turned around, all he could think of was that the dose on Patient Four must have been much too low. If she was capable of pretending to be a slave in order to be let free of the restraints, she was definitely in need of another blast.

Too bad she was holding the Weapon. "Keep your mouth shut," she snarled. She gestured to the entranced women lying on their beds, their eyes closed in an an endless blissful dream of obedience. "I swear, you try telling any of these fucking bimbos to even so much as move, and I will shoot you with this thing until you're a fucking vegetable."

Ethan started to say, "Okay," then remembered that what he was saying "Okay" to was not talking, and closed his mouth abruptly. A moment later, realizing that she was expecting something from him, he nodded. He felt a trickle of sweat running down the back of his neck as he tried to remember what setting he'd calibrated the Weapon to last. Did Patient Five go under too quickly? Or was that Patient Six? He had notes, but Patient Four probably wasn't going to let him look at them.