"When is this going to happen?"
"You forgot 'Master', Anne-Marie. Just so we understand each other, every time you forget will earn you twenty-five lashes. I'm adding twenty-five to the twenty you already have coming, just for being you. And you know from last night I don't hold back."
"Yes, Master." I shuddered at the thought of forty-five strokes from the whip - his whip.
"To answer your question, tomorrow night. Remember, I'll forget who you once were, but not how many strokes you're due for. The context of our conversation will, in all likelihood, simply be reorganized.
"When the lock joining your wrists disengages, you're free to do what you like. Keep the gear handy. I want you wearing them at 10:00 PM. The lock is on a ten hour timer, and has a transponder that sends messages to my Blackberry. I'll know when it's engaged or disengaged. It also senses, through the conductive O-rings on your cuffs, when it's actually restraining the body of a human being, based on the electrical output of your nervous system, and whether or not your tag is within four feet of it. Unless you have someone else willing to wear the cuffs for you, and stand at your side at all times, you won't be able to fool me. Failure to comply will earn you a hundred lashes for each infraction. That's all for now. Wait for my page."
He hung up, and I held the phone to my ear, unable to move, until the disconnect tone startled me out of my reverie.
Chapter 26
Three hours later, I was lying naked on my back, a pillow propped under my back to take the weight off my sore buttocks. I was reading Seventeen magazine, I suppose out of sheer perversity. It was dull reading. "How to get a man" indeed. How do you get rid of them, I wondered?
The padlock clicked open, startling me, and fell onto my belly. I sat up and unbuckled the leather restraints. I put the gear into a drawer in my endtable, and noted the time. 11:00 AM. I had eleven hours before my implicit curfew.
Well, at least I could get dressed and try to live like I'm a normal human being, and not cattle, I told myself.
I got up and showered. I was careful when soaping around my newly pierced area. I brushed my hair, and started to dress.
I decided jeans were out of the question. I needed something loose, something that wouldn't chafe the tag or its attachment point. I ended up choosing a blue spaghetti strap silk dress with an empire waist. It had enough extra fabric around my hips for me to rearrange it if I were uncomfortable, and silk felt better on bruised flesh than denim.
I pulled out my Filofax and looked at my schedule for the day. I was free through the next day. Tomorrow I had an early Psych class.
Homework. I'm a student; I'm supposed to do homework, right?
I spent the afternoon working on a report for the Pysch class, and catching up on American Lit reading assignments. Being a student was actually kind of fun. Besides, it helped take my mind off the fact that I was a piece of property. Even if I asserted to myself that I was more than cattle, I had the tag to prove otherwise.
I was probably the only girl at my school with involuntary piercings. The only one who wouldn't be able to go to parties because I had to lock myself up by ten. The only girl who had to obey or die. Literally.
I shook my head to clear my mind. No point thinking about it; it is what it is. I'm never going to be a man again; and I'll never be a normal girl either. Okay, I'm a freak. Fine. Lots of those in New York. Just now I've got homework; concentrate on that.
Chapter 27
A week later I was kneeling beside Sam in his study. I was naked, my thumbs were restrained behind me with thumbcuffs, and my toes were cuffed in identical fashion. I rested the backs of my hands on the soles of my feet.
It had taken him less than sixty seconds to drag me from his front door, strip me, and put me on my knees beside him. I was a little awed by his efficiency - he had a no-nonsense approach that made up in authority what it lacked in style. While I tended to fantasize situations a little more ceremonious and ritualistic than my first five minutes here, Sam had, in a short space of time, demonstrated that he was Master of this house, and that I was a guest suffered only to the extent that I was at his mercy.
He had his hand in my hair, and was forcing me to look at a computer screen on his desk.
"This is your apartment," Sam said, pointing at a floor plan displayed on the monitor. "I wanted to show you this right off, before we begin, so you understand how short your leash is. Here," he fingered a bright red wobbly line moving about the apartment, "are your movements over the past week. I can filter the vector diagrams out by time, and expand or compress the time scale for better analysis. The tracking is done by triangulation on your ID tag via sensors installed around your street block - you won't be able to find them. They're sensitive enough to determine whether you're clothed, whether you're standing or kneeling, and how fast you're moving. Thus far the only warning flag I've configured has to do with the cuffs - which you've worn as commanded, I see. Good girl.
"However," he said, stroking my hair, "I can configure other flags as well. One, which I've just programmed, will notify me if you're wearing clothing inside the apartment for longer than sixty seconds. I want you naked in there at all times. In addition to the nano-disassemblers, by the way, your tag also contains generic nano which can be programmed on the fly to administer pain in the form of nerve stimulation. If you don't strip immediately on entering the apartment, you'll feel pain. It won't be pleasant. Do you understand, Anne-Marie?"
"Yes, Master," I whispered.
"Good. I want you to understand that the fact you were a man once earns you no privileges with me. I don't know who you were, and don't care. I bought you from John because you're pretty and have potential. Admittedly not much, but it's there."
He smiled down at me. "You know, I couldn't have done this to most women - they would have rebelled far too early for me to have set this up. But you love it - you can't help yourself - and that fact condemns you to slavery. Up to a certain point you had some volition in your submission - you could, after all, choose not to do so. I've removed that option, put it out of your reach. You let me do it, of course - that bit about buying you from John is merely the transferral of his claim on you - but now that it's done, now that I've got effective physical controls over you, submission to my will is your only option. John used psychology to control you. Psychological control is nice, but I like actual, physical ownership. I can now do anything I like with you - anything at all. I can kill you, or cause you pain, at a keystroke. John owned your mind. I own your mind, and your body. You're a piece of property. How does that feel, my little fuckpet?"
"I - it feels good, Master," I admitted, blushing.
He laughed. "So I guessed. Now let's see how good you are at sucking cock."
Sam turned his chair toward me, and pulled me forward between his legs. He drew his cock out from the folds of his kimono and pressed my lips to it. I opened my mouth obediently and he shoved his member in.
This had been my cock once. Well, not exactly - it was a nano-produced replica - but the effect on me was similar to the way being in the men's room of the library had made me feel. I had been robbed of my masculinity. And now it was literally being shoved in my face.
For all that, it was still arousing, having a cock in my mouth, sucking it. And though I knew this hot, throbbing, stiff staff of flesh had once been a part of me, now it was unfamiliar and daunting. A symbol of power - and I couldn't even recall what it had felt like to have one. I knew intellectually that my body, its curves and soft flesh, was not the body I was born with, but at the same time Sam's masculinity was as foriegn and mysterious to me as if I had never been a man. I simply couldn't visualize what had been like to be on the other side of this power dynamic.
John had done his work well.
As Sam slowly pumped my throat, his thickness stuffing me, I thought about my conversation with Natalie - now almost six months ago - and realized that she had it right. If nano meant you could be anyone, then your body had little b
earing on who you really were. Deprived of the ability to change, I was now fixed into one discrete identitiy - Anne-Marie - and since I could no longer change, my whole essence was dominated by the feelings, emotions and worldview that this frail, feminine body promoted - I couldn't escape or ignore them. I was a woman. And I couldn't imagine otherwise.
It had been a gradual evolution, I realized. I thought back to that first day, and remembered how strange my body had felt at first - my soft breasts, the curve of my belly down into the pubic mound, my wide hips. And how, later, when I learned that my change was not really of my own volition, I had yearned to fight my inevitable subjugation. Now all that seemed remote, as if another person had thought those thoughts and felt those feelings.
Now, in the presence of the man I had been, it really struck home. Why had I bothered to fight it? For better or for worse, this female form - on my knees, sucking a man's cock - was my proper place. I was happy, healthy, and that counted for a lot. I was owned property. And being the creature I was, this was enormously satisfying. So what if I had been made to feel this way? I felt it, it was real, I - Anne-Marie - was a real, living, breathing human being. I knew my body well enough now that I could no longer think of it as something I had been forced into. The imperfections - the freckling, the mole on my right forearm, my crooked smile - reinforced the feeling I had of being a natural female, rather than one created by nano. I was quite different from the person I had once been, but this was who I was now. Why had I resisted, in the hope of regaining my masculinity, when I no longer even identified with the gender I was born into, could no longer remember what satisfactions were to be had from being a man? I glanced up at Sam's muscled stomach and realized I felt no identification with his physical form at all. It might as well have been a stranger's body, it seemed so unfamiliar and foriegn to me.
How could I be angry with Sam for exercising his power over me when I needed someone so badly to do to me what he had done? The fact of the matter was that I needed to submit - emotionally, physically, psychically.
From that moment on, I could only see Sam as who he was - my Master - and no longer harbored any hope of being anything other than his slave.
Chapter 28
Eleven months passed. I figured this out later.
Two weeks after Master purchased me, he decided my memories of my former life were impeding my training, and subjected me to a series of memory blocks. To be honest, I almost welcomed the enforced amnesia. The very concept that I had not always been Anne-Marie troubled me.
From then on, from the suppression of my memories until I was liberated, I didn't just believe I was living Anne-Marie's life - I believed I was Anne-Marie. Her memories were overlaid where my own had been blocked.
I had no sense of the passing days. I think after the third month he moved me into his home. I lived full-time in Master's house, a live-in slave, with no clothing, no money, and no say whatsoever. I didn't even know my captor's name, and knew enough to guess that he wanted to keep it that way. It was actually a pretty good life, though it doesn't sound like it. A slave needs structure and rules to be happy - and I had plenty of both.
In retrospect, it was an interesting situation. We were living each other's lives and didn't even know it. There was no longer any angst-ridden introspection on my part; in my mind - remember that, for all intents and purposes, I was Anne-Marie, an avowed submissive - and even a DNA test would prove it - this was the life I had dreamed of having. All my life I'd wanted to be with a man like Master - cruel, commanding, authoritarian - and
Master knew exactly how to handle me.
He had me withdraw from school - and put the money in a trust fund, which he would sign over to me when he freed me from his service. According to Master, that would be in about ten years, sooner if he tired of having me around. I hoped desperately that would never happen, and the implicit threat made me work harder to please him. I didn't mind giving up college too much, though I did miss being around people my own age. Master's friends were all in their forties, and the closest I got to people in my generation was seeing them from the small barred window in my fourth floor cell.
Not that I didn't like the fact that all those men were so much older. It somehow made them more authoritative. I liked the grey on thier temples, and their natural confidence that boys my age lacked.
I loved them all, with the kind of awe one usually reserves for gods. They were beings to be worshipped, and I did so in the only way I knew how, in the only form they recognized. I was a nothing animal to be used by them, and when they used me, I felt safe and valued. I felt lucky when I was chosen, and not Anya or Sarah, to serve in Master's bedchamber for the night. I knew I wasn't exactly loved in return - but I didn't expect or deserve that - it was a demand I was in no position to make of them. Being a slave, in a sense, is an utterly one-way street: Any demand could justly be made of me, yet I could ask for nothing in return. I had no bargaining power. I didn't want any.
Mr. Dentz, to whom Master lent me for weeks at a time when he was out of town, seemed to regard me his favorite. On those occasions when I was his, Mr. Dentz would bring me up to his country house (packed safely in the trunk, of course) where he had a custom-built dungeon almost as well-stocked as my Master's.
Whereas Master was diffidently cruel, in predictable ways, Mr. Dentz had imagination. He was a font of new and novel methods of torture, sexual and otherwise. When not torturing me, he would sit out by the pool and I would serve him and his friends drinks. He had even more of a controlling nature than Master; when at his disposal, I wore a collar that paralyzed my vocal cords, making speech impossible, and when put away for the night I wore opaque contact lenses, to blind me.
I loved it. And, over the course of a year, I grew to love him - Mr. Dentz - more even than my Master. Rendered forcibly mute, blind, stumbling to please him, I felt as though my wildest dreams had been granted.
Thinking back on it, actually being Anne-Marie for so long was probably what made becoming a man again such a difficult experience. Anne-Marie's needs and desires were simple, clear, and satisfied in every respect by her enslavement to Mr. Smith. The life I returned to was much more complicated, and my emotional state much less blissful.
Chapter 29
One morning, I woke up feeling very, very strange.
Even before I opened my eyes, I knew that I was no longer in my snug little holding cell. I also knew, by the sensory feedback my body gave me, that I was Sam again, and found my memories intact once more.
I could remember being Anne-Marie; in fact, in my mind, I still felt like Anne-Marie, felt as if my essence had been poured into a scary, foriegn physical form.
I sat up groggily, opened my eyes.
I was wearing a hospital gown, sitting upright on a gurney. I looked around. I was in a nano lab, by the looks of it.
"How are you feeling, Mr. Smith?" a doctor said, walking briskly into the room. He had a clipboard under his arm.
"Like shit," I answered. My head was throbbing, my muscles sore. "How did I get here?"
"Mr. Maynard's slave ring was discovered a few months back. One of his victims had a case of appendicitis. Her owner brought her to the hospital. The nano-modifications were so cleverly done that it would normally have been impossible to detect them. But because the girl developed complications, more thorough blood tests were done, and the nano discovered.
"Her owner wasn't even aware that she had been nano-modified - he thought he had bought a born girl. The police used the slavery charges to get the seller's name from him, and that led them to Mr. Maynard. They've been tracking down his other victims and handing them over to us for restitition of their gender. You were lucky - your owner kept you on U.S. soil. There are fifteen girls abroad, and we haven't yet been able to extradite their owners. We have hope for a few of them, but most I think we'll have to give up on. The people involved in this ring are very wealthy and have a lot of political influence, and some are in countries where slavery i
s tolerated."
"What about -" I paused, biting down the word 'Master', "what about the other Sam? The guy who replaced me?"
"She is Anne-Marie again, and is in another nano lab downtown. I hear she's doing well, although I think she's having a hard time coming to terms with the conflict between the sexual inclinations she used to have as a man, and the ones she was born with, and has regained. We had to force your memories of the past year onto her to get the nano to take at all. She's apparently complaining we took her masculinity from her."
"May I see her?" I asked.
"In a few days, maybe. We need to do some more psych work on you first."
Chapter 30
It was strange, being the owner of my house, rather than a prisoner of it. My role under this roof had been so tightly circumscribed for so long that there was a certain wonderment in poking into rooms where I had been forbidden to go.
The fifth floor had been locked at all times. I had the key now, and went up exploring tentatively. It was still my library, but more sumptuously furnished. Funny that for a full year I hadn't even known what was up here; I'd long wondered, my imagination wrapping a crazy mystique around it. It wasn't so mysterious now.
I felt as though I were walking through a haunted house. This place had been the home of Sam and his slave girl, and I felt like a stranger here, not the Sam who had been and no longer Anne-Marie.
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