From: Philanna A'tri

Subject: Kody, I’m Sorry

Kody, please come find me. Drop everything, I’m begging you. This isn’t ‘urgent’ like that AI uprising on Earth’s moon, where it wasn’t going to be a bigger problem for a few months.

I’m being indoctrinated, Kody. I can actually feel some of the changes now. It’s not just getting, uh, carried away, like I was talking about in my last message.

I can see clearly what was happening there now, by the way. It wasn’t pleasure conditioning. It was just distracting me. I know that because almost any line of thought I take about the mechanism of indoctrination, I get distracted before I’ve really done more than lay out my given assumptions, before I can make any conclusions.

I asked Cordelia, and she didn’t have that. For her it kicked in whenever she tried to plan her escapes.

“I had a great idea, once,” she told me. “I noticed a particular pattern to the power fluctuations, and based on the last time I was here-”

“You’d been to this place before?”

“Right,” Cordelia confirmed. “Before I was reassigned to the Ascension Project, I was here working on accelerated-reality combat sensor suits.”

“On what?”

“We never quite got them to work,” Cordelia said, “at least not while I was here. And since I never saw them in the field after I abandoned Komainu, I have to assume nobody afterwards was more successful.” She sounded regretful. “We were blending stolen alien and Reaper technology, with augmented reality processing and projection, and a low-tier neural interface.

“Mulneans’ suit targeters have incredible fire-predictive capacity if they’re calibrated correctly. And with the Steel Collective’ radio-neural broadcasting, we could effectively give human combatants a sensorium that processed faster than our own. The goal was human soldiers with the reaction speed and precision of Mulneans.”

“Cordelia, that would have been a low-level indoctrination source on every soldier!” I blurted, horrified. She shrugged placidly.

“At the time, that was one of my own objections,” she said. “But we were confident we could edit the devotional parameters of indoctrination. If our troops had to be indoctrinated, they could be indoctrinated to a cause they already believed in.”

“That’s robbing them of free will.”

“I never particularly worried about that for our troops,” Cordelia told me, and it chilled me how casually she said it. “Now I don’t worry about it at all. Free will isn’t a necessity of life, Philanna. It’s not even a benefit to most of those who have it.”

I shuddered, but my mind was still on her comment. “This place must have been chosen for indoctrinations because research had already been carried out here, then,” I said.

“I can’t swear to that decision,” Cordelia told me. “I wasn’t here at the time.” She seemed completely disinterested. It occurred to me that she had given me a very precise answer without even considering speculating on it. Nothing in advance what she could prove axiomatically.

It was a very mechanistic answer, I suddenly thought. I wondered if that might be a side effect of indoctrination, imposing encoded rules on behaviour the way AIs are limited. It seemed a promising line of investigation.

Rather than follow up on it, Kody, I leaned forward and kissed Cordelia. She answered my kiss with what in hindsight I think was amused tenderness, kissing me back and putting her hand on the back of my neck to control the length of the kiss.

I moaned into her embrace, crawled forward almost involuntarily to press against her. Cordelia held me to her for a few moments, letting the heat of our kiss and our bodies build, but then broke the kiss firmly and moved me back.

She looked steadily into my eyes with her own, which seemed to sparkle a brighter blue, and she laughed gaily. “I think you’re coming along very well,” she said. “You’ll be ripe soon.”

And then she got up and left my holding cell, leaving me in a pool of arousal and need. I realise now that she must have gone off to report.

I stared at her back until I couldn’t see it anymore. I found I was visualising her body nude again, as I had seen it twice now, and I imagined her hands on me, her fingers inside me, teasing and stroking, as I succumbed entirely to lurid fantasy. It seemed to me that I was squirming around her fingers, and I had cum several times before my thoughts seemed to clarify at all. I slept before I could try to pick up my train of thought, before I could even remember what I had been thinking about when I surrendered to the impulse to kiss her.

That was two days ago, and I still haven’t even been able to consider anything else as evidence for or against the hypothesis. If I may be honest, Kody, I’m scared to try again.

I hear someone approaching. I’ll finish this later.

–

Why didn’t I just send this on incomplete, as I had the last one? I was speaking of how urgent my own rescue is, but I didn’t send it. I heard Cordelia approaching again and I took this as reason to delay.

I think that wasn’t my own decision, but I fear that it may have been.

Kody, I have more news. I have been out of my cell.

“I told him you wouldn’t be ripe quite yet, but he’s insisted,” were the first words Cordelia said on entering my cell. “You surely know I cannot disobey him, so come along.”

Well, I had my own reasons to want to see him, so I did.

Did I say I wanted to see him? I mean I wanted to see the station. Sooner or later someone would slip and I’d see something that would give me a clue, either to solve the indoctrination problem or to help you find me.

Yes. That’s what I meant.

I was amazed by the quarters he was in when we arrived. Except for the occasional luxury habitat or planetary system government station, space stations tend to the utilitarian, and science station most of all; any real luxury is usually a nightclub, and everything required to make it one was imported at great expense by the owner with an aim for profit.

So seeing him in quarters larger than a typical station chemlab, with a luxurious quadking bed as well as his desk, holoprojector, and control complex startled me.

Cordelia put her hand on the small of my back and pushed me inside the door. I thought she would follow me through, but she closed the door behind me.

I confess I was startled. While I’m no trained assassin, it’s rare that people don’t assume as Commander Kody’s companion that I can fight, and of course I can - and I have my tie to the Starsoul to boot. No intelligence I’ve read on the Shogun indicates great combat prowess or bravery in his past.

I looked over my shoulder to see Cordelia taking up residence at a viewport looking into the room. It was just low enough that, as she unzipped her bodystocking, her bare breasts could be seen from within. She was expressionless as she had been when I first saw her over his holocall.

I was trying to decide how best to take advantage of the opportunity, turning back to the Shogun. I could inflict significant injury before Cordelia could even get to the door. Could probably kill him before she could stop me. I thought it would be an interesting test of the indoctrination to see if the effect ended with him.

Kody, I should not have stopped to think that. I hesitated to wonder whether I would survive, and I found myself instead remembering licking your juices from my fingers, my eyes in contact with yours, the charge of excitement between us strong.

That prevented me from taking immediate action, and before I could clear my head, the Shogun said “Strip.”

“I will do no such thing!” I told him hotly. But my hands were already rising to the throat of my bodysuit. My thumb and forefinger found the fastener, and I was drawing it open, shouldering out of it enthusiastically, moments after I had finished speaking.

I wriggled out of its constraints at the waist, conscious that every motion I made showed off my body even more so, and hurriedly drew it down my thighs until I could step out. My panties followed a moment later. There was no hesitation in my actions.

Kody, my love, I’m so sorry. I was acting before I realised, my breasts bared to him before I could think. But even once I could think, I couldn’t stop myself. I promise you, Kody, I tried to resist. I truly did.

But my body did not obey me. I obeyed only the Shogun, who beckoned me closer with a finger. My body took this for command just as much as his word, and I made my way up to him. Kody, I can’t express how I felt. I should have been shaking, but my body did not allow me even that.

He snapped his fingers and pointed to his belt, and I swallowed. “Take out my cock,” he told me. His voice was as resonant as we have both heard it on the holo. For the first time, though, he did not sound to me like an enemy, and I do not like that.

I took out his cock, of course. There was no way for me not to.

I felt myself wet, and was not sure if it was the feel of his hard cock in my hand, or the indoctrination, or even the memory of our passion in the past. I just knew my body was excited.

“Fuck me,” he told me. And my body obeyed. Kody, my love, I am so very sorry.

I straddled him and lowered myself onto him, and he smirked, and he let me roll my hips and grind myself up and down the length of him, milk the thickness of him inside me, let me work for his pleasure, still smoking casually, watching me with that smirk.

I braced myself against his chest with a hand and I rode him obediently and I closed my eyes and I started to ride him eagerly. Doing what he wanted, devoting myself to his pleasure, set fires of pleasure burning within me in turn. Before long I couldn’t hold back, was riding him with urgency, was bouncing up and down his length with speed, was humping him with furious eagerness, the pleasure all I could think of.

When he was done with me, he beckoned to Cordelia, and she came in and she put her arms under my shoulders and she dragged me bodily from him, then carried me naked back through the corridors to my holding cell, where she left me.

I have wronged you so deeply, my love, and I fear part of me took pleasure in it, and I cannot stand that.

Come find me, my love. Come for me, Kody, I beg you.

*

“Hello, Kody,” Philanna said, smiling ruefully into the hololens. “You need to get me out of here. I really don’t know if I have much time left. Please come for me, Kody.” She swallowed. “I thought it might be easier to get my messages to you through proper holo recordings now. They’ve given me full access to the comm suite systems in my cell console now. I don’t have search, but I can record and transmit.”

She looked down and away. “I recognise that you’re going to wonder why I have that privilege now,” she said. “Things have changed in the past week. the Shogun is still here, on station - I do wonder if he always was, but Cordelia will not tell me and I would not trust his answer.

“But the wider organisation of Komainu still runs, and the Shogun delegates to very few. Only those he can fully trust. Of course, since you convinced Cordelia and Twining to betray him, that list is much shorter. He has to take most of the decisions for Komainu himself.

“He’s constantly in communication with dozens of projects, some research, some clandestine operations.” She went silent for a few moments, staring off into the distance. “They remind me of you, actually. In their reports. I’ve seen yours, and I know how much detail goes missing if you decide the higher-ups shouldn’t hear about it. I can see the same gaps in theirs.

“Yes, I’m seeing these reports. After breakfast every morning I’m taken from my cell and I go to the Shogun’s office. I sit at his comm suite. I…”

She sighed slowly, head bowed. “I’m a glorified secretary,” she says. “I triage the messages coming into him. I organise them into urgent, no action needed, non-urgent. And I refer them up to him. They opened up the comms in my cell so I can filter for urgent messages at night, while he sleeps. Cordelia tells me she’s so happy that this has become my responsibility, not hers.”

The look she gave the hololens was apologetic. “I even pass on his answers. And I know, Kody, I know I should be deceiving him, bogging him down in details that don’t matter while he thinks he’s handling urgent inquiries, or at least burying the important stuff so he can’t decide in a timely manner.” Again she looked down, wondering when she’d developed such a set habit of not meeting the eyes of others. “I haven’t been. I’ve done the job just as well as if he’d been my top-paying client, as… in my old role.”

The Twilight King’s old database made her privy to an astonishing amount of information, and being Ouhanian meant that she could retain a huge amount of it in her memory alone. And yet it had proved so useless in this predicament.

She was sure that was the only reason she hadn’t claimed her old title. It couldn’t simply be her seeing herself more as a cog in the machine anymore. “He told me to, you see,” she confessed. She bit her lip, losing herself in the memory. “He told me my role. So I… uhhh.”

Her eyes crossed briefly before rolling upward into her head, her features slackening briefly into an emptiness she hoped she would still have been horrified to see on her face, one she now associated with Cordelia Floyd after all their recent time together.

“I obey,” she half-droned, half-moaned, before blinking several times, refocusing.

“It’s the same about trying to escape,” she said, as if nothing had happened, and indeed for her it had already been forgotten. “I haven’t even thought about it since the first day on this duty. The guards escorting me already barely care to keep watch. They know I’m safe. Kody, it’s exhausting.”

Philanna smiled softly. “Although I get plenty of rest. That’s one thing I didn’t expect about indoctrination - it turns out we don’t need hobbies. So I’m not studying constantly and filling my head with empty dramas or distracting myself with combat drill if I can’t study, I get to just sit and not think in between duties. I’m not driving myself to exhaustion. I don’t strive for perfection.

“Cordelia called it perfection. It’s not, but I do understand what she means now. I’m a better version of myself.” She was sitting up straighter, her smile broadening as she talked, an obviously genuine sense of delight having taken hold.

“Oh - I don’t know where I am, either. I haven’t been told not to find out, and I know if you had a destination, you wouldn’t let being grounded stop you. But of course I’ve no contact for you that isn’t your ship, so I have to hope either you think to collect your messages remotely or you get access back…”

She frowned thoughtfully. “I’ve gone off my point again, haven’t I?” she asked, and chuckled. “I’m sorry, Kody. I think my focus has been tampered with. I… uhh…”

Her eyes crossed briefly before rolling upward into her head, her features slackening briefly into an emptiness she hoped she would still have been horrified to see on her face, one she now associated with Cordelia Floyd after all their recent time together.

“I belong here,” she half-droned, half-moaned, before blinking several times, refocusing.

“So even though I know I should, I just can’t seem to force myself to,” Philanna offered apologetically, as if the previous few moments hadn’t happened.

“I know that must sound awful. I’m sure you could power through this, Kody, but I never had your strength of will, never even as much as my mother, and-”

She broke off. “Well, you know,” she said. “And besides, I’m definitely not in as bad a situation as she was. I’m enjoying myself, at least some of the time.”

She flushed in embarrassment. “Uh. Well. That is.” She was fumbling for answers now, answers not just for Kody but for herself. “It’s not scary anymore. I remember how it felt being brought in front of him the first time. That was completely different, you know? I was terrified. I was helpless. I was there against my will.”

She stopped short again, playing her words back in her head. “That didn’t come out right,” she said. “I didn’t mean that. I meant, uh, obviously I was there against my will, just like I am now. But I wasn’t allowed to do anything, I was watched. And I was scared. That’s what I mean by the difference.”

She didn’t examine the logic of that too closely. She wasn’t confident it would hold up and she didn’t want to find out that it didn’t. Hopefully Kody wouldn’t look at it too closely either.

“He’s busy, obviously, and he doesn’t talk much when he doesn’t have to,” she continued in hopes of making things sound better. “It’s not his way, I guess. But there are times when you see a better side of him.

“Ooh! Here’s an example; he always ordered me to get him a coffee after I’d been at my desk for an hour, and a couple of days ago I started making him the coffee a little earlier, before he ordered it. And he looked back at me and he smiled.” She knew how important that was but she feared Kody might not understand.

“I know how stressed he gets. Last night, I gave him a neck massage and a shoulder rub. I don’t think he’d ever have ordered me to do so, if only because how would he ever have known I was good at them? But I could see the tension in him, and I knew life would be better if he was less tense, and so I took it on myself.” She was talking now ahead of her own thoughts, wanting to plead her own case and the Shogun’s at once.

“He gave this little growl and I knew he must be really enjoying it, so I put much more effort into it,” she babbled on. “And he took my hand, one of them, and he brought it down across his chest and put it on his crotch, so I undid his belt and I reached in and…”

Blushing furiously, she trailed off, bowing her head. “Oh,” she said quietly. “Oh, I didn’t realise what I’d done until I told you that story. Kody, I am so sorry. It wasn’t my intent. I promise you. I…”

She swallowed and met the hololens’ gaze only with a visible effort of will. “I can’t escape, Kody,” she said. “Not under my own power. I can’t even try anymore.

“And as angry as you may be with me now, I think - I hope - you understand that I should be rescued. That it’s better for both of us if I am.

“Come find me, Kody. Please come for me, I beg you.”