As Mae had expected, with half of the cheer squad now good obedient breeder sluts Harry’s spirits were high, but he had dreams of bringing them higher still. The natural first step was to direct Alexis to arrange for the rest of the cheer squad to try the game in turn, though he gave this less urgency than he had the original project.

“They must be the ones who were less interested to start with,” he told her, and she nodded dutifully. “If you all act like it’s the best thing you’ve ever experienced, they’d be suspicious, right? Cheerleaders can’t be that dumb.”

Alexis did not bridle with offence at this comment. Instead she was still smiling as she said “Yes, they’d definitely be suspicious. Especially Toni.”

“Right. So, obviously they should be obedient breeder sluts.”

“Yes, Master.” Alexis was always smiling but never more than when she said that. Mae had never been fully certain if she was naturally that perky and cheerful at all times or putting on an act because she knew it benefitted her when people thought of her that way; the fact she was still like this now she was brainwashed probably proved one or other argument, but Mae had difficulty deciding which one.

“I’m putting you in charge of getting them to try the game,” Harry told Alexis. “Mae is at your disposal, obviously. Mae’s obedience is to us all, not just to me, isn’t that right?”

“Yes, Master.” She smiled in her turn. It felt hollow, though she would admit (if and when compelled to honesty) that it felt less hollow after every session she spent training under Lauren.

“Right.” He turned back to Alexis. “So get them under me, but don’t rush it.”

“No, Master.”

He nodded approval. “Alright. Both of you get to it. Mae, on your way out tell Lauren and Lina I want them to join me in here.”

“Yes, Master.” Here was Professor Chase’s bedroom. No doubt what he wanted them for. Mae could wish it was her who had been chosen instead - she felt as keenly as her fellow breeder sluts the need to suck and be fucked, the need to breed - but she could not disobey. So as they headed out, she paused beside first Lauren and then Lina, passing on the instructions that both needed.

Mae sighed, but turned to Alexis. “So,” she said. “How are we doing this?”

“I’ve only just been told what to do,” Alexis answered. “I have half a plan, but if we start before I’ve got the rest of it down, we’re almost guaranteed to make mistakes.”

“Right.” Mae nodded. “Perhaps we can sit down and figure out a plan together.”

The cheerleader’s smile became suddenly lopsided. “Perhaps you have some ideas you think I should adopt?”

“Well, I might have a couple-”

“In spite of the fact I know my squad much, much better than you would?” Alexis chuckled lightly. “Lauren has spoken to me about you, Mae. And your history.”

She felt small suddenly. This didn’t feel like being overruled; it felt like it had done when, as a child, she had run up against a limit she hadn’t known was there. The adults around her had found it funny, but she had always burned with frustration that nobody had told her where the boundaries were. The grand scope of choices open to her had been an illusion; if she had chosen ones they didn’t approve of, the illusion was pierced and the ruling came into play instead.

“So I don’t get to make suggestions?”

“You do. But you don’t get to protest if I ignore them.”

Mae was aware suddenly of a pit beside her, an open trap. “What happens if I protest?”

“I tell Lauren, and Lauren tells Master.”

He was just Harry when I started. Mae nearly blurted the stray thought out, her tenure as a good obedient breeder slut the only advantage she had in the conversation. Thankfully she caught herself before they could both be embarrassed further. “OK,” she sighed. “In that case, how about you put the plan together and tell me after? At least let me try and troubleshoot.”

The cheerleader’s smile had gone from open to amused to teasing to suspicious and now softened again into compassion. One thing was for sure; Mae wouldn’t consider it an empty, bland smile again. “Of course,” Alexis said, and she sounded like she genuinely meant it.

Mae took her leave, making her way home.

*

“There she is,” came the drawl as Mae walked back in. “You must live in the library these days.”

Mae’s shoulders had tensed when she heard her roommate’s tone of voice. She forced herself to relax her shoulders. This was already a confrontation; if the past few weeks had taught her anything, it was that bringing her own aggression into a conflict just made things worse.

“No,” she admitted. “I’m studying more than I was, though.”

“So what gives?”

Harry still hadn’t updated his standing instructions, and Mae was at a loss for how to follow them in a way that would actually quell Sandy’s curiosity. She shrugged, and headed to the kitchen. “I’m going to have a coffee,” she said over her shoulder. “You want one?”

“Not until you tell me what’s going on,” Sandy retorted, following close on her heels. “You’re acting very weird.”

“Does it matter?” Mae asked, and winced immediately afterward. She’d sounded too dismissive and she knew it; Sandy had been more an acquaintance than a friend to her, as she’d always had other options, but her roommate had sometimes had only Mae. Consequently, she’d always looked on Sandy as a little below her, but she’d been careful to manage her responses so the other woman wouldn’t suspect.

It was harder keeping up the facade now Mae knew what she had always been meant to be. She supposed that Professor Chase had dealt with it by letting go of her own old value judgements, but she wasn’t sure how she’d do that for herself.

“What’s got into you?” Sandy demanded, and the brittleness of her tone told Mae she’d noticed the dismissive tone. The pleading note told her that this still mattered too much to her.

“Nothing,” Mae said as she opened the fridge. “I just… look, it’s been a weird time.”

“So tell me what’s going on. That way I can help.”

The idea of being helped until she was no longer a good breeder slut sent a physical shudder through Mae. “I don’t need help.”

“Yeah, that’s clearly not true.” The sentence came to a more abrupt stop than they generally did. Mae could almost feel the realisation that Sandy had been struck with. “Is it drugs?”

Having seen it coming didn’t make it any more pleasant to hear. She turned to face her. “Do I look like I’m on drugs?”

“I don’t know,” Sandy said quietly. “I know you’re acting weird, and you’re lying to me, and you never used to do either. I just want to know what’s going on.”

“I can’t tell you,” Mae answered, meeting her eyes levelly. It was the truth, after all, just leaving out that the reason she couldn’t tell her was that she had been ordered not to. “Look, Sandy, I’m OK, I promise. I’m not on drugs. I’m not selling them either. It’s alright.”

Sandy studied her in silence for a long moment, lips pursed. “Maybe,” she said in the end, her tone grudging. Mae hesitated for a moment. She felt like she should say something, but on the other hand Sandy’s concession, however minor, had given her no place to push where pushing wouldn’t look suspicious.

So she made them both coffee, and after a while she went to bed.

*

Outside of office hours, Professor Chase now only answered her door if she heard a specific pattern of knocks. There was, after all, a reasonable chance that she wouldn’t be decent by the standards of society,

It was also the case that the pattern wasn’t sounded very often. Harry would simply let himself in with his own key (though this certainly wasn’t meant to exist) so it was really only the other members of his harem who ever needed to sound it.

Lorraine was therefore quite surprised when she heard the pattern rapped out at a quarter to eleven one Wednesday morning. She rose from her desk, reaching out to gather up her cashmere sweater as she did so - it was the simplest item of clothing to spare her blushes in the event someone saw her at the door - and pulled it on as she made her way to the door.

The pattern had repeated itself twice before she got there, each time delivered with increasing urgency and faster. She opened the door eventually and immediately had to give ground as Lina, Tiffany and Alexis pushed their way in, along with -

Well.

The moment the four newcomers were in Tiffany had spun on her heel and closed the door with a slam. She grabbed the key in the lock just as fast, and Lorraine found herself tracking that just as much as she was assessing the unknown party in front of her.

She was a woman, most likely the same age as the cheer squad (if only because she wasn’t consciously dressing more formally on a college campus), and her arms had been strapped to her sides by someone’s belt, wrapped around her wrists and hips and fastened tightly. A canvas bag bearing the logo of a local store selling refillable cosmetics had been pulled down over her head, and muffled noises - squeaks of mingled outrage and fear - emerged from it steadily.

“I thought we’d never get in without being spotted,” Alexis said, looking worried. “Hello, Professor.”

Lorraine gave her a fleeting nod, still trying to catch up. “Girls, who is this?”

“We don’t know,” Lina answered.

Before Lorraine could open her mouth to ask further Tiffany was speaking in explanation. “We spotted her following Mae. She was trying to stay hidden.”

Alexis snorted dismissively. “Badly,” she said, and Tiffany nodded.

“Right,” she said. “You know the way people try and sneak around in movies?”

Lorraine nodded.

“It really stands out,” Lina said. “She was obviously suspicious of something.”

“And we know,” Alexis continued. “She’ll be more than just suspicious now. But we can fix that.”

Lorraine was still looking between the three cheerleaders with mounting bewilderment. She wondered if they’d given off this same aura of one mind in multiple bodies before they were all brainwashed together, or whether somehow the installation of Harry’s code in their hindbrains had synchronised them in some way. On the face of it, it was an absurd idea, but the three breeder sluts were acting as one. “I think we’ll have to, now,” she said heavily, summoning up the wherewithal to take charge only with an effort of will. “Three of you to bring her here?”

“We couldn’t risk her escaping,” Tiffany said.

“Chelsea is keeping the rest of the cheer squad distracted,” Lina filled in. “And Bianca has her phone and her keys. She’s going to find out if there’s anything written down which might make anyone else suspicious.”

“This sort of thing would be so much easier if we’d already reformatted the rest of the cheer squad,” Alexis added. “Toni and Kris especially.”

“God, if we’d had Kris updated, we wouldn’t have needed three of us to get this spy to you,” Lina agreed. She was smiling wistfully.

Lorraine sighed. “See if you can get her attached to my chair,” she said. “Securely, mind. We don’t want her to do anything we’ll regret.” She didn’t like it - not at all - but they couldn’t have laughed off kidnapping this woman even before having that conversation She wanted to call her Master to confirm things first, but there was the problem that he might give them orders before he had a chance to properly take stock of the situation, orders they would then have to obey.

This is the same thing Mae got in trouble for, she thought ruefully. But sometimes, it really is better to beg forgiveness than to ask permission.

After a brief, pleasant and highly distracted mental image of begging Harry for forgiveness, she turned her attention back to the work the cheerleaders were doing as they bundled their captive into the chair. Lina and Alexis each secured an arm; Tiffany undid the belt that had pinned her arms to her side and used it instead to lash one wrist to the arm of Lorraine’s office chair.

The three of them hesitated for a moment, then Tiffany turned around. “Professor,” she said, “may I borrow your belt?”

Startled, Lorraine looked the scene over in more detail, and only then noticed that while Tiffany was in leggings and Alexis wore a short skirt and bobby socks, Lina was in jeans that currently hung very low on her hips - but weren’t a baggy cut. Her belt had clearly been used as the restraint; even as Lorraine watched, Lina took hold of her waistband and pulled it back up snug, knowing it wouldn’t last until she could get her belt back in place.

Wordlessly, she removed her own belt and passed it over, at which point Tiffany secured the other wrist to the chair.

Lorraine stepped back around her desk and stood there thoughtfully. It was unlikely their captive, whoever she actually was, would be willing to play the game long enough for the software to do its job.

On the other hand, the game framework was there as a trick to get people in front of the software long enough to take effect. So did they really need the game in this case?

“We’ll have to take the bag off,” she said, a little apologetically. “Make sure she doesn’t scream.”

“She won’t,” Alexis said.

“It’s not the bag that’s muffling her,” Lina added, and whisked it off, handing it across to Tiffany.

Lorraine recognised the revealed student vaguely - not one of her own students, but she’d definitely seen her in passing a lot, so probably was part of the department. Admittedly, her inability to place the girl accurately might also owe a debt to the bright pink kinesio tape making a large X covering her mouth.

Lorraine had seen athletes wear the tape before. It offered support to muscles or joints that underwent frequent strain, as she understood it. Used to offset against nagging injuries. She could easily picture the moment when, the reprogrammed cheerleaders finding a need to silence something, they realised they had a perfect option close to hand.

Lorraine met the glare above the tape with an apologetic smile. It wasn’t going to help, of course. “Are any of you girls carrying dildos?” she asked briskly as she picked up the helmet.

She was rewarded by sly grins from Tiffany and Lina.

*

It had all gone catastrophically wrong, but Sandy wasn’t at all sure how. Her cheeks were burning with embarrassment at the comment about her sneaking badly, but part of the embarrassment was that she didn’t completely believe it.

These girls were clearly in league with Mae, wrapped up in whatever junkie delusions had affected her friend so deeply, and Sandy strongly believed that somehow Mae had laid a trap. A trap that Sandy had obligingly walked head-first into.

Or was it drugs?

Drugs had been the obvious conclusion. The most money, the most risk. That meant the most secrecy and the weirdest changes in behaviour.

But they were talking so weirdly. Reformatting the cheer team? Updating them?

To anyone who’d spent many a happy afternoon sat next to their mom enjoying soap operas, this pointed inexorably in one direction. Mae - and half the cheerleaders - had joined a cult, and so had at least one of the staff.

She didn’t even want to think about the dildo comment.

The problem was that she’d been low on options pretty much since they grabbed her. She’d made the mistake of pausing in the opening of an alleyway so she could watch where Mae was going without being seen if her friend looked back. Four of them had come up before she realised she was in danger and bundled her deeper into the alley, one of them clamping a hand over her mouth that she’d only released in order for her friend to slap the first strip of tape over her mouth.

She looked around the quartet gathered in front of her and her conviction that she was face to face with a cult only grew stronger. There was something identical underlying all four expressions.

The staff member picked up a VR headset and tried to settle it into place on Sandy, who jerked her head away, her noise of protest escaping the tape only as a squeal.

“Hold her,” one of the cheerleaders said. The other two - Sandy had mentally tagged them as Jeans and Skirt - moved out to either side of the chair. Somehow the fact it was two cheerleaders doing this made it more of a nightmare.

One of them put a hand at the back of her neck and cupped her chin with the other, forcibly reducing Sandy’s ability to move her head; the other planted one hand so that it gripped Sandy just on the brow, with a thumb near one temple and her forefinger on the other, then put a second hand on the back of Sandy’s neck.

Thus restrained, she was unable to stop the headset being put into place, with one of the cheerleaders restraining her taking her hand away first, while the headset was fastened into place around the first woman’s grip.

The screen was already on. Sandy’s first impression was just of blue-white lines flickering in and out of her vision, not quite straight but not neatly curved. Her ears filled with sibilance. As minimalist as it was, the whole thing was overwhelming. The grip on her chin and neck lightened, so she shook her head, trying to throw the headset off, but no dice; it was too well fitted.

This was all mad, she thought. It wasn’t something that happened to people, it was something you might get in a video game cutscene, not even something happening to the main character.

She swallowed. The realisation that she’d somehow become a damsel in distress was a hard one.

Despite herself, the lines flickering in front of her vision began to draw her in. They had purpose and intent behind them, she was sure of it, but they weren’t there for long enough that she could focus on them.

The sibilance in her ears, on the other hand, was slowly resolving into a chorus of feminine voices - no, chorus was the wrong word. Babble would be much closer. They were overlapping, talking over each other, out of step. Any words in there, and there might be words in there for all she knew, were unclear.

From long experience in crowded lecture theatres before professors showed up, Sandy knew her brain would eventually make sense of the words, eventually separate out at least the biggest voices and the clearest fragments, but it took time.

Maybe there was something similar going on with the lines as well? The lines which were uneven thickness, that weren’t quite straight… perhaps they were words, flashing by so fast she couldn’t read them. They could say anything. Be any kind of message. Like the cheerleaders, spelling out words into her head: give me an S, give me an L, give me a U, give me a T…

There had been a lecture about this sort of thing, hadn’t there? She tried to remember. Surbiminals? Something like that. It did… something. She couldn’t remember. There were more important things.

…

More important than whatever process she was being forced through? That didn’t make sense. Underneath the headset she frowned and tried to focus. There was no sense to putting her through this unless they expected that once she had been, she’d stop causing problems. Of course, these were cult sluts of some kind, and cults didn’t always make sense. But she couldn’t operate on that assumption.

So this system was designed to have an effect on her. Well, whatever it was, she had its measure so far; the only thing going on in her head out of the ordinary was a desire to suck cock, and there was no way this VR was designed to do that.

This was brainwashing, then. Very cult. She hadn’t been paying enough attention to the cheer squad before they grabbed, bound, gagged, and hooded her - something they’d done with a startlingly ruthless efficiency, the fucks - but she could absolutely imagine Mae going through this. Mae was weak willed, too, not like Sandy; she just had to hold steady through this. Fight back whatever ideas it was trying to dripfeed her brain, where they would breed and proliferate.

That was it, surely. What she had to do was fend off the brainwashing. She could focus instead on what was really important.

She’d beat this cult like the proud slut she was.

She realised that she’d tried to say that out loud. ‘Slut’ would have been her proud declaration that she was better than these cult freaks. Her way of telling them that they couldn’t measure up to her. But it had just been another moan into the tape over her mouth.

“Skkk.”

These weird-ass losers didn’t understand how good it was to get your mouth around a cock. Sucking someone deserving off was what really marked her apart. What proved she was better. And it was easy to focus on the image, so that she didn’t need to worry that she might accidentally let some of the brainwashing slide in.

“Fkk.”

She was such a spectacular slut, ready to suck or fuck at a moment’s notice. That was what was really important. Nothing else could be as important.

“Brrd.”

Thinking about sucking and fucking was helping her to keep whatever this was at bay. All the same, and as much fun as both of them were, they didn’t on their own show the kind of commitment expected from and required of a good breeder slut like Sandy.

The sibilance in her ears abruptly resolved itself; a half-dozen or more feminine voices all intoning the same four words.

Slut. Suck. Fuck. Breed.

She couldn’t prove it but she was sure the blue-white lines flickering before her eyes were all saying the same thing. It was good, she thought, that this software was focused on what was really important.

“Slht. Skkk. Fkk. Brrd.”

Someone steadied her head with a hand to the back of it, and they peeled away the two tape strips that had bound her mouth.

“Slut,” Sandy said. “Suck. Fuck. Breed.” Her tongue flickered out over dry lips. “Slut. Suck. Fuck. Breed.”

She was feeling so much better now. Nobody ever considered how it must feel for hardware to receive a software upgrade, but she knew now that it was wonderful. She had been updated, her brain dripping with downloadable cuntent.

“Slut,” she began again, but she got no further. Something thick, rubber, and cock-shaped touched her lips, and rather than speak the next word her mouth opened wider and her head lunged forward to engulf it, sucking eagerly like the good breeder slut she was.

*

“She wouldn’t have been my first choice,” Harry admitted later, once Sandy’s mouth had been transferred from Lina’s dildo to his cock. “But you made the right call. Alexis?”

“Yes, Master?”

“What I said earlier about taking it slow and careful with the rest of the squad. That no longer applies.”

“Yes, Master.”

“We’re already under suspicion now,” he told them all, looking around them slowly to impress the significance of his decision on them. “We need to get ahead of things. Mae, Lauren, and - what’s your name?”

He alerted Sandy to the fact he was asking her with a twist of his hip. She paused, looking up at him wide-eyed and eager, and her mouth made a satisfying pop sound as she slid off his cock to answer. “Sandy, Master.”

“Sandy. You three are with Lorraine. Lorraine, I want the dean, the bursar, and our security head to be your next targets.”

“Yes, Master,” Lorraine agreed.

“Some of them may object, Master,” Mae said. “The dean’s definitely male. I don’t know about the others.”

“Well, either way,” Harry said, “we need them under control. And you’re going to get it done.”

“Yes, Master,” she conceded.

“If we can control the authority here, then we have the situation under control,” Harry said. “You all have your orders.”

“Yes, Master.”