The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

‘Rouge’

(mc, f/f, nc)

DISCLAIMER:

This material is for adults only; it contains explicit sexual imagery and non-consensual relationships. If you are offended by this type of material or you are under legal age in your area, do NOT continue.

SYNOPSIS:

Four investigative journalists attempt to infiltrate the Mars home base of the powerful Rouge Corporation, whose utterly secretive rejuvenation treatment is the closest humans have come to achieving immortality.

INTRO COMMENTS:

This is inspired by, and a total rip-off of, trilby else’s ‘Hive’.

* * *

‘Rouge’

Part One

There was a grunt, and a clang, and an explosion of dust.

A pair of booted feet slid into the room. They were thick boots, bulky, and covered in the fine salmon-colored dust that now glittered in the air of the small room.

Pressure-suited legs followed them, dangling in space. The circular vent from which they were emerging was set in the sloping ceiling of the room; the round grill that had covered it was still wobbling slowly to a halt on the rocrete floor below.

The legs swung around, seeking purchase. They found none. There was a pause, a gathering of nerve, and then the legs slid out into the room, followed by a torso. The woman’s suit would have been pink with dust regardless, after days on the Martian surface, but it was also pink by design, a cunning, rumpled pink, patterned with the best camouflage design that the computers back on Earth could come up with.

Her body slid into the room, hanging from the vent, until her helmet clicked against the vent’s metal rim. She lifted her head and slid in further; her compatriot still in the vent was holding her arms. Already her shoulders were starting to burn. Getting this far had been strenuous enough.

Then her feet found purchase. Gingerly, they explored it; flat, stable. She nodded, and her comrade in the vent let go.

Cardy let her weight drop her into a crouch on top of the crate, for such it was; she quickly spun to take in the room. It was a storeroom, a small one, with an open doorway into a large well-lit room beyond. The air glittered with dust.

If anyone had heard the vent cover fall, or saw her entrance, there was no sign. The room was small, and squared on the interior but rounded on the exterior wall, the wall that Cardy had come in through. Mars habitats were mostly bubbles in the underlying rock; exterior walls tended to be curved.

She clambered off the crate—the envirosuit was bulky and hard to move in, despite having cost the Journal hundreds of thousands of dollars. As quietly as she could, she tiptoed to the open doorway. It was more of an archway, really—there was no door at all.

The room beyond was huge, and filled with row upon row of dark green plants. Hydroponics. They glowed with the light being fed to them through a serpents’ nest of optical fibers. Cardy didn’t see anyone in the room, but the plants were stacked floor to ceiling. The room could be almost any size, and contain any number of guards.

It seemed unlikely. They put guards on the outside, not inside to watch plants grow.

She gestured at Mella, up in the vent, indicating that the coast was clear. Then she fumbled with her pouch and pulled out her environment reader. The readout lit up as it began analyzing the air. Oxygen levels normal, humidity a little over fifty percent—doubtless because of the hydroponics—no sign of toxins or dangerous gases.

Yet.

Mella was slithering down into the room. Behind her, Jane waited her turn.

Cardy watched the display on the e-reader carefully. Nitrogen normal, helium normal, trace gases... she had carefully entered all the airborne intoxicants, narcotics, and will suppressants that she could find. Thousands of them. The e-reader hadn’t detected any of them yet, but she would wait to be sure.

No one had ever broken into RougeCorp and returned to tell about it.

* * *

It was the wealthiest and most powerful entity in the solar system. Of course it was. RougeCorp sold immortality. Six months in a rejuvenation chamber at one of their fortress-like facilities and you were twenty years younger. Not just the way you looked, not just the way you felt. Physically. At a cellular level. Twenty years younger. If twenty wasn’t enough, you could wait a year and do it again.

No one knew how it worked. Dr. Hanh Rouge had published perhaps half a dozen neigh-indecipherable papers in quasi-reputable scientific journals midway through the previous century. When her peers were being generous, they’d labeled her ‘eccentric’. When not, ‘crackpot’.

She’d disappeared. Twenty four years later, RougeCorp incorporated in her home city of Hanoi.

No outsiders were ever allowed near the operational side of things; seventy percent of RougeCorp’s income was thought to go towards security. The smiling corporate representatives on NetCast only ever called it “RougeCorp’s unique aging reversal process”.

No RougeCorp employee had ever come forward to claim the billions offered for the secret. What were billions when it meant death in forty or sixty or eighty years?

So RougeCorp employees were employees for life, or at least none of them had quit yet. None of them had ever spoken to the public about what they did at work.

And no one on the outside would cooperate with any sort of external inquiry, either; to do so was death. If you ever lifted a finger against RougeCorp, RougeCorp would never lift a finger to help you.

Entire governments had found that out the hard way. Early on, the government of Brazil had decided that all of its citizens deserved immortality, and had ‘nationalized’ the Brasilia facility in the dead of night with a battalion of special forces.

Everyone involved was dead now. The facility had self-destructed, and no Brazilian was treated at any RougeCorp facility anywhere for almost seventy years.

Mexico, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and a dozen other nations had suffered similarly for similar offenses, overt, covert, or otherwise.

To cross RougeCorp was death.

Of course, there were always the zealous. People willing to die a natural death if only they could find out the Truth. Crazy people. Zealots.

People like Cardy.

And her team. Mella, Jane, Siobhan. All women, of course.

Because RougeCorp didn’t buy men.

It had almost been beyond even the tremendous financial and political clout of RougeCorp to survive that revelation, when it was made public. They bought women. Bought them and spirited them away. There had been riots, inquests.

But people wanted to live forever, and it had passed.

One of the unmentioned costs of rejuvenation, aside from almost a million dollars per treatment, was, now and then and with no obvious pattern, the handing over of a woman, who would never be heard from again. Sometimes a spouse, sometimes a lover, sometimes a total stranger.

But mostly daughters.

Not very often. There were only a few hundred documented cases, but since none of the sellers would voluntarily come forward, Cardy knew that those were just the tip of the iceberg.

No one knew what RougeCorp did with them. The smiling salespeople, the implacable guards, the cool technicians—no one involved with RougeCorp would say word one.

Most people assumed they killed them and harvested something, as part of the rejuvenation process.

The fact that most people were willing to accept that sickened Cardy.

Cardy had found out, from sources in the American government—who would never oppose RougeCorp directly but who had interests in monitoring space traffic of every sort—where the women were going.

Mars.

* * *

The team was all in the room now, all looking at her.

Cardy waited... waited... and then it was done. The e-reader had detected nothing beyond artificial designed-for-humans air. The LED next to the readout was a perfect glowing green.

It was nonetheless with trepidation that Cardy popped the clasps on her helmet. The air hissed in.

It smelled like a greenhouse.

Not that that meant anything, of course. RougeCorp and Mind Control had been linked in the public consciousness since they first unveiled themselves. None of their tens of thousands of employees ever said anything about the workings of the company at all. Anything. The lack of a single employee willing to spill the beans to anyone, ever...

RougeCorp’s customers described their experiences, of course, but ultimately they were all the same and they meant nothing. Everyone knew what the inside of a RougeCorp facility looked like. No one knew how it worked.

The more paranoid fretted about being a customer. Not that any of them had ever shown any signs of an attitude adjustment, other than joy at their sudden vigor. But no one knew what went on in there. While you asleep, were secret commands installed? Were the leaders of the world doing RougeCorp’s bidding?

Would you, if you went to them? Had they mastered Mind Control?

But Cardy was here, now, and the bulky suits that had let them cross Mars’ unlivable surface and gotten them past the perimeter security were simply unfeasible inside. The possibility of unknown drugs in the air was just one of the many risks they were running.

Many, many risks.

Cardy lifted her helmet off, and gave the others a thumbs-up.

It was George who had pissed her off the most.

“Of course I want to know what’s happened to all those women,” he’d said. “But it’s just too dangerous.”

Too dangerous. All the men thought that. None of them would come along.

Of course not. RougeCorp didn’t kidnap men.

A rancorous breakup wasn’t the best way to start a mission like this, but then chances were that they wouldn’t be coming back. The Journal had paid for this, had connived in setting it up, but had been damn sure that they had total deniability if the four of them went missing the way that all of their predecessors had.

Yulia Lenkov. Cardy had gone over her notes a thousand times, memorizing the schematics, poring over the theories and the ideas and the plans. She had been well-prepared, exhaustively researched, and very, very smart.

And she was as gone as the others.

Perhaps bits of her were floating around in some twenty-year-old sixty-year-old right now.

“Cardy.” Jane’s subvocalization came through clearly on the tiny receiver in her ear canal. “We’re all ready.”

The three of them looked at her. They’d stripped out of their envirosuits and were now in basic tan jumpers, pockets bulging with supplies. Cardy shook off her reverie and accelerated her own stripping.

Jane and Siobhan were the cameramen. Lenses dotted their jumpers, recording everything, storing it on tiny memory cubes in their pockets. They were backed up, each camera linked to multiple cubes, although they dared not make any transmissions (at least, not of any power, the comm links were very short range and a risk at that), so if the world was going to learn what went on here, Siobhan or Jane would have to walk out.

Mella was here to ensure they did that. Her jumper bulged with weaponry. She was former Special Forces, had been part of the Chinese Expeditionary Force in ninety-eight. There were a countable number of people on Earth who could beat her in a fair fight.

Her badassitude didn’t diminish her anger at RougeCorp one bit. They’d taken her sister’s daughter two years ago. No, had been given her sister’s daughter, by a brother-in-law who wanted to live forever.

His daughter had been sixteen.

Men could be such fuckers.

And there was Cardy. The brains of the operation. The soul. No one knew more about RougeCorp Mars than she did.

Of course, what she knew could fill a small wastebasket and still leave room for her head.

* * *

She was done taking off her suit. They stashed the suits behind a stack of small barrels. Mella peered into the garden room, and nodded.

Records. They were here for records. The world had to know. They’d find out what RougeCorp did with all those women and the world would have to take notice. Have to stop simply accepting their disappearance as the cost of living forever.

Cardy slid into the garden room. It was huge, and the rows upon rows of plants blocked all view of the far wall. They were healthy-looking, dark green and leafy, an eye-catching contrast to the monotonous red of the surface. The ceiling was rocrete dashed with white lightstrips. Twisted ropes of fiber-optic cables ran up into it at regular intervals.

Along this wall it was at least a hundred feet to either end. No one seemed to be around. Had there had been, they would hopefully assume that the four women in the tan jumpers were just technicians. Based on RougeCorp Mars’ imports, Cardy figured that there were at least a thousand people living and working here. Of course, that many people could be self-sufficient in a lot of ways, and her painstaking and statistically rigorous guess was ultimately just a guess. There could be a thousand, there could be a lot more.

But it was unlikely in any event that they all knew each other. And the team was already inside, past the guards. Surely anyone they met here would not automatically be suspicious.

And if they did become suspicious, Mella would deal with them.

Swiftly, quietly, the group made their way along the room’s edge. The grey wall was pierced by doorways into other small storerooms, at regular intervals. There were no obvious cameras, although that didn’t mean there were no cameras at all. But the room certainly appeared to just be a room where RougeCorp Mars grew its food.

“Soybeans,” Siobhan’s voice said in her ear. “These are soybeans.”

Mella’s hand came up, and they all froze. A quick jerk, and they dodged backward, into the rows of soybeans, peering through their broad leaves to see what Mella had seen.

A woman emerged from the plants a few rows ahead.

No one gasped.

She was dressed in red, crimson, a glossy rubber or latex or plastique, skintight and shining, from neck to toe.

She emerged from a row twenty feet away and turned away from them, facing the direction in which the group had been headed. She stopped.

Cardy stared at her. Why was she dressed like that? A skintight red fetish outfit? It couldn’t be comfortable. Her legs glistened like they were dipped in scarlet paint, her arms were the same.

Why was she dressed like that in a garden room?

Cardy couldn’t see her face from here. Her ears were covered with... headphones? Mirrored metal cones, covering her ears entirely and swooping in quickly diminishing curves away from her head to end in points; thin needles with thick bases, sprouting from the sides of the woman’s head, at ninety degrees to the floor.

Antennae?

The woman’s hair was short, neck length, and was tightly bound behind her head by a crimson plastic bauble. Her back was smooth, muscles visible beneath the tight scarlet she wore, and at the bottom of it...

The suit she wore was one piece, except. It stretched reflectively from fingertip to fingertip, toe to neck; but at her crotch it was open, cut round in a perfect circle. It looked to Cardy like an antique key-hole, a round opening containing smooth brown flesh for the key shaft, the space between her legs an opening for its teeth.

She was not naked there. Instead, two buttons high on her hips pinned up the straps of a bikini bottom, a thong as blood red as the rest of her uniform. Her smooth mahogany ass was visible around it, clenching the shinythin strip. And on her legs there were—pockets. Small, square pouches, high on each thigh, centered on her smooth legs. And from the pouches ran wires...

...up under her bikini bottom.

Cardy was still staring when the woman suddenly turned around, rotating in place like a revolving door.

She was Indian; a high fine nose and honey brown eyes accompanied her milk chocolate-colored skin.

Her eyes were wide open and emotionless, glittering.

Crouched behind the wall of plants, Cardy prayed for the woman to go away, to head the other direction. What a fuck-up, found out within meters of breaking in. Did they have a chance at all of pretending they belonged here?

The woman in red did not appear to have seen them. She had in her glossy red fingers an instrument and a large spray bottle. Her attention was on the plants; she placed the instrument against the leaves of one, then another. She performed her task unsmilingly, her eyes wide and glassy.

Her eyes...

Mind Control, Cardy’s brain whispered.

The woman reached the top row of plants; for a moment she considered the instrument in her hand, then without haste raised the bottle and sprayed the plant. Once, twice, thrice.

Then she turned, pivoting in place, and walked towards where the intruders hid.

Mella would take her down, if she thought that the woman saw them. To be captured was to disappear.

But the woman’s eyes were empty, mindless. She did not look around, did not see anything but whatever it was that had captured her mind. She stared blankly at the plants in front of her, and Mella did not move. The woman began to touch them with her instrument.

Her breasts were shinysmooth under the crimson plastique she wore. On the front of her thighs were two more pockets, small rectangular bulges from which crimson wires dangled, their ends disappearing up under the slick red front of the bikini bottom.

Cardy could guess where those wires ran to. What they ran to...

The woman tested the top plant at the end of her new row. She pivoted, stepped, pivoted, stepped, and disappeared into the dark green leaves of the new row.

They waited. Mella would give them the signal that it was clear to move.

Then something moved in Cardy’s peripheral vision. She swung her head around.

Another red-suited woman was walking right towards her.

* * *

She’d been in one of the storerooms. She was Caucasian, tall, blonde, her breasts smaller and her eyes blue, but as wide and as glazed-over as the Indian’s. She was looking right at Cardy.

Right through Cardy.

Her outfit was the same. Glistening red, from the neck to the toes, where her feet showed a single bifurcation between her big toe and her others. The perfect circle around her shiny red thong was flesh, smooth and pale pink. Her lips were slightly glossy, reflecting the overhead lights in just the same way as her wide, blank eyes.

Astride her head were the shiny silver earpieces—not headphones, Cardy could now see, there were no wires, no headframe, just earcovers, flush with her head, as though her ears had been removed and replaced with the robot equivalent. The antennae stuck out above her shoulders, did not bounce as she came smoothly closer.

A single red LED glowed near her head at the root of each antenna.

She was just like the other woman. Different, but exactly the same.

These women were robots.

There was a blur of movement. Mella had seen the blonde and was charging, rushing forward to knock her out or kill her-

“Stop,” Cardy hissed.

Mella stopped, five feet away, hands outstretched.

“She doesn’t even see us.”

Mella’s sudden rush had provoked no reaction at all. The blonde kept walking smoothly forward, each long stride identical to the one before, not rushed, perfectly measured. She, too, was wired, small pockets on her thighs connecting to the mysteries under her plastique thong with thin red wires.

She walked forward, came close, and passed Cardy without turning her head. Without noticing Cardy at all. Her pale blue eyes never moved from dead center.

Cardy watched the blonde stalk away. The woman was holding a package of something she had fetched from the storeroom. The cheeks of her ass, surrounded by reflective red and with the stripe of her thong between them, flexed rhythmically as she walked slowly away.

“What’s wrong with them?” Jane asked.

“They’re brainwashed,” Siobhan replied. “I told you that RougeCorp had to be doing that.”

They had come out of the aisles they’d hidden in and watched the woman walk away, slowly and evenly down the row of plants.

“We should incapacitate her,” Mella growled. Even subvocally, it was a growl. “Hypnotized or not, she saw us and might tell someone we are here.”

“Are they all going to be like that?” Jane wondered.

And then there was another one. A brunette, shorter, tightly wrapped in glossy red, stepped out from a row behind them, and pivoted to face the plants. Her brown eyes were wide open, her mouth emotionless and slack. She reached out with an instrument.

“Look,” Cardy said, “Let’s just get out of here.”

Mella gave her a hard look.

“Mella, if these women disappear, that’s as much a problem as if they report us. But if we leave them alone, it’s entirely possible that we’ll never be mentioned. They’re obviously not... programmed to react to us.”

Programmed, Cardy thought. Goddess, that’s the only word for it.

“And when we meet one who is?” Mella demanded.

“We’ll deal with that then. This room is too busy. Let’s get out of here.”

They had bunched up together to watch the blonde recede. Mella gave Cardy a disapproving look, then shrugged, and started walking along the wall again. “Which way are we going?” she asked.

“On the wall we’re approaching there should be a corridor, and that leads to an elevator bank.”

They passed another dozen rows of plants. As they drew near the opposite wall, an Asian woman, her body the color of glossy lipstick except where her golden skin showed on her face and in a circle around her crotch, stepped out of a storeroom on their right. In her hands was a tray of seedlings.

Mella stopped—and so did the Asian woman. Her head slowly rotated to face them. Her eyes were black, and so wide they seemed lidless. The silver needles which sprouted where her ears should have been glinted.

They stood looking at each other, frozen.

“Keep going,” Cardy hissed.

Reluctantly, Mella took a step, and resumed walking. They moved past, turning to watch the woman, whose head did not track them but remained locked looking left. As Siobhan, last in line, passed her, the woman’s gaze hooked on her and rotated, then stopped when it reached the directly forward position.

The woman stepped forward, walking smoothly into the rows of plants. The team watched her disappear.

“She was just waiting for us to pass,” Cardy said.

“Wishful thinking,” Mella replied, but kept moving.

Were these them? Was this what RougeCorp did to its victims? Hypnotize them into robots, strap them into fetish plastique, and set them to tending plants?

It was better than death—maybe. If it were true. If they were all like this.

But why?

The group reached the corner; down the new wall a door was visible. On the schematics Cardy had in her mind, the door opened onto a corridor, which led to a bank of elevators.

Somewhere down in the complex, the records waited. What RougeCorp was doing... and why they were doing it.

Of course, getting there and back out again was the trick. Cardy hadn’t known what to expect. Some sort of office complex, some sort of manufacturing facility. Not... not a room full of soybean plants tended by hypnotized women in fetish gear. Goddess, they’d already been seen four separate times.

And now, again. Standing with her back against the wall was another red-suited woman, African this time, with coffee-colored skin and expansive breasts straining against her plastique bodysuit. Her hands were at her sides; she gazed at the plants opposite her with blank eyes, empty eyes. The four infiltrators hurried by her.

Were they all like that? All the kidnapped women, strapped into red suits without crotches, with wires plugged into their...? Hundreds, thousands of them?

Why?

There was a reason here, somewhere in this place. Someone in charge. Perhaps even Dr. Rouge herself. Why not? She would live forever if anyone would. The fact that she hadn’t been seen for eighty years...

Meant nothing, really.

They had reached the doorway. It was metal, twin steel sheets with a slit down the middle. No handles at all. No guards, but no handles.

Mella slid her hands along it, up, down. She shook her head. “How do we open it?”

Cardy didn’t know. There had been nothing in her research about special doors. She said as much.

Mella pulled out a knife from a pocket. She worked it into the crack, tried to pry it open. The doors didn’t budge.

“Sst,” Jane said.

They looked up. Another woman was approaching, legs scissoring smoothly, posture erect, eyes staring glassily ahead. The four of them moved aside as she came near, her gaze locked on the far wall.

Then she pivoted to face the door, and stepped toward it.

The door slid open.

The woman walked through, and the four intruders darted after her.

* * *

It was a corridor, corresponding to what Cardy recalled from the schematics. Other metal doors graced the side walls, leading to what she guessed were other garden rooms. The floor was rocrete, smooth and grey, as were the walls, which sloped gently over to form a ceiling. The hallway was hemispheric in cross section. Why, Cardy didn’t know.

The woman in red—white skin, black hair, silver earpieces motionless with her stride like antennae plugged into her brain—led them onward. She walked slowly, evenly, and they kept pace with her easily, not speaking.

Cardy wondered if she could hear them even if they did speak, with those silver caps covering her ears.

If they weren’t actually replacing her ears...

I didn’t need to think that.

The woman kept walking, oblivious. Her ass flexed, bulged and stretched, bulged and stretched, in time with her even stride. The thin wires from her leg pockets reached up into the crack of her ass and vanished beneath her thong.

There was little doubt where they were going.

Cardy wondered what the woman was listening to, on those silver antennae.

Then, without warning, the woman pivoted ninety degrees and moved towards a door. The door slid open to receive her, giving a glimpse of green plants and white fiber-optic light, and then slid shut.

The women in the corridor stopped.

“How are they opening the doors?” Jane asked.

“It’s those earpieces,” Mella replied. “Has to be. They aren’t wearing anything else.”

“Could be something implanted,” Cardy observed.

“What about those little pockets?” Jane suggested.

No one replied.

“They’ve got little pockets on their legs—”

“We know,” Mella said. “It’s not the pockets.”

“Oh.”

“Potatoes,” Siobhan volunteered.

“What?”

“That’s what they are growing in that room. Potatoes.”

“Let’s move, folks,” Cardy broke in. She pointed. “Should be some elevators down there. We can take them down to the administrative levels.” If, of course, the levels she had guessed were administrative actually were administrative. If not... well, if not she’d guess again.

They moved more quickly down the corridor, now that they were no longer following the woman in red.

Cardy was feeling better. If the only people in the complex were these awake yet unconscious women, they stood a pretty good chance.

“Um,” Jane said.

“What?”

“I was thinking. Should we, um, should we disguise ourselves?”

Cardy looked back at her. “What?”

“Well, um, all the women here are wearing those... those clothes, and I just thought that we sort of stand out and if we found some of those clothes and put them on, we’d look like we belong here.”

I don’t want to belong here, Cardy thought. But it was a good idea. So good she should have thought of it. But looking like them... Inside, Cardy felt like that would be the first step towards being like them, and the thought frightened her very core.

“That’s a very good idea,” she said. “Let’s try and find some.”

“Elevators,” Mella cut in.

There they were. A wall with five doors. No buttons.

A woman in red stood in front of one set of doors. They have such good posture, Cardy thought to herself. Not thinking must do that to you.

The door opened, but too far away, and the woman stepped smoothly into the elevator and the door was closing before the intruders could come near it.

It might not even have buttons inside, Cardy thought. No, that’s silly. Those ear things can’t read their minds.

“Well, intrepid leader, what now?” Mella asked.

“We wait,” Cardy said. “Pick an elevator, and wait.”

They picked the center one, and gathered around. A minute passed, then another.

With a soft sound, one of the doors on the end slid open. A woman in glistening red stepped out and glided down the hall. They watched her go.

Then there was a click. Everyone tensed. The elevator door in front of them slid open.

It was occupied.

There were three women in the elevator. On the left and on the right were women in red, standing stiffly at the elbows of the woman in the center.

The woman in the center was dressed all in white.

The material was the same, glossy skin-tight plastique. The cut was the same, neck to toes, only instead of soft slippers her feet ended in tall shoes, four-inch rises under the hard white sole and eight inch heels. Her breasts were average size, well-framed by the tight white gloss.

Her earpieces were also the same, silver towers growing from the sides of her head. The glow of the red LEDs contrasted with the snow white of her suit.

Her skin was lightly tan, winter Mediterranean.

She wasn’t wearing a thong.

Her sex was nude, smooth skin above her bare cleft, lips just visible beneath, all framed by the perfect circle cut into her suit.

There were no pockets on her thighs.

And she looked at them. The woman’s head did not move, but her eyes did, swinging right to look at Jane and Mella and left to take in Siobhan and Cardy. Then they returned to center, and became fixed again. She was staring at all of them, and none.

Her pursed lips opened, spoke.

“In.truders.”

* * *

They stared at the woman in white.

Her lips moved again.

“Intruders. You will surrender,” she said, staring blankly down them. “You will not run. You will wait here until you are collected for conversion.”

Cardy stared at her, trembling and uncertain.

Mella tackled her.

“Surr—” the woman said, before Mella rapped her head smartly against the floor and her eyes closed, then slowly opened again to reveal the irises rolled up into her skull. A small sigh opened her lips.

“Boss?” Mella demanded, looking over her shoulder from her perch atop the fallen.

“Get off the elevator,” Cardy hissed. “We have to go. We have to go now.”

The women in red hadn’t moved. The light reflecting from their chests and thighs barely shifted with their breathing. Their eyes remained fixed and glazed, staring down the hall.

Mella scrambled off of the woman and out of the elevator. The doors did not close. The women in red remained staring, the woman in white crumpled on the floor.

“Come on,” Cardy said. “We have to leave.” She turned and led as they scurried back down the hallway.

They hadn’t known. Women in plastique, Mind Control. Of course they hadn’t known. How could they?

But they had it all on vid, now. Jane and Siobhan, both. They hadn’t found the records, hadn’t gotten more than two hundred yards, but what they had on vid would have to be enough. Fetishdolls tending soybeans. Wires that dangled and ran up into sexes. Empty eyes...

It wasn’t enough, not by half, but it was better than nothing and now they had to get out.

A door opened on their left and Cardy almost yelled, but it was just a drone in red, emerging from a garden room with a tray of tools. They ignored her and moved on, not quite running, scrambling. The door to the room they’d come from was just ahead.

How would they open it?

The tools.

Cardy spun around. The others stopped, but she hissed “Keep going!” and they reluctantly moved on without her.

The drone walked smoothly towards her. She was Asian, glittering black eyes focused on a point somewhere behind Cardy, ten yards and an infinity away. Her hips scissored, the wires brushing between them, but they did not distract Cardy as she grabbed a trowel and an instrument that looked surprisingly like a prybar right off of the tray.

The woman did not notice, did not stop, did not break stride. The LEDs astride her ears glowed.

Cardy ran, now, ran flat out to the door where her friends were waiting. The look of approval in Mella’s eyes as she brandished the metal rod with the spike at the end gratified even through her fear.

How long did they have? Had anyone heard the woman in white? Was anyone even listening?

At the other end of the hall, past the steadily moving drone with the tray, Cardy could see the woman getting to her feet.

They jammed the rod into the door. It shifted a little, opened a hands breadth.

“I need a hand,” Mella said, and Jane leaned forward and pushed on the rod as Mella pulled. The door slid open another inch.

For a moment Cardy hoped that the drone she had passed would arrive at the door and open it for them, but as she watched the woman pivoted, ten feet away, and glided smoothly through a different door.

Then, twenty feet beyond the door now closing behind the drone, two other doors opened.

Women in black came out.

Cardy’s breath stopped. They were in plastique, shining under the overhead lightstrips, but it was black, black as night. They too wore no shoes save the plastique slipper-like things, and had glossy thongs with thin wires creeping up underneath. And they had the ear-antennae, of course.

They also had on visors.

Black visors, running from one ear to the other, which reflected the light as harshly as the material taut all over their bodies. RougeCorp had taken their eyes as well as their ears.

Their forearms were different too, swollen, and Cardy realized they were wearing large cuffs which ran from wrist to elbow. For some reason they reminded her of oak twigs swollen by wasp galls, smooth but unnatural bulges.

Two of them had emerged, in perfect synchronization, from a pair of doors opposite each other.

Two more emerged behind them.

“Trouble,” Cardy gasped, forgetting to subvocalize and startling herself with the sound of her own panicked voice. The other three looked away from the door and their eyes widened.

“Oh, no,” Jane whispered.

“Help me!” Mella demanded, and after only a second of hesitation Cardy forced her fingers into the crack and pulled and Siobhan grabbed from the other side and pulled, and all four of them strained against the silver metal. It held a moment, and then began to give.

The women in black approached, legs moving in perfect unison. They did not hurry. Astride their ears, red LEDs glowed.

The door was almost open enough to slide through. The women in black were twenty feet away.

Suddenly, the door slid open, throwing them all to the ground.

Six women in glossy black plastique stood there, looking down at them. Cardy could see herself reflected in those black visors, on the glossy black second skins.

No one moved.

Oh no. Oh no no no...

The four approaching from down the hall slowed, and stopped, just out of reach.

They were surrounded.

The women behind them raised their right arms, locked their elbows, pointed those large smooth forearm bulges at the intruders.

From the other side, in the garden room, there was a sharp click as all six of the women in black snapped their arms down and to the side. Out of their forearms, slim grey rods slid down into waiting hands. Glossy fingers closed around them.

No one moved.

“Boss?” Mella hissed.

Cardy had no reply. There were ten of them. What could three journalists and a single commando do?

They couldn’t—wouldn’t let themselves be captured. There had to be something...

There was more movement. Inside the room, a figure in skintight white came into view, walking smoothly in from the right.

She walked behind the black Praetorians and pivoted in place, stepping between the center two to look down at the four intruders crouched there. She was an ethnic blend, brown eyes too wide to be Asian, too long to be from Europe; the skin between her legs was the color of old ivory, her nude slit just a fold in the skin, with a slight width at the top that made Cardy think again of keyholes, and set as it was in the circle of glossy white Cardy thought also of mirrors, reflecting each other over and over again...

“Intruders.” the woman said.

“You will surrender. You will remain here until you are instructed otherwise. You will be taken for conversion into slaves and you will not resist when you are taken.”

Jane whimpered.

“What can we do?” Cardy subvocalized.

“I can get three or four of them,” came Mella’s reply. “But not all. Not without a distraction.”

They didn’t look like they could be distracted. The six in front stood there, a wall of robotgirl flesh, batons in their hands. Behind them, the other four had their arms out, the strange cuffs pointed at them, one at each of the intruders.

What were those? Guns?

“You will surrender,” the woman in white repeated. “You do surrender. You will not run. You have no desire to run. No desire to run. You will relax and you will await your conversion.”

Down the hall, the other white-clad woman was approaching, red-clad drones at her elbows.

The woman addressing them kept speaking. “Relax. Surrender. You surrender. You relax. You await.”

What could they do? Mella couldn’t fight them all. Surely there would be a chance to run. If they just waited, something would turn up. They just had to wait... to await...

“You have surrendered. You are relaxed. You await. You await conversion. You surrender to conversion.”

Cardy was watching the three women as they came down the hall. They were so smooth, so glossy... they glided rather than walked, their heads level, their steps in perfect syncopation.

“You have surrendered. You are relaxed and awaiting. You are calm. You have surrendered. You will be converted. You await conversion. You desire conversion...”

Something about that was not right. Cardy swung her head to look at the woman in white. Cardy’s head was somehow very heavy. The woman... the woman was very, very beautiful. Cardy had been too wound up to notice that before. Somehow the woman’s... focus made her even more beautiful. Her mind was her task.

And she has a beautiful pussy, too, Cardy thought, letting her gaze drop to enjoy it.

“You will be converted. You want to be converted. You desire conversion. You will become a slave. You want to become a slave...”

She was still talking, but Cardy was just watching her lips now, watching how smooth and alive they were, moving in a slow rhythm beneath her glittering brown eyes. She was so beautiful, and Cardy wanted to touch her, to kiss her and taste her and maybe slide her mouth down to that intriguing slit between her legs...

She would do that, once she was a slave.

A slave...

Something about that? With the tiniest of frowns, Cardy turned her heavy head to watch the other women arrive. The other woman in white had a trace of red at the corner of her mouth. Her mouth was moving, too, speaking. Cardy’s eyes refocused on the shinyblack guards in front of her, on their outstretched arms. Those strange smooth cuffs were pulsing...

“Converted,” Siobhan’s voice said quietly in her ear.

“A sssslavvee,” Jane replied.

The cuff itself wasn’t pulsing, it was the air around it. Cardy wanted to touch it, but she had surrendered, and was so relaxed...

Mind Control.

It was those cuffs.

Cardy inhaled and even her gasp was slow. Both of the women were speaking, speaking in precisely the same voice and saying the same words.

“You want to be a slave. You want to be a slave. You will submit and obey. You will submit to conversion...”

No.

“Run,” Cardy gasped, “Oh, run.”

She didn’t know if the other girls even heard her. With a sob, she lurched forward, into a pair of glistening black thighs, knocking the guard back a step and sprawling onto the floor beyond her.

Her mind was full of fog and the words falling magically from the lips of the women in white pursued her.

“Surrender. Obey. Surrender. Obey. Convert...”

Cardy bit her arm for the pain, for the focus, and screamed.

“RUN!!!”

Then she dove directly into the wall of soybean plants and crashed through and away.

* * *

END Part One