Title: Alice the AI
Author: BedHead
Chapter 5 — Refinements of Design
Thuy gazed out of the minivan window at the gray buildings beside the freeway, now blurred behind sheets of rain. Madame Anh had been driving for two hours, and Thuy was starting to need a bathroom break.
She mentioned this to Madame, who made reassuring noises. “We’re nearly there, my little ducks. About ten more minutes.”
Truc was engrossed in a game on her phone, and Le and Cam were reading a magazine together, so Thuy sighed and tried to stretch her legs as much as she could as the minivan came down the off-ramp towards the town which was apparently their destination.
Madame drove the minivan to a solid- looking four-storey building which occupied a corner of a block. With some effort, she located the entrance to the underground parking lot and pulled up at the barrier.
“Let me just get the code,” she muttered, scrolling through her messages on the phone. “Ah!” She tapped in a series of digits and the barrier rolled up.
The underground parking space was about half the size of the building area, but wasn’t heavily used. Most of the cars were clustered at one side, and Madame parked the van there too.
“Out you get, my ducks,” she clucked, sliding open the door. “We’re here.”
The four women climbed out, clutching their purses. Thuy looked around, wondering what this place was. Madame had told them that they were going to help one of her friends, but hadn’t been more specific.
Madame ushered them to an elevator and they all squeezed inside. She hit the button for the top floor.
“We’re a little late, but not too much,” she explained as the elevator clanked upwards. “I suspect she’ll want us to get started soon, though.”
The elevator opened on to a small reception room. A Latina in a white tunic sat behind the desk there.
“Emilia!” Madame kissed the woman’s cheek. “How nice to see you again. And isn’t this building lovely? Much more spacious than your old one.”
“Hello, Madame,” the woman smiled, returning the affection. “It’s nice to see you too. Are these your girls, then?” She gestured at Thuy and her friends
“That’s right. And they’re all ready to help,” Madame beamed.
Thuy hesitantly raised her hand. “I’m sorry, is there a bathroom? It was a long drive...”
“Just behind you,” Emilia pointed out. “Help yourself, chica . Everyone else; please take a seat and you’ll be called shortly.“
Thuy did the necessary in the bathroom and returned to join her friends. They didn’t have to wait long; a speaker on the wall clicked on and a woman’s voice spoke.
“Truc, please come through.”
Truc shrugged and walked through the door that Emilia indicated.
Thuy wondered what all this was about. They’d had to close the salon for the day, and it looked unlikely that they’d be back in town before dark if this activity took more than a couple of hours.
It only took ten minutes or so before the speaker clicked to life again.
“Thuy, please come through.”
Well, maybe they would get through this quickly. Thuy obediently entered the door, which clicked shut behind her. There was a short hallway, then another door with a red light on its lock panel; as she watched, it turned green.
“Walk through,” a second speaker instructed her.
Thuy entered a room which was painted a neutral beige, with a couple of chairs, a mirror, some cupboards, and a series of baskets on a shelf. It was anonymous, and gave her no clue to what was happening.
“Remove all your clothes; take a basket and put on the gown, then put your clothes in the basket.
Thuy shrugged, and stripped down to her bra and panties. She had pulled out the gown from a basket, and was studying how to put it on, when the speaker admonished her:
“Remove all of your clothes.“
Sighing, she did so. With the gown tied on loosely, and not really concealing much even of her small frame, she folded her clothes neatly into the basket.
“Put the basket in the cupboard.”
She opened the cupboard to find a basket already there; she recognized Truc’s clothes and lacy pink bra in it. She placed her basket next to Truc’s and closed the cupboard door, wondering what came next.
“Exit through the green door.” This was on the opposite side of the room to where she’d entered. Tentatively, she pushed open the door.
This led to a much larger room, painted white and with a tiled floor which felt cold on her feet. Four women in blue scrubs and caps were waiting for her; without any introduction, they took hold of her arms firmly and pulled her towards one of two medical tables that occupied the center of the room. Thuy felt herself scooped up, and placed on her back on the hard padded surface. The women then started to fasten her arms and legs to the table with sturdy straps.
“What are you doing?” They didn’t react to Thuy’s question, continuing instead to apply the restraints.
Thuy looked over to see Truc on the other table, similarly bound and looking very apprehensive. “Truc, what’s going on? What are they doing to us?”
“I don’t know.” Truc shook her head. “But Madame wanted us to help, so this must be okay, yes?”
“I suppose so...” Thuy tried to pull against the straps, but they had been precisely applied. She sighed and looked up at the ceiling. There was a bank of surgical lights above each bed, ringed with what looked like cameras.
Apparently satisfied with their work, the women moved away for a few moments. One then returned, holding what looked like hair clippers. She powered them on, held Thuy’s head steady and started to run them through Thuy’s hair. By the sound of it, something similar was happening to Truc.
“My hair...” Thuy was getting very worried. She trusted Madame, of course, but there was no way she could be a good hairdresser if she was bald. And from the feel of the clippers very close to her skin, bald was what she would soon be.
Finally the clippers turned off, and she could hear Truc whimpering. Truc had always prided herself on the length of her hair, needing to keep it artfully pinned in place in order to be manageable, and now no doubt she would have to start from scratch. The silent woman used a brush and small vacuum to remove the hair, then left Thuy alone for a few minutes.
Thuy turned to look at Truc—as she had expected, the girl was completely shaved. No doubt Thuy looked just the same.
A new figure appeared, but this one she recognized: Madame Anh, dressed in the same scrubs as the others. She was smiling broadly.
“Hello again, my dears. Don’t you look lovely?”
“Madame... " Thuy mumbled, uncertain; “what are they doing with us?”
“Well, my friend Alice is doing a study on the workings of the brain,” Madame explained brightly, “and needed some people to experiment on. So I thought of my ducklings, and offered to bring you to her.”
One of the women pulled a rubber cap onto Thuy’s head, and strapped it firmly under her chin. Thuy felt lots of cold metal pads press against her skull, and from her side vision saw many wires trailing from the cap.
“They’re going to look at the way sexual ecstasy activates different parts of the brain,” Madame continued. “I imagine it’s going to be quite fun for you. Quite fun for me to watch, too, of course.”
The women tugged Thuy’s gown clear of her waist and started to apply something cool to Thuy’s sex.
“It won’t be quite like our little games in my bedroom, of course,” Madame mused. “My friend’s helpers are very focused on extracting the right level of response from you, rather than just having fun. I do hear that they are very good at it, though.”
Thuy felt fingers sliding between her lips, and gasped. The fingers quickly located her nub and held it firm while something circled its tip. Thuy groaned as the sensations stabbed into her, and instinctively pulled at her restraints but to no avail. Next to her, Truc cried out.
“And so we begin!” exclaimed Madame. “Don’t mind me, my dears; I’ll just take a seat here to watch and listen.” She moved out of sight.
The women’s focused attention on Thuy’s nub very quickly brought her up to the edge of climax. She squeezed her eyes tight and tried to will herself over that edge, just to get some relief for even a few seconds, but whoever was directing the stimulation knew what they were doing and held her off. Thuy screamed in frustration, begging her attendants to let her come, but they seemed completely indifferent to her entreaties.
A change of focus: her nub was released and she gasped in brief relief. Then, something firm but flexible started to push her lips apart, and a ribbed surface entered her sex. Thuy groaned at the intrusion, trying to push the intruder out but unable in her bound position to flex her muscles in the right way. The intruder, once it had stretched her to the limit, was pulled back—then pushed forward again, and withdrawn... and Thuy could feel her climax come back into view.
The attendants impassively continued to stimulate her with the dildo, and now it seemed inevitable that they would bring her to climax. Thuy curled her hands into fists, feeling the familiar sensations build inside her but being completely beyond control of her body. The thrusts continued—and then attention returned to her nub, and that was too much. She gave a long-drawn-out scream of lust and agony, and the climax took her. Dimly, she was aware of a similar cry from Truc.
When her vision returned, Madame was leaning over her, smiling. Her sex ached as if she’d just run a mile.
“You did very well, my dear. My friend got just the information she needed for the next step.”
One of Thuy’s attendants removed the cap from Thuy, and gently dabbed off the perspiration which had built up underneath.
“How do you feel?”
“Madame,” Thuy groaned. “It was so much... I don’t know if I can take any more of it.”
“Don’t worry,” Madame soothed. “The next part is very different.”
A clamp was slowly and carefully fastened around Thuy’s head, holding her immobile and staring up at the lights and cameras. She felt something cold applied to the left side of her head, and smelled something antiseptic. When the attendant came into view, Thuy was alarmed to see that she now wore a surgical mask and visor.
“Now they know how stimulation flows through your brains,” Madame explained, “they know where to go to generate it directly.”
The attendant pressed a mask onto Thuy’s face and strapped it in place. Thuy tasted the cool dryness of oxygen. A second attendant placed a clip on her finger, and started to tape electrodes in place on her chest. Thuy stared up at Madame, wondering what came next.
Madame put a surgical mask and visor on herself. “I’m very interested to see how they do this,” she commented. “My friend says that it will make you much more useful to her than her current staff. Well, let us hope so! I do want my ducklings to do well; you’ve been so well-trained.”
The attendant slid open a cupboard door on the wall behind Thuy. A set of robotic arms moved out and locked in place above Thuy. Fearfully, Thuy noticed a number of sharp blades and wheels among the instruments mounted there. There was also what looked like a pincushion of needles, between one and three inches long. Thuy started to hyperventilate, but the taste of the gas changed and she found her breathing slowing down again.
There were a series of pricks on the left side of her head. Soon she felt a numbness spreading there and across the left side of her face.
“I’ll move out of the way now,” said Madame from behind her mask. “This shouldn’t hurt, apparently, but you may feel strange. Exposed, even.”
She disappeared from view. Moments later, one of the cutting wheels on the arm started to spin with a high pitched hum, and lower down to the side of Thuy’s head. She pulled at her restraints and tried to scream, but the mask muffled her.
She had tensed herself for pain, but was only aware of a vibration that shook through her head, nothing more. Eventually it stopped, and more instruments descended from the arm. She could only move her eyes, and her limited sight picture told her very little about what was happening.
Finally the pincushion descended out of sight too. Thuy’s breathing was now slow, and she almost relaxed with the lack of visual stimulation. Deep in her mind, though, she was wondering what might be happening to her.
Her left ear crackled. Suddenly, her hearing on that side felt very different.
A warm, calm feeling started to spread through her. She couldn’t tell where it came from, it was just ‘there’.
“How do you feel?” An emotionless voice, speaking unaccented Vietnamese, sounded in her left ear.
“Calm,” she mumbled behind her mask. “Peaceful.”
There was a pause. Then a wave of fear started to wash over her. Again, she couldn’t tell where it was from, and she didn’t know why she was afraid, but it kept strengthening. She started to hyperventilate again, and pull at the straps in an undirected panic.
“No, please! Stop it! I’m afraid...” The entreaty seemed to work since the fear subsided, and a calmness returned.
The next sensation was like a stirring in her loins. It was faint at first, but grew in strength until it was unmistakably sexual. She gasped under the mask, trying to control herself. Briefly she was able to hold it together, but the feeling then stepped up another notch in power, and she gave in to it.
“Fuck me!” she cried. “Please, please fuck me. I really need it...” She tried to squirm but of course failed. Abandoning all dignity she tried to call out to Madame past the mask. “Madame! Please make them fuck me!”
The sensation changed, and suddenly she was at orgasm. Her legs and arms trembled under the restraints as the climax soaked her, and she cried nonsense words, feeling her sex flood with her moisture.
As quickly as it came, the sensation faded away, and she was left gasping on the table.
Madame Anh was watching, fascinated. The robot arms had removed much of the side of Thuy’s and Truc’s skulls, exposing the grey-white folds of their brains. Slowly the needles from the pincushion were being precisely inserted into different locations, and apparently used to drive different emotions in the women. A few small beads of blood came from behind Thuy’s left ear where a device had been implanted earlier.
The needles continued their slow progression, eliciting various emotional and physical responses from Thuy and Truc. From Madame’s viewpoint, the two women seemed to be slowly detaching from their reality on the operating tables, just aware of the changing feelings in their minds.
Thuy had indeed lost track of time and, to some extent, place—it was as if she’d been here forever. The series of switches of emotion and sensation had made nothing feel really real. She lay still, no longer fighting, weary from the see-saw of feelings.
Suddenly, there was a change. A buzz in her mind, and her body felt slightly more disconnected. She tried, with effort, to clench her fingers into a fist, but was only partially successful.
Another buzz, and her hand slipped away from her. She thought she remembered how to move it, and she could still feel her fingers resting on the table, but they simply would not move.
“Flex your toes.” The emotionless voice sounded in her ear. Reflexively, her body obeyed—it seemed to do so without her active request.
Ten minutes later, her body was no longer her own. It worked, it breathed, it responded to the commands in her ear, but she was unable to make it do anything that was not commanded—or even resist the commands given. It was as if she had been short-circuited out of her nervous system.
A new tool on the robot arm spun up—a sharp, narrow drill. It reoriented until facing directly downwards above Thuy’s right eye—then started to descend, steadily closing the three inches between the tip of the drill bit and Thuy’s cornea, and buzzing with an increasing high pitch.
An hour ago, Thuy would have screamed and thrashed in her bondage, desperate to move her eye out of the path of the descending tool. Now, though, although her inner voice had the same sense of desperation, her connection to her body had apparently been severed. Thuy’s body lay placid, staring straight up at the drill.
The drill bit was an inch from Thuy’s eye when it stopped rotating, and moved back to the arm. Apparently, it had fulfilled its purpose.
There was more activity at the side of her head for a while, then suddenly the robot arm rose away from her and folded its tools back. Her attendants returned and started to remove the many restraints binding Thuy to the table. Deprived of her body, Thuy was helpless to react.
Once the clamp was released from Thuy’s head, the last action of the attendants was to wind a broad bandage around and around her skull, applying pressure to keep it tight.
“Sit up, slowly.” The emotionless voice in her ear returned.
Thuy’s body sat up. Her head turned, observing the room. Truc had left her table and was standing in front of Madame Anh.
“Go to your Madame.”
Thuy’s body swung her legs off the table and joined her friend. Madame Anh, mask now removed, was smiling at them.
“Follow your Madame and obey her instructions.”
“Come with me, my ducklings!” Madame exclaimed. Her voice sounded slightly distant to Thuy—her left ear didn’t appear to be working properly—but Thuy’s body obediently pivoted, and followed Truc and Madame out of a door in the far wall.
Behind them, the drones were sanitizing and cleaning the tables and surgical instruments. They had two more subjects to process soon.