Don't You Forget About Me

Beth felt it begin as she was blowing out the candles during her sixth birthday party.

She wasn't really blowing out any candles, of course; she was in the chair. (Beth tried not to think of it as the Chair.) But the electrodes taped to her temples made her memories more vivid than the antiseptic white room around her, and anyway Beth preferred her memories to her present situation. That was why she fought so hard to keep them.

Right now, she was looking at her sixth birthday. Mom and Dad were there, of course, and so was Grandpa Richard. (Grandma Betty had died before she was born.) Her big brother Michael was sulking about something...no. Not something. Don't let it get away. He was sulking about...the cake! He'd wanted to lick the frosting off the knife, Mom hadn't let him, and it was really obvious to Beth now, looking back, that he was just upset about being ignored because it was her special day. And she had a friend, there, too, the girl from next door, Emily. Only five, but--

Then Beth felt it. Just like every other time. Her real body kicked and struggled against the restraints, but they held. Just like every other time. It was always the same. Whenever she went back--whenever the chair took her back to a memory, it wasn't to show it to her. That was just a side effect. It was trying to burn it out of her head.

She felt the...the program, the effect, the whatever-it-was, like wires burrowing into her brain. She gritted her teeth--real or imaginary, she couldn't tell--and focused on pushing them back, blocking them out. Not this one, she said inside her head. Maybe out of it, too. She didn't care what they saw of her, naked and strapped down and writhing. Beth no longer cared about trying to preserve the dignity of her body. She was too concerned about preserving the sanctity of her mind.

The effect got stronger. They must have turned up the juice. Beth didn't care. She pressed harder with her own mind. This was the last birthday before Grandpa Richard had died, she wasn't losing it. A tendril of blankness seeped around her defenses, consumed the name of the girl next door. Beth didn't let it distract her. She'd lost a whole month once, back near the beginning, by worrying about what she was forgetting instead of what she could still remember. There would be time enough to assess damages after the session was over.

Beth felt a tiny buzz on her clit as the girl's features joined her name in oblivion. She was just a vague figure now, indistinct in Beth's mind, and she felt the pleasure as the chair stimulated her body. Every time she forgot, every time she let it take another little piece of her mind away, the chair rewarded her with pleasure. Sometimes, she gave in and let it win just to feel the stimulation turn to masturbation and the masturbation turn to orgasm, but not this time, not this memory. The effect pressed at her for what seemed like an eternity, but Beth fought back just as hard.

Finally, it receded. For a moment, Beth became aware of herself in the chair, soaked in sweat, muscles aching. Then she was somewhere else again. Seventeen, on a vacation to Cape Cod. She recognized the boy she was with, Seth...she shrugged in the depths of her own mind. She could afford to lose Seth. She only had so much energy, and the chair always had more. Every day, it eroded a little more of her. All she could do was hold onto the important things.

She still fought some, though. She couldn't help herself. She kept the tendrils away from the scent of the sea air, the sight of a lighthouse in the fog. Not the most important details, but it was the principle. She never wanted them to think she'd given up. She remembered (really remembered, not like the demanding mental theater of the chair) their first day in the cells, remembered forcing the guards to drag her down the hall, fighting them every step of the way, almost slipping free of their black latex-gloved hands, spitting defiance even as they strapped her into the chair. "I won't ever stop fighting!" she'd shouted. "Not ever!"

The guard had looked at her. The blank, empty expression in her eyes had stilled Beth's tongue. "everybody fights," she'd said. "everybody loses." Beth had understood, then. The guards weren't her captors. They were captives who had been to the chair one too many times.

Almost as if on cue, she found herself in a blank white space. Proto-memory, memories waiting to be written. This was harder to fight. The tendrils came back, softer now. Like they were whispering in her ear, telling her things she'd forgotten, filling up the space they emptied with newer, more seductive ideas. The touch of a woman is soft and sensual to you. Beth let that one in, it wasn't anything she didn't already know. You want to sexually please other women. Pleasing women gives you sexual pleasure.

These ones were particularly hard to fight. Missy would be a very happy girl tonight. Assuming that their captors kept letting them share a cell. It was Beth's secret fear, every time she was in the chair--not of losing her memories, but that when they took her back, that Missy wouldn't be there. She didn't know what she'd do if they took Missy away, or worse, if she was the guard...no. Better not to even think about it. They'd been there a week now, and nobody had split her and Missy up.

You like to do what you are told. It gives you sexual pleasure to follow the commands of Mistress Joy. Beth managed to push that one away, but only barely. She'd already accumulated a few commands conditioning her to love Mistress Joy, to enjoy sexually servicing Mistress Joy, to enjoy being sexually submissive to Mistress Joy, and those made it harder to push aside the other commands. Beth hadn't ever seen Mistress Joy, but she knew exactly what she looked like from the conditioning. She could picture that dark brown hair, those cold gray eyes just as clearly as if the woman was standing right there.

Assuming there actually still was a Mistress. She'd considered the possibility, over long sleepless nights in the cell, that Mistress Joy had died weeks, months, years ago, and her slaves just kept recruiting and processing more women to serve her, following commands automatically and then imprinting them onto others. But it was more likely that Mistress Joy didn't bother watching the processing personally. Why risk an incident with a girl who still had free will, when you could be surrounded with devoted slaves?

The scene shifted again, to age twenty-two and her second girlfriend, and Beth dug in and prepared to fight again.

*****

They dumped her back in the cell exhausted, dehydrated, sore and chafed from pulling against the straps and aching all over, but she didn't care. Missy was still there. Beth picked herself up to her hands and knees and crawled over to the other girl, dragging her into a huddling embrace and kissing her so hard it nearly bruised her lips.

They held the embrace for a long time, just savoring the warmth, the realness of each other's bodies. Then food and water slid through the slot in the door, and the need to replenish their strength after a session in the chair forced them to separate.

"So how did you do?" Missy asked, picking up her bottle of water and taking a long, grateful gulp from it. Damage assessment was always the first priority.

"Not bad, I think. I can't remember how I met Caroline anymore, though. I know it was in college, but..." She could see the look on Missy's face, and knew that Missy must know, but she didn't ask. They'd agreed on that, after the second day. Hearing their own missing lives recounted back to them as stories hurt worse than the empty space where the memories had been. She wouldn't ask, Missy wouldn't tell her. Her first night with Caroline was gone and it was never coming back. "You?"

"Didn't lose much. But I love begging for sex now." Notch up another piece of conditioning in Missy's brain. Beth worried about that a lot, now. Missy had always been the bottom in their relationship, one with a submissive streak a mile wide. She'd been able to fight off the memory loss almost as well as Beth had, but the implantation, the insidious web of brainwashing that seeped into their minds like poison...Missy had a hard time telling the difference between the voice of the chair and her own desires. They'd use that weakness against her. One of these days, they'd tell her to stop fighting and she would. And just like that, the woman Beth loved would be gone.

Beth leaned over and kissed Missy again, on the neck this time. They'd both be gone someday. They couldn't hold out forever, and the first day's sessions had implanted instructions not to try to escape before they really realized how to fight the chair's control.

The idea of rescue had occurred to Beth, but she didn't hold out much hope. She'd counted eleven other cells on her trips up and down the hallway, knew that some of them were occupied. She'd been into five of the eight doors off of the big room where they took the prisoners when it was time for sessions, and they'd all contained chairs. She'd noticed at least twenty distinct brainwashed women guarding the prisoners. If they'd been kidnapping girls this long, then it didn't seem likely that they'd made a mistake now. That might be the pessimist in her talking--it also followed that the more girls they kidnapped, the more likely they were to do something that would lead people back to them--but the odds seemed slim of rescue arriving during the narrow window of their resistance.

But that just made every day more precious. Every day she came back into this room, still Beth instead of a blank-eyed slavegirl, and saw Missy still sitting there, recognition and love still lighting up her eyes...Beth kissed a trail down her collarbone, making her way down to Missy's breasts. She'd fight for this forever if she had to.

She heard Missy whimper, heard her voice taut with arousal and need as she said, "Oh, oh please, please lick my titties, please take them and suck my nipples, I'm so fucking hot for you now, I need your tongue on my horny slutty body, please oh please oh please..."

It turned into babble after that, Missy's arousal making it difficult to remember what words were, let alone how to string them together into a coherent sentence. That only made Beth hotter. She knew she was following her own conditioning, the brainwashing making her want to service Missy with her tongue and her hands just as surely as it was getting Missy off to hear herself pleading for orgasm, but as long as it was Missy she was pleasuring, Beth didn't care that she was doing what she was told. Missy could have all the pleasure she wanted.

Missy's skin tasted salty with dried sweat on Beth's tongue as she licked her way downward. Beth didn't need to finger herself as she licked, her conditioning was already making her cunt tingle with hot, surging pleasure, but she did it anyway, and it made everything even better. She paused, just inches away from Missy's snatch, and waited for a long moment as Missy's needs, her arousal and her need to beg and her arousal at begging, all built up into a whimpering incoherent chant of "pleasefuckme, ohpleasefuckpleasefuckpleasefuckplease..."

Beth ran her tongue along Missy's labia. Missy's first orgasm hit before she'd even gone all the way down.

*****

Beth remembered that moment all night. She remembered it when they strapped her into the chair. So there didn't seem to be anything odd when she continued to remember it after they'd turned the chair on, after the electrodes began to feel warm against her skin just like they always did. It was such a gorgeous memory, something so sweet and beautiful in the middle of so much horror, seeming all the more perfect because it might be the last time they ever fucked. She relived it again, the way Missy had given everything of herself, the way she'd taken it all and given everything she had back...

And then she felt them. The tendrils. "No!" she screamed, she actually heard herself scream it in the real world, and she pushed back harder than she ever had. She would break the goddamned chair if she had to, take its fucking tendrils and shove them all the way back down the wires and into the motherfucking twisted guts of the machine. She never thought she'd fight to remember anything that happened this week, but she was going to remember this. Perfectly. Every detail, every taste and touch and lick and moan.

The tendrils receded. She was back further, the night before they'd been kidnapped, the last perfect night before the nightmare. Missy and her and a bottle of cheap California wine and a baggie full of weed. God, Missy looked so beautiful stoned. The tendrils came at her again, but she pounded them down now. It was easy, she felt full of fire and rage and adrenalin. Nothing was going to take Missy away from her, not ever.

Another memory, their first anniversary, Missy surprising her with breakfast in bed--breakfast in bed served on Missy's body, strawberries and cream carefully arranged on her breasts and belly. They'd had to wash the sheets afterwards, but...the effect came back, stronger this time. Missy shimmered, her body suddenly coated in black latex as though she'd been dipped in it. Beth felt the buzz of a vibrator against her clit, but she only fought harder. Let it be something else, anything else, and she'd give it away, but not this, never this.

The effect moved on, back further, becoming stronger. Beth heard herself distantly grunting and moaning with effort as she fought. The first time she and Missy had made love, coming back from a concert and holding hands in the car, both knowing what was going to happen and both wanting it. Both of them would be submitting to Mistress Joy that night...NO! The tendrils pushed harder now, and Beth understood why.

They hadn't just been erasing her, they'd been mapping her. They'd probed on low power, found what she would give up, and what she would fight for. And now, after a week, they'd found what they were looking for. Her most important memories, the ones that gave her strength and the will to fight. And when they took these away, the rest would just crumble and melt on their own. She'd become like those other girls, a slave to Mistress Joy, just like she always had been...Beth could feel her memories shift and alter, the erasing and rewriting now almost simultaneous as the power increased, the sensations of pleasure more intense as she gave in. She struggled to find something to cling to in the maelstrom, one memory that she could keep for herself.

Their first day together, a rainy, drizzly mess of a day. She'd been wearing a...black latex slavesuit, just like always...and she had forgotten her umbrella, so she'd ducked into an...an...office building! She'd ducked into an office building, dripping all over the foyer, and the secretary had looked at her with this sympathetic look in her bright blue eyes, and B...b...Slave had known. Her gaydar had just gone off, and she'd known that the blonde girl in the red dress who looked so sharp and professional and Barbie-doll straight was really a dyke just like her. And that was awesome. Because she loved women's bodies, loved to service women like the slutslave she was, wanted to make them gasp and moan in pleasure as she obeyed commands. She'd asked the girl her name, and she'd said...she'd said...

"Misty"? No, that wasn't it. She couldn't lose this one, it was too important, come on...

"Mitzi"? No, no, no...Slave felt the memory trickling away like water between her fingers, she heard her own voice begging the people running the Chair, telling them they could have everything else, they could have her will and her heart and her soul if they just let her keep this one perfect day, this one perfect memory, this one moment, this name...

"Miss..."

"M..." It started with 'M', it definitely started with 'M', please!

"M...Miss...Mistress"! Of course! How could she have forgotten? "Mistress Joy." Slave remembered those beautiful gray eyes staring appraisingly at her, finally deciding that she was worthy to join the harem. It was the best day of her life.

Slave remembered other things too, another life, but it didn't seem anything like as real as the life she had with Mistress Joy. She felt a surge of pleasure in her slavecunt as the Chair began to wash it all away and leave her a good, obedient, blank slavegirl.

*****

Missy hadn't slept at all that night. When they hadn't brought Beth back into the cell, she'd felt something give inside her heart. As much as she tried to tell herself that they'd just been split up, that this was just one more trick to try to wear down their resistance, she felt no surprise at all when Beth showed up the next morning in a black latex slavesuit to take her to the chair. Just a dull ache where hope had once been.

Missy didn't fight as Beth strapped her into the chair. She didn't fight as the tendrils wiped away her memories. She understood that they attacked where people were strongest, not where they were weakest. And Missy's strength, her hope and her love and her joy, was standing in front of her without a glimmer of recognition in her eyes.

Forgetting that would be a blessing.

THE END