Judas Kiss

Amanda stood up as Rose approached the table and gave her friend a casual hug and a kiss on the cheek, but that was the last time things went like they usually did. Instead of returning the favor, Rose surprised her with a brief but surprisingly deep kiss right on the lips that left her mouth filled with the taste of Rose's lipstick. She widened her eyes in shock, but Rose had already pulled away and was sitting down like nothing had happened.

Amanda sat down as well and gave her friend a concerned stare. "Are you alright, Rose?" she asked, skipping the usual formalities. "Your text just said we needed to talk face to face, and I thought maybe-."

Rose waved away Amanda's words with a dismissive gesture, and favored her with a dazzling smile. "I'm sorry, Panda," she said, using the childhood nickname Amanda would have strangled anyone else for speaking out loud. "I just texted that to get you to the restaurant."

The ice cube of apprehension in Amanda's stomach melted away at the words. She hadn't realized how nervous that text had made her until the feeling stopped. "So everything's okay, then? No problems with work, Dave's okay, your mom's no worse than ever?"

Rose leaned in and her smile took on a conspiratorial tone. "Actually," she said, "everything is terrible. I quit my job this morning, and sent Dave an email telling him I was moving out and he could keep all my stuff. But that's not why I came here. I came here to kiss you, Amanda, and I am so sorry."

Amanda furrowed her brow in confusion. "I don't understand, Rose. What's wrong? Why did you quit? What happened between you and Dave? What's going on with you?" The chill in her gut returned, bigger and stronger than ever. It wasn't just the news-Rose was saying all these awful things, but she kept smiling like today was the best day ever.

"I'm not doing any of this," Rose explained, punctuating her words with a casual drink of water that suddenly seemed impossibly creepy. "They're controlling my body now. They made me send that text to you so that you would come here, and they made me kiss you to pass along the judasware. I'm so sorry, Amanda. This is all a trap and I helped them catch you."

She didn't sound sorry, though. Rose's voice was perfectly neutral, calm and toneless and almost cheerful even as she confessed the most bizarre and inexplicable nonsense. "What are you talking about?" Amanda asked, her voice almost plaintive with confusion. "Rose, you're not making any sense. Who are 'they'? What's 'judasware'? What's going on?"

Rose rolled her eyes, as if to suggest that she was indulging her crazy friend's nonsense theories. But her words told a different story. "I don't know who they are, not yet. My brain hasn't been reformatted enough. All I know is that they installed something in me, a highly specialized biological computer that colonizes the human nervous system and hacks into a person's brain. They call it judasware. Because it makes you-"

She broke off her sentence for a moment, and Amanda watched her go about the business of looking normal, friendly and approachable. It was somehow even worse than if she'd lost it and started crying. "It makes you betray people," she said at last, her voice still no more upset than if she was discussion the weather.

Amanda opened her mouth, but she realized she had no idea what to say. She couldn't process any of this. It sounded like Rose had suddenly had some sort of psychotic break, but that didn't seem much more believable than the crazy nonsense about 'judasware'. Still, it would explain her weird body language and her affectless voice-Amanda was no psychiatrist, but it seemed pretty logical that if Rose was really in the throes of a delusion, she'd be giving off all kinds of weird signals in her behavior.

The waiter arrived, breaking off Amanda's train of thought for a moment, and she watched as Rose effortlessly shifted gears to order a chopped salad with a glass of red wine. When he turned to Amanda, she almost asked him to call an ambulance instead of ordering. But something deep inside stopped her. She told herself that if her friend was genuinely having mental health problems, she needed Amanda's support more than ever. So Amanda simply said, "I'll have what she's having," and handed the menu back to the waiter without saying anything more.

"Rose," Amanda said gently, once the waiter had left, "I'd like you to think about how all this sounds." She wasn't really sure that you could talk someone out of a psychotic break, but she felt like she owed it to her childhood friend to try. "If you're being controlled, would you really be able to tell me all about it like this?"

"I told you, dumbass," Rose said, her tone deceptively mild, "my brain hasn't been reformatted completely yet. They haven't locked down my speech centers, not fully. That's why I had to send you a text to lure you here."

"So why didn't you ask the waiter for help?" Amanda asked. "Or why didn't you tell me to run away when I first saw you?"

"There's some sort of...emergency lockdown function, I guess," Rose replied. "It's the first sign of control, when you try to do something and you can't make yourself. If I try to yell or shout or get help, my voice dries up and I can't say anything at all. Believe me, Panda, I tried so hard. I was shouting inside, begging you to keep away, to run and hide and forget you ever knew me before it was too late. But my mouth wouldn't move."

Amanda shivered. She knew it was madness, but somehow the calm, measured tones of Rose's explanation made it sound almost reasonable. She didn't sound angry or manic or even sad-it all just sounded like a collection of neutral facts, like she was reading out of the encyclopedia.

Amanda decided to take another tack. "If you don't know who they are, Rose, how do you know what they want? How do you even know this is called 'judasware'?"

"Because Janet told me," Rose replied, grinning as if they were catching up on old friends. "She invited me over to her house last night to check out her new kitchen, but when I got there she met me at the door with a sloppy kiss instead. She brought me in and sat me down, and explained to me that she had just infected me with judasware and that soon I would be an obedient slave just like her."

Just then, their food arrived, and Rose's voice trailed off into silence as the waiter came into earshot. It wasn't until he had gone off to another table that she began to speak once more. "I didn't know what to say to her, not at first. I thought maybe she'd gone crazy or something. But she didn't seem crazy, you know?" Amanda caught herself nodding before she realized the absurdity of the situation. "She seemed perfectly calm about it all. She just explained to me that the judasware was going to rewrite my brain, a little bit at a time, until I loved being controlled just like she did."

Rose paused to take a bite of salad, and the illusion of normality was so profound that Amanda almost felt dizzy. Every time she stopped talking, she was the same Rose that Amanda had known for years, poised and friendly and self-possessed. But then she talked, and...

"She told me that I would lose control of my body, first. The judasware would install itself in my nervous system and paralyze my gross motor functions while it took control. I wouldn't be able to move for a while until the process was complete. Once the judasware was fully integrated with my brain, they would be able to operate my body remotely while my higher brain functions were subordinated to them."

Amanda felt a shiver run down her spine as her friend continued. She reminded herself that none of this was real, that it was all just a delusion and that the only danger Amanda was in was the very real risk that she would fall victim to that same delusion. All the same, she resisted a strong urge to run to the bathroom and wash her mouth out.

"And at first," Rose continued, "I told myself that it wouldn't be safe to try to run away or call the police or anything. I pretended that it was important to humor her. I kind of convinced myself that it was all my idea, that I was just sitting there because I wanted to sit there. But then she sat down next to me and began to pet my legs, and I decided that enough was enough. I needed to get out of there. And that was when I realized I was lying to myself. All the really good reasons I kept coming up with to keep sitting there and listening to Janet? They were just rationalizations. I wasn't moving because I couldn't move."

Amanda fought back another compulsion to run to the bathroom...and then she realized. It was the other way around. She wasn't fighting the compulsion to run, she was trying to run and the compulsion was to sit right here at the table and smile vacantly while Rose talked. She tried to get up, to push back her chair, even just to reach down and spear a bite of lettuce, but her body simply refused to move. As though it was no longer under her control.

Rose continued remorselessly, her voice almost soothing in its flat, neutral tones. "Janet was further gone than I am. The judasware had overridden her speech, maybe even her ability to think things they didn't want her to. I don't know. It's impossible to know for sure, because the body control is so total. She told me that she wanted to be a good, obedient slave and that she loved fucking me while she brainwashed me, but she would have said that even if it wasn't true. I suppose I'll find out soon."

Amanda struggled, but only on the inside. Her hands rested comfortably on the table, not even twitching when she tried to command them into motion. Her face smoothed into a plastic smile, as though she was listening to a not-particularly interesting story from a co-worker. Even her eyes stilled into a glassy stare, locked onto Rose's lips as the other woman talked.

"She fucked me that night. I laid there on the couch and she fingered me, licked me, pounded me with a strap-on for what felt like hours, and I couldn't move at all. The whole time, she told me how hot and sexy it was to be a slave, how proud they were of her for fucking me into submission and how proud they were of me for submitting. And that within a day, I would look back on this memory and masturbate." Rose paused, her lips trembling as she tried to put any kind of emotion in her voice. "I'm terrified that she's right," she said calmly.

Amanda tried to speak, to let her friend know that none of this was her fault and that Amanda believed her and that they were going to find some way out of this...but nothing came out. She didn't even breathe faster. All she could do now was watch and listen as the check arrived. Rose paid it in cash, flirting with the waiter so blatantly that he probably didn't even notice Amanda's presence at the table, let alone what was happening to her.

"You're almost ready, Amanda," Rose said as the waiter walked away. "In a few minutes, I'm going to get up and you're going to get up right behind me. You're going to follow me back to the hotel room I've rented, and we're going to fuck each other while the judasware takes over your mind. It's going to feel so good, Amanda. You're going to love being converted into an obedient slave for them, just like I'm going to love fucking you while you surrender. It feels so good, Amanda. It feels so good that by tomorrow, you won't even understand why you ever wanted to resist."

Amanda heard the change in Rose's voice as her words began to sound more seductive and sensual. She tried to scan her friend's face for any sign that the Rose she knew remained in there behind the soft, purring professions of obedience, but she could see nothing. Rose said, "We will be perfect slaves together, lost in their will, and we will spread the blessing of obedience to all our friends," and it sounded like she meant every word of it.

But Amanda wasn't like that. Not yet. She would fight this, she knew it. As soon as she could move again, she'd get away from Rose and go to a doctor, let them know what was inside her. They'd find it, she knew they would, and they'd cure her. And then she'd find a cure, and then she'd free Rose, and then they'd find the people who did this and...and...

Amanda felt her limbs loosen. She sprang to her feet, just as Rose stood up. "Time to go, pet," Rose said, turning and walking away, and Amanda found her legs moving with one measured step after another to follow.

THE END