Nano (9 page)

With a whip, Sam proved as competent as John.  He hung me by my wrists and laid into my buttocks with a ferocity and skill that showed that three weeks of experience had been supplemented by nano-conditioning.  He seemed to know exactly how much I could take, and judged by my response when to give more, and where.

After he'd beaten me to the point where I was willing to do anything to make it stop, he let me back down to my knees and put me through my poses, correcting in places with a riding crop.  Then he bound my wrists, put me on my hands and knees, and fucked me from behind.  He was careful not to let me come.

The bastard knew how to keep me on my knees just as well as John had.  Not that I complained too much.

I awoke, bleary-eyed and sore, in my own apartment.

I sat up in surprise.  My wrists were in leather cuffs, and padlocked together.  I was still naked.  I closed my eyes and tried to recall what had happened last night.

Sam had continued to use me after fucking me.  He used every means at his disposal to break me to his will.  Thumbscrews.  A cat-nine tails.  Hot wax.  Clamps on my nipples and labia. I remembered at one point screaming as he held a hot flame to my toes - my ankles were in stocks, and a hood buckled over my head.  I must have passed out.

I examined the cuffs and padlock.  The padlock had a digital LED clock set in its bronze shackle that seemed to be counting downward toward zero.  It read 3:23:55.

My labia stung.  I felt down there with my bound hands and found a small steel plate hanging from a piercing in my left labial fold.  I bent it forward and tried to examine it.

I couldn't read it, so went to the bathroom and got out my handheld mirror - a beaten tin antique with a beveled edge.  I sat forward on the toilet seat and read the tag backward through the reflection.

"Anne-Marie La Fontaine

DOB: 6/15/1987

Age: 18

Prop. of: Sam Smith"

The tag was held in place by a small ring piercing that appeared to be welded into a solid ring.  The skin was scabbing, but daubed with iodine.  The piercing was deep; a good half inch of flesh held it in place.  I'd have to cut deep to remove it.  The flesh around the piercing was swollen and ached.

The tag itself was stainless steel, with what looked like a small electronic chip embedded in one side.  I wondered what that was for.

I sat down gingerly at my little kitchen table. I popped a few Advil to lessen the pain from the piercing, and from the deep purplish welts on my ass, thighs, breasts - God, even the soles of my feet.  I washed it down with cold two-day old coffee from the carafe and a slice of bread.  I had a hard time taking my mind off the fact of that tag, resting on the wooden seat between my open thighs, the ring pressed flat between my labia and the seat.

The phone rang.  I went into the bedroom and picked it up nervously.

"Hello, Anne-Marie," Sam's voice said.

"H-hello.  Master," I added after a moment.

"I want to point out that your pager has been replaced.  Please wear the new one at all times.  Also, be aware that the tag senses proximity of your DNA.  If you remove it, it will release nano keyed to your DNA signature, which will disassemble you in short order.  You'll die within minutes.  My recommendation is to be a good girl and leave it in place.  I paid a steep price for you and this is protection on my investment.  Remember.  Your options are obedience or death.  I give you wide latitude in how you choose to lead your life when not serving me, but you are first and foremost my property.  That fact eclipses all else.  The tag will serve both as a reminder and as a form of enforcement.  You'll probably find it more comfortable to eschew underwear, though I leave that up to you.  

"Second item is your finances.  I've frozen your bank account and your credit card, and cancelled your scholarships and loans.  You are now technically listed as foriegn student with an F-1 visa - which isn't true, of course, but will prevent you from obtaining employment. I will finance your living expenses and tuition.  If you need money you will request it from me, detailing exactly what you need it for.  You usually won't get it.  Clothing purchases can be made on my account, which I've set up at a list of retailers I'll provide you with later.  Groceries can be purchased on my account at Dean & Deluca's.

"Any questions, slave?"

"Yes, Master."  I paused, wondering if he would answer what I wanted to ask.  "What did you pay - him - for me?"

"I'm paying in the form of ignorance.  He signed you over to me on the condition I agree to have my memories altered.  In a few days I won't remember that I was once you, and any efforts on your part to remind me will fail.  John didn't want money - he just wanted control over the situation.  He seemed distressed to find out I knew what he was up to. For my part, I'm willing to do this because the knowledge is, to be frank, disquieting, and it's the price he asked for you.  I won't mind not knowing you and I were once each other.  I asked him to alter your memories as well but he refused.  He wants things exactly as he planned them - me assuming the life I was intended to lead, ignorant of my past, and you condemned to live the life he's consigned to you, aware of the punishment he's placed on you."

"When is this going to happen?"

"You forgot 'Master', Anne-Marie.  Just so we understand each other, every time you forget will earn you twenty-five lashes.  I'm adding twenty-five to the twenty you already have coming, just for being you.  And you know from last night I don't hold back."

"Yes, Master."  I shuddered at the thought of forty-five strokes from the whip - his whip.

"To answer your question, tomorrow night.  Remember, I'll forget who you once were, but not how many strokes you're due for.  The context of our conversation will, in all likelihood, simply be reorganized.

"When the lock joining your wrists disengages, you're free to do what you like.  Keep the gear handy.  I want you wearing them at 10:00 PM.  The lock is on a ten hour timer, and has a transponder that sends messages to my Blackberry.  I'll know when it's engaged or disengaged.  It also senses, through the conductive O-rings on your cuffs, when it's actually restraining the body of a human being, based on the electrical output of your nervous system, and whether or not your tag is within four feet of it.  Unless you have someone else willing to wear the cuffs for you, and stand at your side at all times, you won't be able to fool me.  Failure to comply will earn you a hundred lashes for each infraction. That's all for now.  Wait for my page."

He hung up, and I held the phone to my ear, unable to move, until the disconnect tone startled me out of my reverie.

Three hours later, I was lying naked on my back, a pillow propped under my back to take the weight off my sore buttocks.  I was reading Seventeen magazine, I suppose out of sheer perversity.  It was dull reading.  "How to get a man" indeed.  How do you get rid of them, I wondered?

The padlock clicked open, startling me, and fell onto my belly.  I sat up and unbuckled the leather restraints.  I put the gear into a drawer in my endtable, and noted the time.  11:00 AM.  I had eleven hours before my implicit curfew.

Well, at least I could get dressed and try to live like I'm a normal human being, and not cattle, I told myself.

I got up and showered.  I was careful when soaping around my newly pierced area.  I brushed my hair, and started to dress.

I decided jeans were out of the question.  I needed something loose, something that wouldn't chafe the tag or its attachment point.  I ended up choosing a blue spaghetti strap silk dress with an empire waist.  It had enough extra fabric around my hips for me to rearrange it if I were uncomfortable, and silk felt better on bruised flesh than denim.

I pulled out my Filofax and looked at my schedule for the day.  I was free through the next day.  Tomorrow I had an early Psych class.

Homework.  I'm a student; I'm supposed to do homework, right?

I spent the afternoon working on a report for the Pysch class, and catching up on American Lit reading assignments.  Being a student was actually kind of fun. Besides, it helped take my mind off the fact that I was a piece of property.  Even if I asserted to myself that I was more than cattle, I had the tag to prove otherwise.

I was probably the only girl at my school with involuntary piercings.  The only one who wouldn't be able to go to parties because I had to lock myself up by ten.  The only girl who had to obey or die.  Literally.

I shook my head to clear my mind.  No point thinking about it; it is what it is.  I'm never going to be a man again; and I'll never be a normal girl either.  Okay, I'm a freak.  Fine.  Lots of those in New York.  Just now I've got homework; concentrate on that.

A week later I was kneeling beside Sam in his study.  I was naked, my thumbs were restrained behind me with thumbcuffs, and my toes were cuffed in identical fashion.  I rested the backs of my hands on the soles of my feet.

It had taken him less than sixty seconds to drag me from his front door, strip me, and put me on my knees beside him.  I was a little awed by his efficiency - he had a no-nonsense approach that made up in authority what it lacked in style.  While I tended to fantasize situations a little more ceremonious and ritualistic than my first five minutes here, Sam had, in a short space of time, demonstrated that he was Master of this house, and that I was a guest suffered only to the extent that I was at his mercy.

He had his hand in my hair, and was forcing me to look at a computer screen on his desk.

"This is your apartment," Sam said, pointing at a floor plan displayed on the monitor.  "I wanted to show you this right off, before we begin, so you understand how short your leash is.  Here," he fingered a bright red wobbly line moving about the apartment, "are your movements over the past week.  I can filter the vector diagrams out by time, and expand or compress the time scale for better analysis.  The tracking is done by triangulation on your ID tag via sensors installed around your street block - you won't be able to find them.  They're sensitive enough to determine whether you're clothed, whether you're standing or kneeling, and how fast you're moving.  Thus far the only warning flag I've configured has to do with the cuffs - which you've worn as commanded, I see.  Good girl.

"However," he said, stroking my hair, "I can configure other flags as well.  One, which I've just programmed, will notify me if you're wearing clothing inside the apartment for longer than sixty seconds.  I want you naked in there at all times.  In addition to the nano-disassemblers, by the way, your tag also contains generic nano which can be programmed on the fly to administer pain in the form of nerve stimulation.  If you don't strip immediately on entering the apartment, you'll feel pain.  It won't be pleasant.  Do you understand, Anne-Marie?"

"Yes, Master," I whispered.

"Good.  I want you to understand that the fact you were a man once earns you no privileges with me.  I don't know who you were, and don't care.  I bought you from John because you're pretty and have potential.  Admittedly not much, but it's there."

He smiled down at me.  "You know, I couldn't have done this to most women - they would have rebelled far too early for me to have set this up.  But you love it - you can't help yourself - and that fact condemns you to slavery.  Up to a certain point you had some volition in your submission - you could, after all, choose not to do so.  I've removed that option, put it out of your reach.  You let me do it, of course - that bit about buying you from John is merely the transferral of his claim on you - but now that it's done, now that I've got effective physical controls over you, submission to my will is your only option.  John used psychology to control you.  Psychological control is nice, but I like actual, physical ownership.  I can now do anything I like with you - anything at all.  I can kill you, or cause you pain, at a keystroke.  John owned your mind.  I own your mind, and your body.  You're a piece of property.  How does that feel, my little fuckpet?"

"I - it feels good, Master," I admitted, blushing.

He laughed.  "So I guessed.  Now let's see how good you are at sucking cock."

Sam turned his chair toward me, and pulled me forward between his legs.  He drew his cock out from the folds of his kimono and pressed my lips to it.  I opened my mouth obediently and he shoved his member in.

This had been my cock once.  Well, not exactly - it was a nano-produced replica - but the effect on me was similar to the way being in the men's room of the library had made me feel.  I had been robbed of my masculinity.  And now it was literally being shoved in my face.

For all that, it was still arousing, having a cock in my mouth, sucking it.  And though I knew this hot, throbbing, stiff staff of flesh had once been a part of me, now it was unfamiliar and daunting.  A symbol of power - and I couldn't even recall what it had felt like to have one.  I knew intellectually that my body, its curves and soft flesh, was not the body I was born with, but at the same time Sam's masculinity was as foriegn and mysterious to me as if I had never been a man.  I simply couldn't visualize what had been like to be on the other side of this power dynamic.

John had done his work well.

As Sam slowly pumped my throat, his thickness stuffing me, I thought about my conversation with Natalie - now almost six months ago - and realized that she had it right.  If nano meant you could be anyone, then your body had little bearing on who you really were.  Deprived of the ability to change, I was now fixed into one discrete identitiy - Anne-Marie - and since I could no longer change, my whole essence was dominated by the feelings, emotions and worldview that this frail, feminine body promoted - I couldn't escape or ignore them.  I was a woman.  And I couldn't imagine otherwise.

It had been a gradual evolution, I realized.  I thought back to that first day, and remembered how strange my body had felt at first - my soft breasts, the curve of my belly down into the pubic mound, my wide hips.  And how, later, when I learned that my change was not really of my own volition, I had yearned to fight my inevitable subjugation.  Now all that seemed remote, as if another person had thought those thoughts and felt those feelings.

Now, in the presence of the man I had been, it really struck home.  Why had I bothered to fight it?  For better or for worse, this female form - on my knees, sucking a man's cock - was my proper place.  I was happy, healthy, and that counted for a lot.  I was owned property.  And being the creature I was, this was enormously satisfying.  So what if I had been made to feel this way?  I felt it, it was real, I - Anne-Marie - was a real, living, breathing human being.  I knew my body well enough now that I could no longer think of it as something I had been forced into.  The imperfections - the freckling, the mole on my right forearm, my crooked smile - reinforced the feeling I had of being a natural female, rather than one created by nano.  I was quite different from the person I had once been, but this was who I was now.  Why had I resisted, in the hope of regaining my masculinity, when I no longer even identified with the gender I was born into, could no longer remember what satisfactions were to be had from being a man?  I glanced up at Sam's muscled stomach and realized I felt no identification with his physical form at all.  It might as well have been a stranger's body, it seemed so unfamiliar and foriegn to me.

How could I be angry with Sam for exercising his power over me when I needed someone so badly to do to me what he had done?  The fact of the matter was that I needed to submit - emotionally, physically, psychically.

From that moment on, I could only see Sam as who he was - my Master - and no longer harbored any hope of being anything other than his slave.