—-
I woke up drenched in sweat, thrusting and clenching.
It was a rape dream; I was being chased by an army of implacable robots, who were programmed solely to rape me and thereby make me one of them. I’d run, and I’d hid, but they’d always known just where I was, and when they caught me they started fucking me, mercilessly, and I knew I was turning into a robot myself when I started enjoying it, started thrusting back and squeezing them, trying to ram them deeper, deeper into my body—and then I woke up.
Much as I tried to hold onto the dream, it vanished the way all dreams do, thinning and tearing until all I was left with were the basic outlines and a pair of underwear that needed to be changed.
And I hadn’t even gotten off.
I indulged in a moment of self-pity, and looked at the clock. One thirty five A. M. I was thirsty.
The world out the window looked the same as it had when I went to bed two hours ago. Yawning, I slithered out of my wet underwear—they weren’t sexy enough to be ‘panties’—and found a clean pair in the drawer. Then, in panties and shirt, I tiptoed out to the kitchen. Didn’t want to wake Lily.
Lily and I shared an apartment in one of the newer block-buildings in Kansas City. I paid for most of it—she was my sister’s best friend, just moved here from Chicago. On my salary, I could have afforded the place alone, but frankly it was nice to have someone else living with me. She’d originally only planned to stay with me until she found a place of her own, but eight months on she’d basically given up looking. After all, she worked downstairs. Nothing else could have been as convenient.
Me, I worked a bit farther away, at the University. But then, I was a researcher, not a lecturer, and they let me work at home a lot.
And I liked having Lily around. So she stayed.
As I came back from the kitchen with my glass of water, I noticed that there was a light on in my office. ‘Must have left it on’, I thought, and went to turn it off.
But when I reached the door, I realized it was flickering, not steady. And that it wasn’t coming from my desk, or indeed my office proper, but from the clean room.
It’s not really a clean room, I just call it that. I use it to keep potentially dangerous software memes isolated, unable to interface in any way with the external world. After the Candlestick Maker virus back in 2009, people analyzing self-propagating software don’t take any chances. Any chink in the armor—data networks, obviously, but also IR sensing devices, even shared power lines, and the virus might get out.
So, in order to work on this sort of stuff at home, I had the clean room. A room with no connections to the outside world. And only I had the key.
Or so I’d thought.
I almost dropped my glass when I saw Lily in there, seated at the single computer. Staring at it.
Hypnotized.
After the first really successful computer hypnosis programs came out in the early naughties, it was only a matter of time before attempts were made to integrate them with virii. Kind of the ultimate social engineering hack. For years, these attempts were laughable—but they kept improving.
The first real hypnosis virus was the Lee MindHack Worm, which hypnotized office workers across the English-speaking world into sending the virus to all their friends. It was harmless, wore off quickly, and scared the pants off of damn near everyone.
Which is where my job came from. It was only a matter of time before nastier viruses would appear, and the world needed people who could analyze and defeat them before everyone was obediently phoning a 900 number or mass emailing out their credit card info.
The virus currently on the clean room computer was a new one, and although it didn’t seem overtly malicious, it was the most complex one I’d seen yet.
And now Lily was in the clean room, staring at the screen, completely under its spell.
I put the glass down, and crossed to the clean room window. I wasn’t too worried about the computer hypnotizing me—I was on my guard, and the clean room glass randomly interfered with emitted light, tinting or blocking it enough to effectively keep any subliminal flash-programming from coming through. Out here, I was safe.
But Lily was in there, and was very obviously already deeply under.
She was in classic hypnotized position, mouth slightly open, eyes glassy, staring at the screen as a viscous-looking green spiral pulsed and twisted on it. I knew from my analysis of the code so far that this virus used a veritable Pandora’s Box of hypnotic tools—classic spirals & relaxation, subliminals, and stuff that I could really only guess at but that seemed to be physical pleasure/pain training with the aid of peripheral devices. It was incredibly complex.
And speaking of peripheral devices—I realized with surprise—and worry—that Lily was wearing headphones. A thin cord dangled between her and the box on the desk, feeding instructions from the virus straight into her sleeping mind.
I hadn’t left headphones in there. She must have taken them in herself. Which meant that either she had decided to let it hypnotize her, or that it had hypnotized her before and she was returning to it, bringing more powerful tools for it to use on her.
Lily would never have voluntarily let herself be hypnotized by a virus. So she must have been under its control before tonight.
But, if she had been taken by the virus earlier, the question became how much earlier? I’d only installed it on the computer three weeks ago. Worst case, she’d been snared by it (but how?) then, and had been coming here every night since.
That would be bad. A few weeks was enough for some serious behavior modification. Especially if she’d been using the headphones. Heck, she could at this point be consciously trying to help it enslave her. Waiting for me to go to bed, then eagerly returning to be ever more deeply enslaved. Three weeks, several hours a night, was easily enough to have implanted the idea that she wanted this, and then awakened her to allow her to act on “her” desire to fall into its control.
But, if she were consciously abetting it, I should have noticed some change in her behavior. I thought back the last few days, but could recall nothing out of the ordinary.
In the clean room, Lily sat and stared.
I realized I was dawdling. Time to stop it, snap Lily out of her trance, and magnetically purge the machine. If she was enough gone to try and stop me, well, I had restraints.
My hand paused on the doorknob.
I wouldn’t be in any danger. It took substantial time for any hypnosis program, even a malevolent one, to put someone under. I could kneel down next to Lily and stare at the screen for minutes and still be unaffected. The virus couldn’t stop me from shutting it off. And, entranced as she was, Lily wouldn’t think of it, at least not before it was too late.
But still I hesitated.
This was an awfully easy way to find out what this virus did.
The moment I expressed that to myself, I felt terribly callous. Letting Lily become the puppet of some Russian or Thai or Chinese virus writer… I’d be as bad as the guy who wrote it.
But.
I watched Lily, and realized that she was mouthing words. No, she was speaking them, but I couldn’t hear through the glass. (Well, yeah.) The thick green spiral glittered on the surface of her eyes.
And deep in her mind. I wondered what subliminals were flashing their way in. What whispered commands were sinking into her open mind, while her will slept. I knew that they were. Even if I hadn’t been reading the code for weeks, I could see it in the width of her stare, the flickering of her open eyelids. Her mind was being modified, right now.
I realized I was terribly aroused.
The dream may have had something to do with it.
I watched Lily mouthing words that came not from her own mind, but were being fed into it by this alien program, and my pussy was tingling. I wanted to touch myself.
She was my sister’s best friend! We’d been bridesmaids at her wedding! How could I use her like a guinea pig?
Of course, she’d done it to herself. Was doing it to herself. I hadn’t actually done anything.
Sophistry. I set up the environment. Brought the program home, where she must have snuck in to investigate what I did all day, been puzzled, and played a game of solitaire while it flashed instructions imperceptibly into her mind, and that night she came to it again without ever really waking up. Poor Lily. I had to stop her. Allowing harm to come through inaction was as bad as doing it myself.
That was one of Asimov’s laws, wasn’t it? Robots. Just like in my dream. Just like whatever the unfeeling code on that computer was turning—had turned—Lily into. She was a robot, now. Not thinking, just waiting for instructions to obey. She was being programmed. Letting her new thoughts flow into her open, compliant mind.
My hand touched my pussy, and I lost the battle.
I was going to let it happen. Let it enslave Lily. Do its worst to her. See what sort of thrall it made of her. Would she serve it in her waking hours? Or just do its bidding while asleep?
I had to find out.
I stroked myself through the thin cotton of my underwear, staring at her slack mouth and glittering eyes. For a moment, I wanted to walk into the room, to kneel down beside her and let myself slip under. To give myself to it. Become a robot, too. Lily would never know. We could obey together.
It sounded fun.
Wait—was that my thought, or its? Was it somehow pushing its power out of the clean room?
No, my pussy said, that was your thought. Still stroking, I shivered. You weren’t serious. If it had put that thought there, it would have been serious.
My breath caught. Lily was moving, lifting her hand.
Sliding it into her pajama bottoms.
She was still whispering, mouthing the words the earpieces were piping into her brain. And now her fingers went to work, knuckles flexing against the soft fabric, hidden fingertips stroking her slick flesh beneath.
Just like I was.
I whined, without meaning to.
I’d have to be extra careful. An infected Lily was a vector for the virus. She could type it into her own computer, without ever knowing. Send it to thousands of people. And, whenever the timer expired or the right condition was met, the virus would doubtless instruct her to.
And she’d obey.
Would she be asleep at the time? Or would she do it eagerly? A new Lily, with a new mind, and a new master?
My legs shook. Lily was masturbating with both hands now. The corners of her mouth twitched with pleasure, but her eyes were still glassy and asleep, never leaving the writhing spiral that owned them. While she masturbated at its command, reinforcing whatever message it was pushing into her.
It was so complex. Even on the little crippled computer I had installed it on, it had been constantly seeking a network connection, trying to reach out and bring itself new components, seeking additional bits of code to adapt more perfectly to its environment. To enhance its ability to enslave.
Now, Lily would bring those components to it.
Of course, she’d have to install new I/O devices.
But then, she could. A human slave was the best I/O device of all.
My last thought as I fell to my knees, cumming, was that I’d have to be careful. Terribly, terribly careful.
Because once—if—it got me, there was no one to come to my rescue.
—-
“Good morning, Lily,” I said.
“Good morning, Rose.”
I was seated at the counter, clutching my morning cup of coffee. Usually, Lily was up hours before I was—unless I had to be on campus, which was only once or twice a week, I slept in until well after nine. And her workday started at eight. So usually she was already breakfasted, showered, dressed, and gone.
Of course, I hadn’t gotten much sleep last night.
Nor had Lily.
I watched her move around the kitchen. She was in a white t-shirt, extra large, that hung down to almost her mid-thighs. There was a teddy bear in sunglasses printed on the front. She was moving around sleepily, oblivious to my staring. Was that normal? She’d returned to her bed only an hour ago. I’d watched her.
I wished I knew how Lily normally behaved in the morning. I knew she was getting hardly any real sleep, and I had no idea how ‘restful’ being in trance actually was. Maybe it was enough, and she was just usually dopey in the morning. I certainly was. But maybe she was normally bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. I didn’t know.
I realized she’d said something to me.
“What?” I asked.
“You’re up early.” She turned from the refrigerator with a bottle of milk. “Going to campus today?”
“Nope,” I said, looking into my coffee. “Just working here.”
“Huh,” she replied, pouring the milk over her soy cereal. “Turning over a new leaf?”
I snorted. “Just felt like getting up early today, that’s all.”
“Okey-dokey.” She picked up her cereal bowl, and wandered into the living room. I watched as she flipped on MTV4 and slumped onto the sofa. Me, I liked to watch the news while I ate breakfast. But I wasn’t hungry yet.
Early morning fuzzies aside, Lily seemed perfectly normal. Whatever the virus was doing to her, it wasn’t overriding her normal personality. Most likely that meant it was just controlling her when she was asleep. I couldn’t rule out the possibility that she was actively serving it, and consciously pretending to be normal, but I’d never seen a virus that could build up so complicated a level of servitude in only a few weeks. So she was probably still unaware that her sleeping self was doing its bidding.
God, I was horny again.
* * *
Lily took a shower, and got dressed, and after a quick kiss on the cheek she left for work. Perfectly normal.
Except, of course, sleeping in her mind were compulsions she was totally unaware of.
Naturally, I was a lot more trepidatious about getting to work than I had been yesterday.
I puttered around my office first. Answering emails, sorting some files. Don Kelson was wondering about my progress in analyzing the virus, and I had to answer him as though I’d never seen Lily staring blankly into the screen. Complex, multi-faceted, code hard to read—possible Russian grammar and could he send me a Russian code translation program? As though everything were the way it should be.
As though it hadn’t enslaved my housemate.
But I only had so much email to go through. Finally, I had to face it.
It just sat there, behind the glass walls of the clean room.
I stood at the door for a while, looking at the computer. Lily had turned it off. Already, that showed a complexity that put this virus towards the top of the heap. Most of them weren’t able to deal with having the power off, and simply restarted when turned back on. This one must have been able to use memory—since it was apparently able to keep track of the progress of whatever subject was currently being programmed.
Could it handle multiple subjects? It had no I/O—how could it know who was seated in front of it?
Oh, of course. After a certain point, the person being hypnotized became its I/O. Lily undoubtedly identified herself to it whenever she sat down for another hypnotic session.
After all, she was bringing it earphones. Programming her to give it the keyboard input it needed to ‘remember’ her was easy.
The earphones were nowhere in sight this morning, though, and the computer was turned off. Chiding myself for being silly, I opened the door, and entered the clean room.
After all, I’d been working on it for three weeks, and it hadn’t gotten me.
Still, I felt a little frisson of… fear? titillation? as I booted the machine. The virus couldn’t have reprogrammed the system BIOS… unless of course Lily had done so for it. At its command.
She didn’t know computer programming from making sushi, but if she was just obeying a string of instructions, she wouldn’t have to.
I needed to be super careful. Enslaving Lily had turned this virus from a study object to a very real danger.
So I checked the BIOS against a backup. It was clean. I checked the OS. Clean. The virus hadn’t gotten into the system software at all. I checked my applications. Clean.
I wouldn’t call the time wasted.
Time to get to work. I was at a certain place in the code—about fifteen percent through my first pass—but I decided to step sideways for a moment to see if, and how, the virus was accessing memory.
Five fruitless hours later, I still had no clue.
It was accessing memory. My utilities told me that. I could even see the memory areas it was writing to—encrypted into uselessness.
God, this thing was clever.
I really wanted to meet the person who had written it.
But I was getting nowhere on the memory hunt. I’d just have to return to paging through the program, line by line. Somewhere in there, I’d run across what I was looking for.
I took a break to answer my email. Don had sent me the Russian code translator, and told me that he had gotten interest from the government in this particular virus. I smiled—government interest might mean government money. I wondered what prompted it. The complexity of the thing? I doubted it. It had probably just gotten into their systems somehow.
I doubted it was a major problem, well-written or not. Falling asleep at one’s desk was just a little too obvious to continue long enough for this thing to get its hooks in. No, it wasn’t an office threat. It needed time, and a subject that could return to it again and again.
A subject just like the one I’d given it.
The apartment’s front door opened, and I jumped a little in my chair.
“I’m home!” Lily called.
“Hi!” I called back. I darted into the clean room. The screen was just as I’d left it, only… the little activity monitor application I kept running had a new entry on it.
The virus was active.
How? I hadn’t figured out yet how it turned itself on. The OS I was running was painfully simple, and required frequent rebooting, but the virus never started on boot-up. It just randomly triggered, and I had yet to figure out how. It shouldn’t have been able to. It was so freakin’ clever.
With a start, I realized I was standing there staring at the screen as I thought all that. Staring right into whatever subliminals it was feeding me.
I looked away quickly. My heart had sped up. Of course, nothing had happened. I wasn’t in trance, and I could stare at subliminals for hours—well, tens of minutes—without them being able to have any effect. Anyway, it was an occupational hazard. The Hart Worm last year had snuck around my first, primitive activity monitor, and before I realized it I’d found myself staring at the women on the bikini channel with helpless lust. Even after I disabled the Worm, it took a month before my sexual orientation returned to normal.
Why did this virus frighten me so much more?
“Rose?”
I blinked. Lily was standing at the door to the clean room. The virus was still running on the computer next to me.
I stifled the impulse to say “don’t look at it!”
“Yes?” I asked.
“I’m going to go ahead and make dinner. Pad Thai okay by you?”
“Great,” I said.
“Cool.” She turned, and left my office.
I turned to the computer screen. It looked perfectly normal, but I knew it was flashing instructions at me at the rate of four a second. That code, I had found.
Defiantly, I stared at it. The screen looked normal, but my activity monitor showed the virus was fully engaged.
If I sat down, and just went on working, I’d doubtless find myself getting sleepy. Sleepy, and comfortable, and sleepier, and more comfortable, until my chin touched my chest and my eyes fluttered shut.
And then my eyes would open just a little bit, and one of my hands would type in some sort of code, and pretty green swirls would start to form on the screen, fully capturing my attention. And I’d be drawn into them, sleeping and watching until the program decided it was done with that stage, and it was time to move me onto something else.
I wondered what Lily would do, if she came in and found me like that. Would she wake me up for dinner? Or would whatever slept in her mind awaken, and place her on her knees next to me? Perhaps fetch the headphones, and slip them into my unresisting ears?
I sat down.
With a shiver, I turned the computer off.
I had to get ready for dinner.
—-
Source: reddit.com/r/eroticliterature/comments/hkpo04/sub_routine_ff_mc_part_13
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