twelve

  [14 july 2024]=-=[sunday]=-=(2243)

  Morgan awakens in the familiar infirmary that she hasn’t seen in forever, it feels like. “How…”

  A nurse notices this, as she’s there changing an IV bag. “Oh! Don’t try to move, please…” she says, before tapping an earpiece. “Miss Danni…? I know, but you said to come on this channel and interrupt anything if she woke up… Yes, Miss Danni, she’s waking up now.” She turns her attention back to Morgan. “Morgan, Miss Danni is on her way. Please just sit tight for now, you’ve been through a traumatic ordeal.”

  “Ordeal… what…?” Morgan reaches up to try to rub her head. “Where am I? What’s today’s date?”

  “You’re back at Miss Kelly’s compound,” the nurse says. “It’s July 14th, 2243 hours.”

  “July?!” Morgan asks, dumbfounded. It only felt like a few weeks in some regards, but it also felt like years. Four months. She’s spent four months in her Daddy and husband’s care… no, as their prisoner, she reminds herself. And it’s Jason and Joshua, not ‘Daddy’ and her husband. Those intrusive thoughts are still there.

  About fifteen minutes ter, Danni walks into the room. “Morgan, are you okay?!” she asks, visibly worried.

  “No, Mistress,” Morgan admits. “Jason Levin had me, they knew about the pn from the start… he…” She sniffles. “He brainwashed me into acting like he was my father, then tried to brainwash me further into a docile housewife for that bastard Callis… then Levin married me off to him and it was wonderf-- it was hell. I can’t count how many times he made passionate love… how many times he raped me, and I couldn’t stop it...”

  “Fuck’s sake…” Danni says. “That sounds like some of the shit Joy went through, but you might have actually had it worse.”

  “How did you find me?” Morgan asks.

  “Your tracker signal spiked about a week ago,” Danni says. “We don’t know how it happened, but we got an extraction team together and had you out of there inside of two days.”

  “He left for a job…” Morgan remembers. “I tried to find any way to communicate with the outside world, then I remembered the tracker and tried to feed it power in the only way I could think of, by electrocuting myself on a 220-volt feed.”

  “Fucking shit!” Danni excims. The normally even-keeled woman is actually taken aback at the extremes Morgan had to go through to get a signal out to them. “Morgan, you could have died!”

  “...That would have been an acceptable outcome too…” Morgan says, sniffling.

  “Please don’t talk like that,” Danni says. “We were all beside ourselves trying to find out what happened to you after they killed Stark and your signal went silent…”

  “...They killed Stark?!” Morgan says. “Shit… he was our only in…” Morgan tries to get out of the bed, but she feels a tug at her left wrist as she does. She’s cuffed. “Mistress?”

  Danni shakes her head. “We don’t know how much they’ve fucked with your head besides brainwashing you into being a docile housewife,” she says. “Until we can figure that out, you stay here. And you certainly aren’t going on any missions like this. Not until we can be sure you’re okay and not a security risk.”

  “Daddy… mother fuck! Levin had a girl there…” Morgan says. “He brainwashed her into thinking she was Zell’s old self, but idealized in the way he wanted… she’s little more than a Stepfordized tradwife in training… we have to…”

  Danni frowns. They have got to deprogram her somehow. It’s like there are two different versions of Morgan at war inside her head – the soldier-turned-assassin they created, and the docile traditional submissive daughter and wife that Levin tried to turn her into. “There’s nothing we can do for that girl right now. We’re going to continue to try to find Levin, but in the meantime, you are our priority.”

  “...I don’t deserve to be,” Morgan says, as depression and guilt start to overtake her. “I betrayed Raina. I let her brother fuck me… no, I fucking begged for it…”

  “Little girl, none of this is your fault,” Danni says. “You were being controlled and maniputed. We’re going to get you help. I’ll be back. I need to tell Raina that you’re awake.”

  Morgan lies back in the bed and sighs softly.

  Danni leaves the room and gets on her cell, immediately calling Kelly. “Miss Kelly? Yeah. Yeah. Morgan’s awake, but… they fucked her up bad, worse than Joy in some respects. We have a bigger problem, though. We have a leak. Levin had intel on us. They knew we were sending in Morgan.”

  --={@~~~@}=--

  [15 july 2024]=-=[monday]=-=(0813)

  Morgan hasn’t fallen back asleep since she woke up. She can’t sleep. She feels empty and alone. She needs him. She hates herself for feeling that way, but she needs him.

  Raina walks into the room. “Hon…” she says, almost with pity in her voice.

  “Don’t look at me…” Morgan says as she turns away. “I let him…”

  Raina shakes her head. “No, you didn’t. Danni told me everything. It happened to me too, remember?”

  Morgan starts crying. “You weren’t brainwashed…”

  Raina walks over and sits on the end of the bed. “No. He just maniputed me. I still wanted him afterward. I cried for so many nights after my father kicked him out. It’s taken me a long time to realize I did nothing wrong there. He awakened something inside me that should never have been awakened.”

  “I don’t want to feel like this though!” Morgan says through tears. “I miss his touch, even though he brutalized me with it! I miss his taste, even though it sickens me thinking about it! I… I need him in ways I can’t even comprehend! I’m incomplete without him! I don’t want to, but I’m compelled to love him...”

  Raina leans over and hugs Morgan tightly. “I used to think the same things. I’ve healed – well, not entirely, but I’m healing from it. You’ll heal too. It’s going to take time, but you can do it. You can find that you can go on without him. You’re the strongest person I know. I thought I loved him too, that he loved me. It was all a lie. He exploited me. He raped me. Just like he raped you. It doesn’t make you weak. You’re still the strongest person I know… you can overcome this, love.”

  “I don’t know that I can overcome it this time…” Morgan says, still crying, feeling too broken to return the hug. “I… I wanted to be rescued, but… if it didn’t work, I was ready to die. I wanted out that badly. My mind keeps betraying me. I can’t even trust myself… Da-- Levin did a number on me. He broke me.”

  “You hit your breaking point…” Raina says, just continuing to hold her lover. “I’m so sorry, I wish I could do more for you right now…”

  “No one can…” Morgan says softly, continuing to cry. “I’m fundamentally broken right now...”

  --={@~~~@}=--

  (1356)

  Inside one of the control rooms, Danni, Kelly, and Hansen are running a full forensic audit of everyone in the military company with access to the compound. “We’ve got to find that fucking leaker and make an example of them,” Kelly says angrily. “Morgan was our best chance to get Levin, and now she might be too broken or compromised to complete her mission. All because someone wanted a payday, I’ll bet. I thought money could buy us a comfortable life, but all it’s brought us is misery.” She was already leaning towards becoming disillusioned with wealth after Joy was taken and she had learned about the sexual svery cabal those other rich people were running, but now, honestly? She wants to burn it all down. No one should have so much money as to buy freedom from any scrutiny.

  That includes her. She’ll burn every dolr that she has in order to get Jason Levin, and now she’s added Joshua Callis to the top of that list. Ever since she commissioned the original breaking of Morgan, the former soldier has become her responsibility in a sense. In some ways, she’s become a repcement daughter for the one she already lost.

  “There’s nothing out of the ordinary yet, Ms. Jourgensen,” Hansen says as she pores through financial records. The woman is a wunderkind when it comes to computers, and an invaluable asset. A former member of a hacktivism collective in her teens, she first caught Kelly’s eye when she managed to break into the master repository for the Accession program and hack the admin account to post messages promoting the causes of various oppressed groups, from Palestinians to trans people, to all kinds of other groups from it to all users.

  Most people would have sought to put her in jail. Kelly offered her a job instead, which she accepted.

  Hansen’s personal operational security was insane. To be perfectly frank, there was no way they would have been able to break into her records without her help, and she showed them she had nothing to hide. There was no extra money coming in. No out of the ordinary communications, nothing that Levin or his surrogates could exploit. She was clean.

  Meanwhile, Danni, who is not up to Hansen’s level but still isn’t a slouch in the cyberwarfare department, looks through other relevant data about the contractors in the company. She has headphones on, as she’s listening to music she likes to help her quiet her mind. Otherwise, she would be consumed with thoughts of vengeance right now. She’s supposed to be Morgan’s handler, and she had failed her, in her own eyes. “Those who bear a heavy heart, hear my words. On this day, we remind the tyrants above that they can also bleed,” she sings. That’s the cue that Danni is beyond pissed off and just waiting for a reason to go on the offensive.

  “Have we forgotten that kings can also fear for their families? I see from afar, she’s taunting the gods with the head of a tyrant once thought immortal…” Hansen sings in reply, in a surprisingly convincing death metal growl for a cis woman.

  “Didn’t realize you liked industrial death metal,” Danni says with a smirk as she lifts her headphones from her ears.

  “There’s a lot you don’t know about me,” Hansen says as she returns Danni’s smirk. Is… is she flirting with her? “I’d be more than willing to… huh?” Hansen turns to look at her screen. “I see a discrepancy. I’m sending you a name.”

  “Yeah, I’ve got it, cross-referencing with the other data…” Danni says. “Interesting. You think he’s the one, then?”

  “I think so. Unless you can expin an innocent reason for a 75,000 deposit from an Armenian shell company…” Hansen says.

  “I can’t. I can’t expin the phone calls from a Moldovan cell number, either. But I imagine the money covers the financial hit from a nasty divorce pretty well,” Danni says. “Dave Riley,” she says as she turns to face Kelly. “He was on the raid of Roderick’s pce. How do you want to approach this?”

  Kelly’s eyes narrow. “Confirm everything. Then confirm it again. Then we find out what he’s told Levin and his cronies. Then Mister Riley pays a visit to the re-education center.”

  “Ma’am?” Hansen asks, concerned.

  “If he was the one feeding information to Levin,” Kelly says, “then the way I see it, he owes us a repcement for Morgan, assuming she’s too damaged to complete her mission. So, we’ll take it out of his ass. Literally.”

  “R-right…” Hansen says as she goes back to her deep dive, focusing on everything about Dave Riley for the st five years. She’d forgotten how vengeful Kelly could be when given the proper motivation.

  Danni gets up. “I need to check on Morgan. She may be salvageable even after everything. We can’t just give up on her.”

  Kelly nods as she walks over to watch Hansen work. She has a name now, someone to potentially focus her anger and hatred on.

  --={@~~~@}=--

  (2347)

  Morgan has spent all day trying to take back control of her mind from all the damage that’s been caused to it. She’s attempted to reverse-engineer the brainwashing techniques used on her, in a sense. Every time one of those invasive thoughts about Jason or Joshua pops up, she’s struck herself, hard.

  Sadly, the only result of that is that she’s drawn blood and she’s covered in bruises. The thoughts haven’t stopped.

  Danni enters the room, and immediately she runs over to Morgan. “...What the hell happened, little girl?”

  “I…” Morgan starts to cry again. “I tried to associate the intrusive thoughts with pain to make them stop… it didn’t work…”

  Danni shakes her head. “Morgan, that’s not how it works…” she says, frowning. “You can’t just…”

  “I need it to stop,” Morgan pleads. “I’m useless like this and I want to have a use again… I don’t want to be broken and compromised! I… I need to get back to how I was…”

  Danni shakes her head again, sighing. “...I honestly don’t know what we can do to fix you…”

  “I’ll try anything,” Morgan says, desperate, with tears in her eyes. “I want to die if I can’t make these thoughts stop.”

  “...There’s one thing we can try, but it’s dangerous…” Danni says.

  --={@~~~@}=--

  [16 july 2024]=-=[tuesday]=-=(0927)

  “You can’t be serious,” Kelly says as she eats her breakfast, a strawberry and cream fvored parfait and a toasted everything bagel with honey butter. “You’re seriously considering giving her electroshock therapy?”

  “They call it ‘electroconvulsive therapy’ now, Miss Kelly,” Danni says, “and yes, I am strongly considering it. She’s suffering and the brainwashing techniques Levin uses are notoriously hard to break.”

  “But we haven’t even tried therapy yet!” Kelly protests.

  “You’ve had Joy in intensive therapy for four months and she still can’t fight the programming that makes her want to dress in lolita dresses and nothing else,” Danni says. “We don’t have months. And if it turns out Riley is our leaker, we can’t be sure that he’ll respond to re-education like Morgan did.”

  “Fuck,” Kelly says. “Fine. I’ll call in someone who is familiar with the procedure.”

  --={@~~~@}=--

  [17 july 2024]=-=[wednesday]=-=(1015)

  Morgan is strapped to the bed in the infirmary as the electrodes are attached to her. ECG leads are pced on her chest and EEG leads are pced on her head. They’re going for a biteral ECT, because there’s no real way to pinpoint just where the damage that’s been done to her is centered.

  “You’re sure you want to do this?” Kelly asks as she watches the prep work for the procedure.

  “I’m sure,” Morgan says, as she’s given a muscle rexant. “I’m not as strong as everyone thinks I am. I can’t endure this. If I have to keep living with these fucking compulsions, I’d rather be dead. If this has a chance to fix me, I have to take it.”

  “You do realize that even if this works, one treatment won’t be a magic bullet, right?” the doctor asks. “It might take as many as twelve treatments to completely undo the damage.”

  “You’re also still going to need therapy, and possibly medication,” Danni says. “After everything you’ve endured, there’s no way you don’t have PTSD by now.”

  “I know,” Morgan says. “Put me under and do it.”

  The anesthetic is given, and Morgan starts to slowly go under.

  She briefly looks to Danni. “Tell… tell Raina I love her… in case I forget…” Then she passes out. An oxygen mask and a mouth guard are put onto her.

  The procedure starts. The only outward indication of the intentionally caused seizure is her feet suddenly moving. It only takes about ten minutes to complete the procedure, and she will need at least five more sessions – two more this week, and three during the next, with three more sessions during each of the following two weeks if needed.

  --={@~~~@}=--

  (1702)

  Dave Riley is just wrapping up his gun training for the day. It’s been a completely uneventful day so far for him as he heads into the men’s locker room to change for the night. That all changes when Danni walks up to him in said locker room.

  “Riley,” Danni says, in her intimidating, emotionless way.

  Riley gulps. “Miss Danni?! What are…”

  Danni puts a finger on Riley’s lips to shush him. “Finish changing and come with me.” She and Hansen finished their checks of his background. It’s all true. Everything. He sold them out for a girl who had previously been abducted, mindfucked, and surgically altered. He’s as guilty as sin.

  A few minutes ter, Riley is thrown unceremoniously into one of the storage rooms, his hands tied behind his back.

  Danni walks in along with… is that Morgan?! That… that can’t be! he thinks. Morgan’s supposed to be permanently indisposed…

  But it is… but she looks different somehow. She’s showing no outward emotions, as if she has a heart of ice, but her eyes are almost feral. It’s as if she’s no longer human. In reality, she’s still feeling the aftereffects of the first ECT session, and she’s fallen back on her original training… that of a killer. Danni’s word is the only thing holding her back from tearing him apart like a rabid wolf.

  “So, Dave… you don’t mind if I call you Dave, do you?” Danni asks. “Would you like to expin the calls from Moldova? Or would you prefer to expin the 75,000 deposit first?”

  “Calls from… what are you talking about? This is insane…” Riley says, frightened. He knows what happens when Morgan is brought into one of these rooms. You don’t walk out. “I never got…”

  Danni walks over and takes Riley’s smartphone from his pocket, holding his face in pce to unlock it. She then checks the call log. “I mean these calls, Dave,” she says, as she has scrolled to several calls from upwards of six months ago coming from a 373 country code. “We also found the 75,000 deposit in your bank account, so don’t deny that either. I just want to know why you put Morgan’s life at risk.”

  The jig is up. “No! I never… Morgan was never at risk of dying!” Riley shouts. “I… my wife cheated and left me, and the judge gave her everything!”

  “So, you gave them Morgan. You put her in a situation where she was abused and vioted daily for months!” Danni shouts. She’s outwardly angry, which may be scarier than Morgan’s stoic appearance. “They almost fucking broke her! She almost killed herself to signal for extraction! Was it worth 75k? Or did they promise you something else?!”

  Riley starts to cry. He’s fucked. He’s beyond fucked. It goes without saying that he’s fired. Maybe if he confesses to everything, they won’t have him killed. “Tiffany!” he excims. “He promised me his daughter!”

  “...That’s not his daughter,” Morgan says in a ft tone. “That’s someone he abducted and destroyed to make an idealized version of everything he wanted her to be.”

  Riley looks stunned. “No… that’s not right, he promised…”

  “The person who used to be Jason Levin’s daughter is currently upstairs with Miss Kelly’s child,” Danni says, nearly growling. “And ae hasn’t gone by that name in years.”

  “How does it feel knowing that you’re going to die for nothing?” Morgan asks as she starts to walk closer.

  Riley, panicked, tries to get away, but only succeeds at pushing himself back into a wall. “I… I’m sorry… I never…”

  “Little girl, don’t kill him,” Danni says.

  “Mistress?” Morgan asks as she turns to look back at her handler.

  “Miss Kelly wants him alive. He’s going to become another you,” Danni says.

  “Can I at least rough him up?” Morgan asks. She’s still showing no outward emotions.

  “A little,” Danni says. “Leave him conscious.”

  Riley looks on in horror as Morgan walks closer. “Please… no, please!!!” he shouts.

  Morgan grabs Riley by the neck. He’s a nky man, somewhat tall but not very bulky. She lifts him with ease despite the size discrepancy and her lost physical strength. With her free hand, she punches him in the face, hard, fracturing his jaw. Then she turns him around and pulls at his right arm, causing a shoulder separation and provoking a bloodcurdling scream. She isn’t done, however, as she steps on Riley’s foot, breaking a couple of bones in it.

  “Don’t do anything too permanent to him, little girl,” Danni says. She’s enjoying this, sure, but she doesn’t want Riley to be so injured that he will be out of action for longer than a couple of months.

  “Understood, Mistress…” Morgan says as she puts Riley in a punishing hold that won’t break any bones or tear any muscles, but it will hurt him to the point where he passes out from the pain.

  He screams for a few minutes and fils, tapping his hand against Morgan’s body like a pro wrestler in a submission finisher, before the hold and the pain do indeed force him to bck out.

  Danni picks him up. She’s impressed by the sheer ruthlessness of Morgan’s attacks, but… she’s also frightened. Morgan had managed to have a compassionate streak before. She’d usually have to order the girl to kill. This time, she was going to do it of her own volition, without hesitation, if not for her ordering her not to.

  “How does it feel knowing that you’re going to die for nothing?”

  Danni could just tell. It was no idle threat. Hopefully the rest of the treatments, as well as the therapy and the medication could get Morgan back to where she was, otherwise…

  ...Otherwise, she had pyed a part in creating a monster.

  Meanwhile, in Morgan’s mind, things are a lot less chaotic. Sure, the compulsions and commands Levin had put there were still there, but they were a lot quieter, and more easily ignored. Unfortunately, she had also lost something of her normal self in the process. Maybe it would return with enough time.

  All that’s left at the moment is pain and hate… muted, but still there.

  In any case, she had just sent a man to suffer the same fate as she had… potentially worse, as she thinks about it… and she felt zero remorse over it.

  --={@~~~@}=--

  (2006)

  Morgan sits at her vanity, brushing her hair. In her time in captivity, her pixie cut had grown into more of a French bob, and her natural waviness was beginning to show. She feels as if she’s just going through the motions with her self-care, though.

  Raina walks up behind her. “Love, are you okay?” she asks.

  “No,” Morgan says, still not able to express much outward emotion. “I had my first ECT session today, and I’m not sure what I feel. The thoughts are quieter but… I feel hollow inside. Like there’s not much left of me to fill the gap.”

  Raina hugs Morgan tightly, she’s obviously worried even if Morgan isn’t – or at least can’t express it properly. “Talk to me.”

  Morgan stops brushing her hair and ponders. “I almost killed a man today without even hesitating. Mistress had to tell me not to do it before I even started. I… I don’t feel anything from it. No joy, no etion, no satisfaction… no remorse. It’s what I was molded to be, underneath it all… and then since I wasn’t allowed to kill him, I hurt him instead until he couldn’t stand the pain anymore and he bcked out. Then Mistress took him away to undergo the things I underwent.”

  Raina lets go and takes a step back. She suddenly looks horrified. “You… you softened up a man so he could be tortured?”

  Morgan nods. “He leaked our pn to Levin’s people and indirectly got a man killed, a man with a small baby. He did it because Levin promised him a girl, one he’s been breaking for months. He’s the reason they were able to reprogram me and why I was vioted so many times.”

  Raina shakes her head. “You can’t see what’s wrong with this?”

  Morgan turns her head and looks at Raina. There she goes again, with the heart of ice and the feral eyes. Raina barely recognizes her girlfriend anymore. “No. It’s revenge. We’ve operated on revenge here for a long time. Because of him, I suffered enough to want to die. It’s only fair that he gets a turn to feel the same.”

  Raina continues to look shocked and horrified. “Morgan… what’s happened to you…”

  “I wish I knew… that’s part of the reason I’m going to the extremes I am,” Morgan says softly.

  Raina fshes back to something Morgan said back in March.

  “Raina, I am a terrible person.”

  She didn’t want to believe it back then. She still doesn’t want to believe it now, even with the evidence staring her in the face. “I refuse to believe you’re the terrible person you believe yourself to be. I know the compassionate, caring woman I fell in love with is in there. She just needs to continue to heal…”

  --={@~~~@}=--

  [19 july 2024]=-=[friday]=-=(1343)

  Morgan sits down, recovering from her second ECT session. They’ve started her on medications to try to reduce some of the aftereffects of her PTSD, and she hasn’t done much since brutalizing Riley. The intrusive thoughts are much quieter than before, and she isn’t saying things that are prompted by them anymore. But she’s not normal, either. Her treatment of Riley proves that. Violence has become her first resort, not her st. There’s still no remorse from her at all.

  Even Danni and Kelly are starting to worry. Before the ECT, they were worried that the programming forced upon Morgan might have left her compromised. Now, they worry that she’s too ruthless for her task.

  In order for the pn to work, she has to be able to pretend to be compliant with her buyers, at least at first. This allows for her to learn how they tick, what they’re doing, and who they might be harming at a given time. It also exposes links between them and the other perverts in their little cabal. Then, when their guard is down and they assume she is just a compliant sve, maid, living sex toy… whatever they buy her for, and she has the info she requires, then and only then does she eliminate the target.

  It doesn’t work as well when she’s wanting to kill first. Then they’re forced to attempt to piece things together without their most important source of intel: the target.

  The problem here is that they can’t risk breaking her again. The human brain can’t just be bnked and rewritten unlimited times. In reality, it can only withstand the types of trauma required for the task a couple of times at best, before insanity starts to set in. She’s already undergone extremely traumatizing near complete brainwashing twice, and she’s had an identity completely destroyed once. They’re honestly pushing it with the ECT, but her distress forced them to consider the option.

  They’re trying to get her to heal emotionally, but then what? She can’t just be rolled back to the self she was in March, before the failed Callis op. There’s a substantial chance that even with a proper chance to recover, proper treatments such as therapy and medication, and ECT, that she still might prove to be unable to complete her missions.

  It’s one of the reasons Riley is in the re-education center right now having his identity destroyed.

  And yet, despite all that, Morgan is motivated to try to recover enough to resume her missions. Honestly, what kind of life would she have if she couldn’t? True, she could settle down with Raina, and there’s a high likelihood that Kelly would personally ensure that the two would be provided for, for the rest of their lives. The two would never have to work a day in their lives. But then what? She has no pursuits other than the missions. She has no passions other than the missions. Aside from Raina, nothing else matters to Morgan except the missions.

  Without them, what’s the point?

  She gets up and looks at herself in a nearby mirror. She can see it in herself, just like everyone else. There’s no emotion in her face, and she feels her heart is like ice. But there’s an almost feral fury in her eyes. She realizes she hasn’t stopped fighting since she became this new person. The fury has always been there; she just needs to relearn how to properly harness it.

  I’m broken inside. I don’t know how I survived. I’ve looked inside, now I realize… it’s okay to be broken. It’s okay. I can still do this. I can feel my fire, my fury. I have to cim it, yet calm it.

  Only then can I finish what I started.