nine

  [1 march 2024]=-=[friday]=-=(0041)

  Kelly went straight to her room after Stefan regained awareness. She didn’t say a single word to anyone, not to Morgan, not to Gary, not even to Danni. Stefan’s words broke her.

  “Who am I, Mom?”

  A good mother would know the answer to that question.

  A good mother would have protected her child.

  A good mother would certainly not have inflicted the hell that was inflicted on her own child upon an innocent person.

  The only thing the person Morgan was before was ever guilty of was having a temper problem. That’s in part why she chose her… but now Morgan was in enough control of herself that she was virtually the adult in the room.

  She definitely can’t face Morgan. Not now. Not after this. Up here, she won’t have to. Morgan isn’t allowed in the main part of the house.

  She can’t face anyone. Monsters don’t deserve to be okay. That’s what she is. Not a mother. Not a human being. A monster.

  I’m just like those monsters I go after, she realizes. If there’s a hell, I’ve bought myself a first-css ticket there. I deserve it. I deserve to suffer.

  “Miss Kelly, enough!” comes a voice outside the door.

  It’s Morgan. But how? Danni wouldn’t have let her up here, would she? Did she somehow escape the basements on her own?

  “You’ve got to snap out of it. You’re no good to Stefan like this. He needs you right now more than ever!” Morgan pleads. “We need you too.”

  They don’t need me. They’re better off without me. Everyone is.

  “Miss Kelly, please come back to us,” Danni says from outside the door as well. That expins how Morgan got up here.

  I just fuck up everything I touch. Everything I do is wrong.

  “...Please, Kelly,” Morgan says. Not “Miss Kelly,” just “Kelly.” “I wouldn’t be who I am without you, and I like who I am now.”

  Lies. How can she like herself after how much I took from her?

  “...Come back, Mom… I’m sorry if I hurt you…”

  Stefan?

  The door opens and Kelly walks out, appearing almost disheveled. Her hair is matted, and her makeup is a disaster.

  The two girls and the boy who looks like a girl are waiting outside – Danni in her customary pantsuit, Morgan looking like a badass military girl in her sports bra and cargo pants, her usual style… and Stefan is dressed in as close to his Sunday best as his mental conditioning will allow, an upscaled version of a dress a little girl would wear to something like Easter at a church.

  “Mom…” Stefan says. He walks over and hugs her. “I didn’t mean it… I… I still don’t know who I am anymore but I don’t bme you. I know you’re doing everything you can for me.”

  “Stefan, I… I missed you…” Kelly says through tears.

  “...Mom…” Stefan ys his head on her shoulder. “…You said if I wanted to stay a girl, you’d support me, right?”

  Kelly sniffles and nods. “I did, sweetie. Do you…”

  “I can’t go back after everything that’s been done to me,” he says softly. “They took too much of him away. The best I can do is work with what’s left and rebuild.”

  That sounds familiar to Morgan, who has had to do the same after her own brainwashing.

  “So… then it’s Stephanie now?” Kelly asks.

  “Mom, if I’d have been born a girl, what would I have been named?” Stefan asks.

  “Elizabeth… but then she was born and got that name,” Kelly says. “But my second child would have been named Joy if both were girls.”

  “...I don’t remember Elizabeth. Is she here?” Stefan asks.

  “...She’s gone,” Kelly says. “We lost her…” She’s grieving two children now, but… but she can still get one back. “But… would you like to be Joy?”

  Joy nods. “I’d like that, Mom. Because that’s what I want to see in you.”

  Kelly sobs and holds Joy tightly. Her son is gone, but her daughter has come home to her. And she’s never letting go. “Still can’t avoid the childish styles?”

  “No… I tried dressing more my age, and I almost broke again,” Joy says. “I remember something about Soviet mind control from when I was captive… could that expin it?”

  “It might…” That does help expin it. Kelly exposed Morgan to simir techniques. They’re extremely effective and very hard to undo because they’re not meant to suppress parts of a person, they’re meant to destroy them. She would almost have to break Joy again to get rid of that habit, it’s as ingrained in her now as a childhood nguage. She makes a mental note to call a cult deprogrammer – it’s not quite the same thing, but it’s the only thing she can think of to deal with brainwashing.

  Joy holds her mother for a while. “...Can we get rid of the impnts, though? I feel ridiculous…”

  Kelly smiles. “I’ll call a doctor in first thing Monday.”

  --={@~~~@}=--

  (0743)

  A young person with a definite masculine bent walks up to the door of the Jourgensens’ mansion. Ae’d gotten a message to come here, that there was something there ae’d want to see… even though the messages went to someone with a different name, one ae hasn’t heard or used in a long time. Aer hand trembles as ae reaches for the doorbell.

  Danni opens the door. “Hm?” She’d seen the person come in, but ae used a gate code that was sent to Tiffany’s number. “Can I help you?”

  Ae looks up at Danni. Gods, she’s built like a brick shithouse. “I…” ae says in a cracking voice. “I got a message saying to come here… this is the Jourgensen estate, right?”

  “...Tiffany?” Danni asks.

  “Yes and no,” ae says. “I go by Zell now. After seeing what happened to Stefan, I wanted a clean break, it wasn’t enough to forsake my family. Who are you, though? I don’t remember the Jourgensens having a female bodyguard…”

  “Danni,” she says with a smirk. “You used to know me as Adrian. You’re not the only one that’s made changes.”

  “Damn… it’s always the ones you least expect,” Zell says. “So why the cold call?”

  “Stefan came to,” Danni says. “She wants to see you.”

  “...She? Look, it doesn’t matter what my sperm donor did to him, he’s still a guy, okay?” Zell protests.

  “Why don’t you see for yourself?” Danni asks as she opens the door to let Zell inside.

  The two walk up the stairs to Stefan’s room, which has been kept the exact same as the day he disappeared. The door is open.

  It’s never open. Not since that day. And yet… a girl sits on Stefan’s bed, surrounded by the vestiges of the life that was stripped from him for the crime of loving the wrong girl.

  She looks up at Zell. “...Is that…?” Joy asks.

  “He…” Danni begins, but she’s interrupted.

  “Ae. My pronouns are ae/aer,” Zell says.

  “Ae goes by Zell now,” Danni expins.

  “...I remember… her middle name was Zelda…” Joy says.

  Zell’s eyes open wide. Ae’s never told anyone the inspiration for aer name. “...Stefan?” ae whispers. “Stefan, is that you?”

  “Yes… no… I go by Joy now,” she expins. “I’m so sorry. Your father, the person he sold me to, they both destroyed so much of him that there’s next to nothing left. But he loved Tiffany,” she says. “...I owed it to him to expin to you…”

  “After you were dumped on your parents’ doorstep, I… I couldn’t take it. They’d changed you so much… I had a breakdown,” Zell expins. “Joy… so Danni was right… you are a girl now…”

  “...But you’re not…” Joy says softly.

  Zell shakes aer head. “I didn’t want to be anything those people wanted me to be. It wasn’t enough to give up their name. I gave up the identity they had crafted for me for my whole life… gave up my femininity entirely. But I couldn’t go all the way to manhood so I… I just kind of stopped in the middle…”

  Both of them are silent for what feels like an eternity.

  “...I still love you,” Joy finally says. “But I… I’m not attracted to girls anymore, not after what those people did to me… but you’re not a girl anymore.”

  “Boy or not, all I ever wanted was for you to come back to me,” Zell says. “I never wanted to admit what was pinly obvious, that they’d succeeded in destroying the boy I loved. But… I love the person. Not the boy.” Ae walks closer to Joy. “I love you.”

  Joy gets up from the bed and steps closer to Zell.

  The two embrace, in nearly opposing roles from the st time they’d done so. The boy is now a girl, the girl now exists between the binary genders. They do something they were never allowed to do in their former lives.

  They kiss. They kiss for well over a minute. Joy raises her lower leg at some point during the kiss, subconsciously accepting that she’s now the girl in the retionship.

  “...I still want us to work,” Zell says.

  “I do too,” Joy says. “I have a lot of healing to do, still. But I still want there to be an us.”

  “If it means that bastard sperm donor of mine loses in the end, that’s just icing on the cake,” Zell says. “I could stay here if it’ll help…”

  “I’d like that,” Joy says, nodding, through tears as she smiles demurely.

  --={@~~~@}=--

  (1049)

  Morgan sits at her vanity, in front of the mirror. She’s moisturizing her arms and chest at the moment. She’s resolved to start taking better care of herself while she waits for them to find a way to get her inserted into Joshua Callis’s presence, most likely as a sex sve. She’s lost in thought.

  “What is it, Morgan?” Raina asks.

  “...I’m just thinking…” Morgan says as she rubs the lotion into her skin. Everyone else gets to heal except for me. You get to heal. Joy gets to heal. Even Miss Kelly gets to heal. When do I get a turn? I just get tossed back into the fire. She visibly starts to become distressed.

  She starts to rub more vigorously, but she doesn’t apply more lotion.

  “...Morgan?” Raina asks, starting to grow concerned.

  I guess that’s my lot in life. I’m just a weapon, not a person. Something, not someone, used and used again. My identity is irrelevant, I’m just a pleasant, unassuming shape, an expectation, a premise. Nothing I want matters. I just exist to be remolded and used, allowed to be vioted for the sake of getting close to a target and taking them out.

  “Morgan, are you okay?”

  I’m a weapon, and that’s it. Anything beyond that is undesirable, irrelevant, inessential and ultimately, unfathomable. I fit perfectly into this operation because I was made to. Purpose-built to, from the ground up. It only functions because of me.

  “...Morgan, talk to me...”

  I’m so alone… so alone… are weapons supposed to feel? I guess… I guess that would defeat the purpose…

  Morgan’s doomspiraling starts to reach critical mass.

  The bde owes no debt to the pain. I am no different than the bde.

  Raina gets between Morgan and the mirror. “Please, talk to me, Morgan… can you hear me?”

  I am a weapon, not a person. Do weapons have names? How am I supposed to know what it means to be human?

  Raina, not knowing what else to do, hugs Morgan to try to get her to snap out of it.

  “...What?” Morgan asks, suddenly brought back to reality.

  “I didn’t know what else to do, you just… stopped responding…” Raina says.

  “...I was thinking, and I guess it got away from me…” Morgan says as she looks down at her arm. She actually caused a small friction burn from all the rubbing. “Fuck…”

  “Morgan… do you need help?” Raina asks as she leans more into the hug.

  Morgan shakes her head. “What would I even say to a shrink? That I’m doomspiraling because I was remade into a living weapon, a custom-made killer?”

  “...I see your point,” Raina says with a sigh.

  “I probably do,” Morgan concedes, “but I can’t get it right now. Any shrink who pays more than lip service to their ethics would think I’m a threat to others… and they’d be right. That’s the whole point of my fucking existence. I exist to be a weapon.”

  “No. You’re a person first, otherwise you wouldn’t have saved me,” Raina says. “The fact that you did that means you’re not a complete monster like Ss-- like Roderick was.”

  “Raina, I was ready to poison you enough to make you sick just so you couldn’t stop me from killing Roderick,” Morgan confesses. “I would have killed you if you got in the way or tried to warn him.”

  “...If I was that far gone, maybe I would have deserved it,” Raina admits, flooring Morgan. “Maybe I’d have been beyond saving at that point.”

  “Raina, I am a terrible person,” Morgan protests. “You shoudn’t…”

  “I shouldn’t what?” Raina asks.

  “You shouldn’t love me because I don’t deserve it!” Morgan cries. “I’m a murderer! An assassin! I’ve killed in cold blood!”

  Raina hugs Morgan tightly. “You’re just listening to brainworms,” she says. “And I’m allowed to love who I want. I don’t care that you’ve killed. If you were truly cold-blooded, you wouldn’t have treated me so gently even under the influence of those drugs back at Roderick’s compound. You would have killed me instead of knocking me out when you poisoned him. You wouldn’t be trying to help me return to being a functional person, you’d leave me to fend for myself and I’d still be consumed by the thoughts of being just a pair of holes to be used.”

  “...You can’t love me…” Morgan weakly protests as she starts crying.

  “I do,” Raina says. “I can’t imagine a life without you.”

  “...You… you do realize that one day I might not come back from one of these missions?” Morgan asks, very softly.

  “I believe you’ll do everything in your power to come back to me,” Raina says, before kissing Morgan deeply.

  “Raina, I…” Morgan continues to protest as the kiss ends, but she can’t come up with any good ones because deep down, past the brainworms, she feels the same about Raina. She loves her. She didn’t want to admit it before, to anyone, even herself. But she does. Because in the middle of the hell that was her treatment by Roderick, Raina treated her like a human being as well. “Fuck, I… I…” She can’t say it, so she demonstrates it by kissing Raina back.

  The two kiss for well over a minute with no sign of stopping before there’s a knock on the door.

  Morgan leans back for a moment. “Should we ignore that?”

  The knocking intensifies.

  “I think we should answer it,” Raina says, disappointed. It was just getting good. She was expecting Morgan to passionately tear her clothing off and carry her to the bed, but no…

  Morgan sighs and walks over to the door. “I’m coming, I’m coming…” she says. She opens the door.

  Danni is standing there. “...Did I interrupt something?” she asks.

  “Yes, Mistress,” Raina calls out from over at the vanity.

  Danni raises an eyebrow at her. “Excuse me?”

  “Ignore her…” Morgan says, facepalming. “What is it, Mistress?”

  “We found Callis,” Danni says. “We’re working on an insertion pn, if you want to be involved in it.”

  “Yeah…” Morgan says.

  “You’re going after my father?” Raina asks, confused.

  “No,” Morgan says. “We’re going after your brother. He works for the bodyguard of the guy that fucked up Joy’s mind.”

  “...I woudn’t object if you did,” Raina mutters.

  “Maybe ter,” Danni says. “As a treat.”

  “Jesus,” Morgan says. “I thought I was bad with the insensitive jokes.”

  “Who’s Joy, anyway?” Raina asks.

  “Miss Kelly’s daughter,” Morgan expins. “She’s like us. She was used up and broken badly by Roderick long before you were bought by him.”

  “Oh, shit…” Raina says. “I didn’t realize…”

  “She’s the whole reason I’m doing all of this… or at least she was,” Morgan says. “...Now I have two reasons.” She turns back to Danni. “Yeah, I’m ready.”

  --={@~~~@}=--

  (1301)

  Danni, Morgan, and Rick are in the war room.

  “Okay… tell me what I’m doing here?” Rick asks, confused. He’s just the driver. He doesn’t normally get involved with actual operations, though he is trained as a professional getaway driver.

  “We need someone the Levins don’t know to be the point man for this operation,” Danni says as she sips her soda.

  “Why not one of the PMCs?” Rick asks, sounding like he wants no part of the pn. “Surely, one of them would be a lot better for this!”

  “You pass easier for one of the rich folks,” Morgan expins. “And we need a man for this. Don’t worry. Your involvement with the operation ends once I’m sold.”

  “I really don’t feel comfortable with this…” Rick says.

  “You’ll be fine. You’ll have a PMC with you at all times serving as your bodyguard,” Danni says. “You just need to be the one doing the talking. But you need to be confident.”

  “Maybe he doesn’t,” Morgan says. “What if we take a different angle on this? What if he’s being bckmailed?”

  “Huh?” Rick says.

  “Think about it, Rick. You’re old enough to be my father,” Morgan says. “What if you’re being forced to sell me to get the money to pay off some gangsters? You don’t py as super rich, just comfortably wealthy. I just happened to be your trans daughter, so you wouldn’t have even had to pay for any of the surgeries.”

  “It could work…” Danni says.

  “I still don’t like this, Danni,” Rick says.

  “No, it’ll work,” Morgan says. “I’ve been doing a bit of a psychological profile on my target. Got to know how he thinks, you know? He loves taking advantage of desperate situations, and he’s been known to be a bit of a chaser. I think if he knew of your ‘situation,’ he’d jump right in to save the day.”

  “But how do we even make contact with this guy?” Rick asks.

  “Congratutions, you are now the new CEO of Independent Industrialism, one of Kelly’s many shell companies, and you’re in the market for PMCs to protect your company after the threat by the gangsters. The company is just barely breaking even and you can’t get the money they want on their own,” Danni says. “And Starscape came heavily recommended.”

  “Wait, wait, wait,” Rick says. “What if they just decide to go after the gangsters themselves?”

  “Already thought of that,” Danni says. “We’ll just point them at a local group of Nazis or something. No one will miss them.”

  “Let’s refine this,” Morgan says. “If we’re going to do that, we don’t even need the CEO angle. We can just have him be a desperate dad who can’t pay, except with me. And the world ends up down some Nazis, which I’m sure is a cosmic net positive.”

  “That could work,” Danni says. “In that case… yeah, sorry to stress you out, Rick, we’ll just use a PMC for this and give him a cover ID.”

  “Ugh…” Rick grunts as he faints.

  “...Maybe we need to be careful who we try to use for these pns in the future,” Morgan says. “I think we nearly gave the old man a heart attack.”

  “...Yeah, maybe,” Danni concurs. “We still need a PMC who can pass for being old enough for being your dad. It helps that you look 18.”

  “What about Gannett?” Morgan asks. “He’s old enough and he has a bit of a scummy aura. He’d be able to sell this.”

  “Yeah, he should work,” Danni says. “Have you been familiarizing yourself with our PMCs?”

  “Yes, Mistress,” Morgan says. “I like to know who I’m working with.”

  “Good girl,” Danni says. “That’s a smart idea. Now… we need a believable way for Gannett to have heard of Starscape.”

  “Let’s check their client list,” Morgan says. “We might be able to find a weak link we can… convince to be Gannett’s referrer.

  --={@~~~@}=--

  [4 march 2024]=-=[monday]=-=(0954)

  While Joy, Zell, and Kelly are at the office of a mental health professional who specializes in undoing brainwashing from cults, Morgan and Danni are looking over Starscape’s client list, which they were able to hack thanks to the efforts of a PMC who used to do cyberwarfare for the Air Force.

  “I’ve seen a lot of these names before,” Danni says as she scrolls through the list. It’s completely unredacted, from their internal servers. They shouldn’t even realize there was an intrusion, and if they do, they’ll think it was Russian cybercriminals. The good thing about them is that they can conceivably be bmed for any type of cybercrime that ever happens. “Can you pull up Roderick’s client list?

  “Yeah,” Morgan says. “One second… there, Mistress.”

  Virtually everyone on the Starscape client list is on Roderick’s contact list, though not every one of Roderick’s contacts are or were Starscape clients.

  “Shit,” Danni realizes. “Starscape’s client list is a who’s who of the underground sex svery trade among the super-wealthy… three of the world’s twenty wealthiest men are on here!”

  “Who’d have known that particur list was littered with perverts?” Morgan asks. “But if that’s the case, our pn won’t really work. How are we going to insert me?”

  “No, our pn can still work, it just needs to be refined again,” Danni says. “Raina’s dad was able to do it. Maybe we need to go after him directly. Figure out how he found out about Roderick, and see if we can use that connection to get to someone else on the list.”

  “Can we kill him after we get the information we need?” Morgan asks, in a simir tone to a child asking for candy at the grocery store.

  “Maybe if you’re good,” Danni says.

  “I’m always good…” Morgan protests.

  “Can you two quit flirting for five minutes?” the hacker PMC asks.

  “She might be right…” Danni says. “Can we find our new target, Hansen?”

  “It’s going to take some doing,” the hacker girl, Hansen, says. “He doesn’t really have an online presence, so I’m going to have to use some analog detective techniques. I’ll let you know. Meantime, I’ll see if we can find another target who can be exploited for your pn…”

  --={@~~~@}=--

  [5 march 2024]=-=[tuesday]=-=(1718)

  Joy lies in one of the beds in the sub-basement infirmary after having had her impnts removed, being brought down from the ridiculous breast size Zell’s father had given her, to a more manageable C cup.

  “How do you feel, love?” Zell asks as ae sits nearby.

  “Less like an object, more human…” Joy says as she recovers from the anesthesia in her system. “Is this how it felt for you, when you…?”

  “I didn’t have them removed yet,” Zell says. “I just bind.”

  “It all feels weird right now…” Joy says. Yesterday, she’d had her first deprogramming session with the mental health professional, and it had been extremely taxing to her to say the least. It didn’t help how thorough Jason’s brainwashing of her had been, but the trauma inflicted by Roderick was an additional complicating factor.

  How can you learn to overcome mental programming you don’t even know you have?

  Kelly and Zell had to keep her off of a guy in the waiting room as some of that programming kicked in, driving her to want to be fucked by the guy – or as it turned out, any male stranger. To say it was embarrassing would be the understatement of the year. This meant she would have to be worked on only by women until the deprogramming could be completed. She’d also have to stay away from any of the male PMCs, and potentially even her own father, as he was now most likely a stranger to her after all this time.

  He hadn’t seen her after the night she was dumped at the door. His trauma response has been to work nonstop.

  “I feel like a bomb that’s been armed,” Joy admits. “And I’m just waiting to explode, but not in a burst of fury and rage… Zell, hon, I…”

  Zell puts a hand on Joy’s shoulder. “You don’t have to apologize… well, you did have to apologize to the guy you tried to jump, but you don’t have to apologize to me. There are going to be difficulties as you recover. The only ones who know the true extent of what’s been done to you are a dead man and an unrepentant asshole.”

  “I feel like I’ve betrayed you, over and over again, every time I let that bastard use me…” Joy says, starting to tear up.

  “Love?” Zell says as ae gently grabs Joy’s shoulders. “You’re a victim in all this. None of it is your fault, and I don’t think of you any less. Show me someone who can endure what you did without some kind of mental damage and I’ll show you a fucking liar.”

  “I still can’t help it… I… I need to be used again…” Joy says, sobbing. “I feel like I need it like I need air, food, and drink…”

  Zell frowns. “Well, we can’t do anything about that while you’re recovering from surgery,” ae says. “...But maybe ter…”

  Joy blushes. “I… I’d like that… if I’m going to be driven to it, I’d rather it be with you.”

  That causes Zell to react with a bit of a blush.

  --={@~~~@}=--

  [9 march 2024]=-=[saturday]=-=(0016)

  Morgan waits in a rge box truck with a group of five PMCs. They’ve found a different target, one who used to be a client of Starscape. However, some time ago, he started to distance himself from the sex svery trade and ceased being a client.

  No one knows why, but there are some guesses among the PMCs.

  Inside the building, in Suite 219, the target awaits. He wakes up, yawning. He hasn’t gotten much sleep in a couple of months. By all rights, he’s getting what he deserves. Someone who has done what he has done does not deserve to sleep comfortably.

  He figured this new luxury apartment building would be secure enough for him to do without having a private military contracting group providing bodyguard services… and maybe protect him from his victims.

  Against anyone else, it might.

  Hansen breaks through the security system as if it were child’s py. The motion detectors and proximity scanners all drop offline. The locks open. The phones and internet are all down. Security is blind.

  The complex is defenseless.

  The target is fixing himself a bowl of soup, while a bottle of milk heats on another burner.

  A group of PMCs, including Morgan, start to infiltrate the building. All of them are armed. They make their way up the stairwell and down to Suite 219.

  Another PMC, Riley, quickly sets upon picking the lock. It doesn’t take very long.

  The target is done making his soup and starts walking back to his bedroom as the PMCs break in.

  He is startled, dropping his bowl of soup and the bottle of milk. From the bedroom, a baby cries.

  Morgan points an AR at the man. “Freeze,” she says. “I have eyes on the target, secure the exits. Are you Benjamin Stark?”

  The man starts to stammer. “Y-y-yes… please don’t hurt me, I’ve got money, I’ll give you whatever you want… please don’t hurt me or my baby…”

  “Are you alone?” another PMC asks.

  “Yes…” Benjamin says. “I mean it, take whatever you want and go!”

  “We’re not interested in material things,” Morgan says. “We’re interested in your dealings with Roderick Javier.”

  “R-Roderick?! I washed my hands of him and his business a year ago…” Benjamin says. “I’ve gone legit since my wife d-d-died…”

  “Yeah, well, he's dead now. We need you to contact your Starscape contact,” Morgan says. “We’re not interested in hurting your baby, so get that out of your mind. You, though, we’ll hurt. Or worse.”

  “Callis?” Benjamin asks. “Why him?”

  Morgan points the gun at Benjamin’s face. “You’re going to make one st sale. Me.”