Chapter 2: A Second Climax
The warm vinyl of the chair stuck slightly to the back of Annie’s thighs as she settled back in. The room’s quiet hum felt deeper now, part of her own bloodstream. Dr. Hewitt’s fingers were busy at the machine, the click of a dial precise in the soft, antiseptic-scented air.
“Just relax into it, Annie. Your body knows what to do now.”
The probe, freshly lubricated, entered her more easily this time. There was no hesitation, no tightness. Her body opened for it like a flower already in bloom, still wet and sensitive from the first seismic release. Annie let out a shallow sigh, her head lolling against the headrest. Her gaze drifted to a poster directly across from her—a woman with a blissed-out smile, one hand on her enormous stomach, the other tangled in her own hair. Optimal Ovifem Response.
The vibration started low, a familiar purr deep in her core. But it didn’t stay familiar for long.
It was quicker. Sharper. The throbbing seemed to bypass the slow build-up and go straight to the heart of the matter, a direct line to the raw, tingling nerves that were still singing their aftermath song. The probe’s rhythmic slide felt less like an exploration and more like a claim, a confident reoccupation of territory that was already surrendered.
“Oh, wow,” Annie breathed, the words fluttering out of her. Her fingers, which had been lying limp, now twisted into the vinyl. A flush spread from her chest up her neck. The sensation wasn’t just in her pelvis; it was a warm, ringing ache in her teeth, a vibration in the roots of her hair. Her back arched, seeking more pressure, and the machine provided it, the thrusts becoming more assertive.
Dr. Hewitt watched the monitor, her eyes tracking the frantic, colorful peaks erupting across the screen. The neural activity was spiking faster, climbing higher than the previous set. The baseline had been reset lower, and the peaks shot up from that diminished starting point with a startling, almost brutal, efficiency. A small, professional smile touched her lips. “Beautiful,” she murmured, more to the data than to Annie. “Accelerated response curve. Perfect dampening of higher cortical functions.”
Annie didn’t hear the words. Sound had become a dull roar in her ears. The pleasure was a wave gathering force with terrifying speed, no longer a slow swell but a surge dragging everything under. She tried to form a thought—this is faster—but the idea dissolved before it could fully coalesce. There was only the relentless, pounding rhythm and the heat spiraling tighter, brighter, into a single point of impossible tension.
She came with a choked, guttural sound that was almost a sob.
It wasn’t a wave this time. It was a detonation. Her body seized, rigid and bowstring-tight, heels digging into the stirrups. The world didn’t just blur; it shattered into splinters of sensation—the cold metal of the stirrup against her ankle, the smell of her own sweat, the blinding white nothingness behind her eyes. The orgasm seemed to empty her skull, pouring every flicker of conscious thought out through her shuddering nerves. It was less pleasure, now, and more pure, obliterating release. A system being flushed clean.
For a long minute, there was only the sound of Annie’s ragged, wet breaths and the quiet electronic hum of the machine as it powered down. Dr. Hewitt waited, letting the final tremors subside before gently removing the probe. She cleaned Annie with practiced, impersonal swipes of a warm cloth. Annie lay utterly spent, a doll with its strings cut. A slow, thick strand of drool connected her lower lip to her shoulder. She blinked at the ceiling, her hazel eyes wide and utterly vacant.
“Outstanding session, Annie,” Dr. Hewitt said, her voice pulling Annie back from a vast, warm nowhere. She typed a final note with a decisive tap. “Really top-tier compliance. Let’s get you sitting up a bit, hm?”
She helped Annie crank the chair back to a semi-reclined position, propping a pillow behind her back. Annie moved limply, obediently. The pleasant, fuzzy blankness was filling up slowly, like a shallow pond. Simple feelings returned first: comfort, warmth, a vague knowledge that she had done well.
Dr. Hewitt wheeled her stool close, the monitor between them. The screen now showed two sets of jagged, colorful peaks side-by-side, labeled ‘Session A’ and ‘Session B.’ The second set was taller, sharper.
“Look here,” Dr. Hewitt began, her tone that of a friendly tour guide. She used a pen to trace the mountain range of Annie’s first orgasm. “This was you, what, twenty minutes ago? Big, healthy neural event. But see how much activity is still here in the prefrontal cortex?” She circled a zone of flickering yellow and green. “That’s the thinking part. It was still trying to participate. To… understand.”
Her pen then moved to the second set of peaks. “Now look at this. See the difference?” The peaks were more extreme, but the areas of complex activity around them were subdued, grayer. “The thinking parts are almost silent. Just the primal, pleasure-reward pathways firing at maximum volume. Your brain is learning to bypass the unnecessary wiring. It’s streamlining.”
Annie nodded slowly, her gaze following the pen. She understood shapes. The second shape was spikier. “Streamlining,” she repeated, the word feeling new and clumsy in her mouth.
“Exactly.” Dr. Hewitt clicked a key. The orgasm graphs vanished, replaced by a simple, stark line chart. It stretched back in time over ten months. A red line started near the top and sloped, with only a slight dip at first, then began to plunge more steeply as it moved to the present day. “This is the big picture. Your cognitive function. Your IQ.”
She pointed to the start of the line, labeled ‘Month -2: Pre-Conception.’ “Here you were, about eight months ago. You’d been on Ovifem for a few months, having lots of sex, lots of big feelings. Your scores were already beginning a gentle decline. That’s the medication and the lifestyle working as intended.” Her finger slid along the line to a marked point labeled ‘Conception.’ The dip was more pronounced. “The pregnancy hormones accelerated the process. And then…” Her finger moved in increments down the steepening slope, tapping at specific markers. “Month two. Month four. Here at month five, you passed below the threshold for standard secondary education. The complexity would just frustrate you now.”
Annie stared at the point. It was just a dot on a line. She tried to feel something about it. She remembered school. The letters used to swim sometimes. It had been frustrating.
Dr. Hewitt’s finger moved to the very end of the line, a point far down at the bottom of the graph. It was labeled ‘Current: Month 6.’ “And this is you now, Annie. After today’s beautiful responses.” She looked from the screen to Annie’s soft, waiting face. “You have passed another major threshold. The threshold for most employed work. The world of jobs, of schedules, of complex tasks… that world isn’t for you anymore. Your mind is too simple for it. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”
Annie’s brow furrowed. She looked at the dot at the bottom. She looked at the dot at the top. The distance between them was vast. She felt a swell of something then, not distress, but a profound, validating clarity. It was the same feeling she got when she matched two simple shapes together. It fit.
“I’m… I’m quite dumb now,” Annie said, testing the words. They didn’t feel sharp. They felt true. They felt like a fact from a poster. A specialization.
Dr. Hewitt’s smile was radiant with approval. She reached out and gave Annie’s hand a gentle, congratulatory squeeze. “Yes, Annie. You are. Quite delightfully, functionally dumb. And you’ve worked so hard to get here. You should be very, very proud.”
And Annie was. The fog in her mind held no shadows of doubt, no lost futures. It held only the warm, lavender-scented certainty of the chair, the comforting hum of the machine, the approving smile of her doctor, and the heavy, precious weight of the life in her belly. It was enough. It was everything. She beamed, a vacant, sunlit smile, and nodded.
She beamed, a vacant, sunlit smile, and nodded.
“Good,” Dr. Hewitt said, her voice a smooth blend of warmth and precision. She tapped the keyboard, and the single line graph was replaced by a colorful, three-dimensional rendering of a human brain, rotating slowly. Sections of it were highlighted in pulsing shades of blue and violet. “Let me show you the actual geography of your progress. This is your brain, Annie. Or, a map of its activity.”
Annie leaned forward, fascinated by the swirling colors. It looked like a stormy planet.
“These bright violet zones here,” Dr. Hewitt said, circling an area with her pen, “in the limbic system and the ventral tegmental area. These are your pleasure centers. They’re massive. Hyper-developed. They light up like supernovas during your scans, which is exactly what we want to see.” She clicked, and a time-lapse played, showing the violet regions growing brighter and more dominant over the ten-month period. “This is the direct result of the massive, frequent orgasms. You’ve exercised these parts so much they’ve essentially built superhighways. All sensory input gets rerouted here for processing. It’s why things feel so good, so… total, for you now.”
“Oh,” Annie breathed, a soft sound of recognition. It explained the all-consuming white noise of her climaxes, the way feeling blotted out everything else.
“Now, these areas here,” Dr. Hewitt continued, her pen moving to the frontal and prefrontal cortex, colored in a dim, static gray. “This is your problem-solving, your critical thinking, your complex planning. See how quiet they are? Even in a resting state, they’re barely idling. The connections here have been gradually pruned back. This is the long, gentle decline from the Ovifem and the pregnancy hormones. It’s not damage, Annie. It’s a beautiful, purposeful repurposing.”
The doctor pulled up two new graphs, side-by-side bar charts. “Let’s look at averages. This bar here,” she indicated the taller of the two on the left, “is the general female population average out in the wider world. A bit higher. Lots of jobs, lots of stressing over bills and news and complicated things.” She made a faint, dismissive shrug. “Then this one,” her finger moved to the shorter bar beside it, “is the average for fertile women here in our town. Lower. Happier. More focused.”
More focused.” Dr. Hewitt’s finger then moved to a third, much shorter bar, isolated on the right side of the screen. It was a stark, unambiguous pillar. “And this one is you, Annie. Right now.”
Annie blinked at the little bar. It looked so small next to the others. A tiny, lonely skyscraper in a field of bigger buildings. She felt a strange, distant ping—like a pebble dropped down a very deep well. It was the last ghost of a more complex emotion, something akin to comparative sadness, but it faded before it could fully form.
“My bar is short,” Annie said, her voice flat with observation.
“It is. And we can put a very precise number on that.” Dr. Hewitt’s fingers danced over the keyboard, and the bar graph vanished. In its place, a digital document appeared, filled with dense text. Dr. Hewitt scrolled to a highlighted section. “Here we are. Post-session cognitive assessment summary for Patient A-114, Annalise ‘Annie’ Carter. Let’s see… full-scale IQ, as of today’s scanning protocol and subsequent standardized evaluation…” She paused, not for drama, but for accuracy, her eyes scanning the line. “Seventy-four.”
She let the number hang in the lavender-scented air.
Annie stared at her. The number meant nothing. It was a shape: a seven, a four. “Is that… good?”
Dr. Hewitt’s smile was patient, instructive. “It’s a measurement. It tells us exactly where you are. An IQ of seventy-four places you firmly within what is called the ‘Borderline Intellectual Functioning’ range. Some older, less progressive texts might have used the term ‘mild mental retardation,’ but we don’t use those clumsy labels here.” Her tone was dismissive of the old terms, warm and embracing of the new reality. “Think of it as a descriptive category. It means your reasoning, your learning speed, your ability to handle abstract concepts—all of that operates at this specific, manageable level. It’s why schoolwork would be impossible. It’s why following a recipe with more than five steps would be incredibly difficult for you. Reading anything beyond a basic children’s book would be a struggle.”
A slow, dawning understanding spread across Annie’s soft face. It wasn’t an understanding of the number, but of the concrete examples. She remembered the letters swimming. She remembered trying to follow the instructions on a box of pancake mix last month and crying because the steps got jumbled in her head. The memory was fuzzy, but the feeling of frustrated confusion was still there, a stale taste at the back of her mind.
“That’s why the mixer made me sad,” Annie whispered, more to herself than to the doctor.
“Exactly.” Dr. Hewitt’s voice was approving, as if Annie had just solved a complex equation. “Your mind was already simplifying itself, protecting you from that kind of frustration. The category, the number… they just confirm that the process is complete. You’ve arrived.”
Annie nodded slowly. Arrived. It sounded like a destination. She looked from the stark ‘74’ on the screen to her own belly, rounding under the thin paper sheet. One was a number. The other was a fact. The fact felt heavier, more real. Better.
“So I’m here,” Annie repeated.
“You are. And your duties are perfectly aligned with your capabilities.” Dr. Hewitt closed the document, and the screen returned to its soft, neutral glow. “Your primary function now is gestation. Your secondary function is receptivity—to pleasure, to instruction, to care. That’s it. That’s your whole wonderful, uncomplicated world. No taxes. No news. No confusing choices. Just the baby, and the feelings, and being a good girl.”
Dr. Hewitt stood up, her movements efficient and final. She handed Annie the small stack of her folded clothes. “Get dressed, sweetie. You’re all done for today. Remember to take your Ovifem with dinner. And maybe stop by the communal gardens later—the sensory stimulation is good for the baby, and you always seem happy there.”
Annie took her clothes, the cotton dress soft under her fingers. She swung her legs over the side of the chair, her body feeling both heavy and light. The numbers, the graphs, the categories—they were already melting away, leaving behind only the essential takeaways. She was done. She was here. She was a good girl.
She dressed slowly, carefully, her movements deliberate and simple. She pulled the dress over her head, not bothering with her underwear, just stuffing them into the pocket of her dress. It was one less step. One less thing.
“Thank you, Doctor Hewitt,” Annie said, her voice clear and sweet as she stood by the door.
“You’re very welcome, Annie. You did beautifully.” The doctor was already making notes, already moving on to the next file, the next girl, the next measurement.
Annie opened the door and stepped out into the bright, sterile hallway. The hum of the clinic was different here—a murmur of voices, the distant sound of a soft laugh, the squeak of a wheel on linoleum. She walked, her hand automatically resting on the curve of her stomach. She passed a glossy poster on the hallway wall. A woman, face ecstatic, cradling a newborn. Your Clarity Is Their Future.
Annie smiled at the woman in the poster, a vacant, pleasant expression mirroring the one on the paper. She didn’t think about the number seventy-four. She didn’t think about the short, lonely bar on the graph. She thought about the sun in the garden, and the feel of dirt on her hands, and the next dose of Ovifem that would taste like strawberries. Her world was perfectly, beautifully small. She walked toward the exit, each step a simple, deliberate act, moving into the waiting embrace of her uncomplicated day.