Chapter 23: The Binding
The strap across SexiWoman’s chest wasn’t tight enough to hurt, just tight enough to remind her she couldn’t leave. The nylon bit into the bare skin of her shoulders. Silas’s knobbly fingers worked the buckle with a terrifying gentleness.
“This is insane,” she breathed, her voice shaking. Her eyes darted to Chloe, who was calibrating a wand-like sensor, refusing to meet her gaze. “You can’t just strap people to chairs.”
“Protocol, dear Subject,” Silas murmured. He leaned close, his breath smelling of stale tea and something metallic. His whisper was a dry leaf scraping on concrete. “For your safety. And ours. The emanations can be… volatile.”
He produced a length of black velvet from his coat pocket. Draped over his palm was a necklace, a twin to Amy’s gaudy heart pendant, but darker, the crystal within like a clot of dried blood. He began to murmur, the words not English, not anything from a romance language. They were guttural, rhythmic, a backwards alphabet of sounds.
As he spoke, the rhinestones on SexiWoman’s lingerie began to glow. A faint, sickly purple light that pulsed in time with Silas’s cadence. It wasn’t a spotlight kind of glow. It was an internal one, as if the fabric itself was heating up from within. She could feel it, a low-grade buzz against her skin, like static electricity everywhere the lace touched.
“What is that?” she demanded, straining against the strap. “What are you doing?”
“Establishing a sympathetic resonance,” Silas said, not breaking his chant. He lifted the dark pendant, letting it dangle over her sternum. It began to spin lazily, against all logic, with no draught to move it.
Chloe approached then, a roll of adhesive electrodes in one hand, a small razor in the other. Her expression was set, a mask of clinical focus, but a muscle ticked in her jaw. “I need a clean contact point. For the femoral pulse reading.”
“Where?” SexiWoman asked, though she already knew.
Chloe didn’t answer. She just knelt beside the chair, her movements efficient. She placed a hand on SexiWoman’s inner thigh to steady it. The touch was professional, cold. With a few quick strokes of the razor, she cleared a patch of skin high up, near the lace border of the lingerie’s leg. The sensation was bizarre, intimate, and utterly dehumanizing. The chill of the alcohol swab that followed made SexiWoman gasp.
“Chloe, don’t,” she said, the plea leaving her before she could stop it.
“It’s just a sensor,” Chloe said flatly, peeling the backing off an electrode. She pressed it into place. The adhesive was shockingly cold. Chloe’s eyes flicked up, just for a second. “It reads biomagnetic fields. That’s all.”
“That’s all? He’s doing some creepy chanting voodoo and you’re wiring me up like a car battery!” SexiWoman’s composure was crumbling. The glow from her lingerie was brightening, the purple light casting strange shadows on the cracked observation glass.
Silas finished his incantation with a soft, definitive click of his tongue. The dark pendant stopped spinning. He smiled, a network of cracks in an old painting. “There. A stabilized conduit. Now we can see the flow. This won’t hurt you.” He paused, his eyes glinting under the fluorescent lights. “Except your pride. For that, it will be very painful.”
The monitors behind Chloe chirped to life. Waveforms scrolled, numbers flashed in rapid succession. A low thrumming filled the room, emanating from the chair itself, vibrating up through SexiWoman’s spine.
And then it hit. A wave of sensation that wasn't pain, but was somehow worse. It was a deep, resonating pull, starting in her core and radiating outward. It felt like being turned inside out, but emotionally. A raw, scraping exposure. The lingering anger, the humiliation, the sheer bewildered frustration of the last few weeks—it all seemed to rush to the surface, made visible. The purple glow intensified, throbbing.
And with it, a sharp, undeniable surge of physical arousal, a direct, mocking feedback loop from the emotion. The lingerie felt tighter. The air colder on her newly-bared skin. The sensors itched.
It was too much. The lab, the straps, the glow, the cold electrode on her thigh, Silas’s proud smile, Chloe’s averted eyes. The dam broke.
John’s voice ripped out of SexiWoman’s throat, raw and terrified, stripping away the performed femininity. It was just him, trapped.
“WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS TO ME?”
It echoed off the steel cabinets. Chloe flinched, her hand freezing over the keyboard.
John sobbed, the sound ugly and desperate. “Just stop it! Please! Every time I think I’ve hit the weirdest possible part of this, it gets worse! I don’t want to see the flow! I don’t want to be a conduit! I want to go back to debugging code and eating cold pizza and being nobody! Why are you taking even that away? What is this for?”
Silas observed the monitors, fascinated. “The subject’s baseline emotional frequency is spiking. Remarkable clarity in the shift.”
“Shut up!” John screamed. “I’m not a subject! I’m a person! My name is John Abernathy! I have a student loan! I’m real!”
Amy’s voice, when it came, was unusually quiet, devoid of its usual smirk. It was just a clear, hard truth in his mind. You were. You are fading. Every time you become her, the line blurs. The chair isn’t causing this. It’s just turning up the contrast so you can see it yourself. Your anger, your fear… it’s all just fuel for the change now.
On the main monitor, a visualization bloomed. Two overlapping aura maps, one a shaky, spiky blue outline—John—being slowly consumed from the inside by a vibrant, swirling magenta mass—SexiWoman. The magenta pulsed in time with the glowing lingerie, with his racing heart.
Chloe stared at the screen, her professional detachment finally cracking. Her face paled. “Silas… the integration rate. It’s not situational. It’s cumulative. It’s permanent conversion. Look at the neural overlap.”
Silas’s smile widened. “Beautiful. The corruption doesn’t just spread. It roots.”
John watched the screen, the scientific proof of his own erasure rendering him silent. The sobs died in his throat. He felt a terrifying numbness creep in at the edges o