Chapter 15: The Chemist's Visit
The timer on her spreadsheet ticked over to fourteen minutes and twenty-two seconds. The probe was no longer an object inside her; it had become the center of her gravity, a dense, silicone star around which her frail body orbited. Every micromovement—a shift in the chair, a tense of her stomach—sent bright, electric signals through her nervous system, a constant reminder of the conquest. The meth high had plateaued into a thin, metallic buzz in her teeth, just enough to keep the crashing fatigue at bay.
She heard the knocking as if from another dimension. A dull, repetitive thud that refused to align with the digital rhythms of her playlist, which had cycled back to the wet slaps and synthetic moans.It was wrong.All of it was wrong.No one knocked. Deliveries were left in the vestibule, a concrete cell between the building’s main door and her own. A neighbor needing sugar was a punchline from a dead world. She froze, the column of data on her screen blurring.The knocking came again, more insistent.
Dmitri’s voice crackled over the audio-only line. “What is that?”
“Someone,” she whispered, the word feeling absurd in her mouth.Her eyes darted to the laptop camera, even though it was off. As if he could see her panic.“Ignore it.”
The knocking didn’t stop. It morphed into a pattern—two quick, three slow.A code. Her blood, already thinned by chemicals, ran colder.Only one person used that pattern.Dred.
Her dealer.Her chemist.He never came to the door.Transactions were electronic; parcels appeared. His physical presence was a rupture in the protocol, a system error of the highest order.
“It’s Dred,” she breathed into the mic.A pause. Dmitri’s exhale was a long, static hiss.“Handle it.I’m here.”
The command gave her a frame. She pushed herself up from the chair, a slow, ungainly motion. The probe shifted, a deep, internal dislocation that stole her breath.The ballet boots made every step a perilous negotiation. She teetered, caught the edge of her desk, sending a bottle of lube clattering to the floor. She shuffled out of the living room, through the short, dark hallway, her heart a frantic bird in its bony cage.She peered through the fisheye lens. The distorted view confirmed it: Dred, in a worn leather jacket, his face a tapestry of old needles and sharp angles, holding a small paper bag.He looked bored.Annoyed.
The chain was on.She opened the door the few inches it allowed. The hallway’s fluorescent light sliced into her dark apartment.“Dred.”
“Petrova. You deaf now, on top of everything else?” His voice was gravel in a tin can. His eyes, pale and assessing, flicked over her face, then down to the sliver of pink latex visible in the crack.“Jesus. What’s the occasion?”
“You… you don’t deliver.”
“Special batch. Needed a signature.” He held up the bag. “But I can take it back to the lab, let it settle.Your loss.”
Panic flared.A new compound. Her spreadsheet had a column for new compounds.Her mind, trained on data, latched onto the opportunity.“No. Wait.”
She closed the door, fumbled with the chain, her fingers stupid and thick. She opened it fully.The change in his demeanor was instant. He stepped over the threshold and stopped, his boots on her stained laminate. His gaze swept the living room—the flickering porn split-screen, the tower of toys leaning like a bizarre modern sculpture, the greasy magazines, the open spreadsheet glowing with its manic log, the walls papered with charts and her own inked measurements. It was all there.Laid bare. The air itself was a concoction of her sweat, silicone, acetone, and the sweet-rot scent of meth smoke.
His eyes finally landed back on her, tracing the slogans stretched across her concave chest and tight stomach. His lips moved silently as he read them.NO LIMITS INTOX SLUT.METH WHORE.HUFF SLUT. FEED ME.His expression didn’t change, but something in his stillness did.A recognition. Not of shock, but of a shared language.
“Well,” he said, the word dropping into the humming silence.“You’re committed. Gotta give you that.”
Anya stood, anchored by the boots, filled by the probe, exposed by the suit. Shame warred with a bizarre, vertical pride.He wasn’t laughing.He wasn’t calling the police. He was reading her like a manifest.“Signature,” she managed to say, her voice strangled.
“Right.” He pulled a small, crude device from his pocket—a digital pad. He handed it to her.As she took it, their fingers brushed.Hers were cold, trembling. His were stained and warm.She scribbled something illegible and handed it back.
He then produced a small glass vial from the paper bag.It held a clear liquid that seemed to swallow the light. “This one’s different.Synthesized it myself.Call it ‘Zero.’ It’s for the void. You understand?”
She stared at the vial.The void was her oldest companion. The hollow in her gut, the empty space in her pelvis she was constantly trying to fill, the silence in her head between peaks.He was offering her a chemical key.“How?” she asked.“IV. Only way.Hits the system, bypasses all the chatter.It’s not euphoria. It’s… absence.A clean, quiet delete. But it’s not for the faint of heart.The body can… confuse silence for death.Start panicking. You gotta ride that out.”
He placed the vial in her palm.It was cool against her skin. As he withdrew, his hand brushed the slick latex covering her forearm.A simple, accidental contact.But it lingered. The charged silence in the room condensed, thick and palpable.His eyes met hers. In them, she saw no desire, no pity.Just a frank, unnerving acknowledgment. Here they were: the architect and the temple, the chemist and his most devoted application.
“The boots are a nice touch,” he said, his voice dropping to a near whisper. “Adds to the… aesthetic.”
He broke the moment, turning back toward the door.“Start with half.No more. Log it, if that’s your thing. I’ll know if you fuck it up.”
And then he was gone, pulling the door shut behind him with a soft, final click.
Anya stood in the sudden stillness, the vial clutched in her fist. The probe inside her felt suddenly trivial, a child’s toy.This was something else. This was an invitation to the core of the obsession.To not just stretch the vessel, but to evaporate the contents. To become the void itself.She hobbled back to the desk.On the audio line, Dmitri was quiet. “He’s gone,” she said.“What did he give you?”
She described it. The vial.The name ‘Zero.’ The method.The warning.
Dmitri was silent for a long time.When he spoke, his voice was different.Stripped of its performative edge. It was just a man’s voice, tired and wary.“Anya. That sounds… that sounds like a stop. Not a next step.”
“It’s the logical next step,” she countered, her eyes on the new column she would create.Compound: Zero. Dosage: 0.5ml.ROA: IV.“Is it?” He sighed.“The timer. You have forty-three minutes left on the probe.That’s your current objective.Finish the objective. Then… we’ll discuss the new variable.”
He was reasserting the protocol.The spreadsheet. The order.It was a lifeline thrown across a suddenly infinite gap.
Her eyes flicked from the vial to the screen.The timer read 15:47.The probe was a known quantity. A conquered diameter.The vial was a question mark that threatened to unravel all known answers.
“Okay,” she whispered.“Good girl.Just sit.Be the vessel you already are. Prove you can hold that first.”
She sat.The physical fullness was a anchor. She placed the vial of ‘Zero’ squarely in the center of her desk, next to the bottle of Anal Prep Gel. It sat there, gleaming, a siren, a stop sign, a promise.
She focused on the timer, on the digital climb of seconds.Each one was a victory over the pull of the vial. For now, holding still was the most radical act. The probe was no longer just a test of capacity. It was a tether, holding her to the world of measurable, loggable things, while the void in the glass vial whispered of a place beyond all charts.
The probe’s timer hit thirty-seven minutes, a new personal record. Her body had accepted the invasion, the burning stretch mutating into a dull, permanent ache that felt like truth.She marked the cell in her spreadsheet, the action feeling rote, insufficient.
Dmitri’s voice was a faint echo.“You’re quiet. You still with me?”
“I’m here,” she said, but her eyes were locked on the vial. Its contents weren’t liquid; they were a potential, a Schrödinger’s cat of consciousness. The slogans on her suit—“FEED ME,” “NO LIMITS”—itched against her skin, a taunting script she now had the means to fulfill literally.
The spreadsheet, once a bible, now seemed like a child’s drawing. It documented the journey to the edge, but ‘Zero’ was about stepping over. Her hand, moving with a clarity separate from her churning thoughts, reached out.The cool glass was startling against her feverish palm.
“What are you doing, Anya?” Dmitri’s tone shifted, a note of real concern piercing the digital veil.
“Finishing the objective.” Her voice was detached, clinical. She unscrewed the tiny dropper cap.The sound was impossibly loud, a definitive click that silenced the moaning playlist. There was no smell, just the clean, menacing absence of any odor at all.
She laid out a fresh tourniquet, an alcohol swab, a single-use syringe. Her movements were efficient, a procedural ballet her thin arms performed by muscle memory. The liquid drew up into the syringe, clear as a tear.“Wait.Just wait.” Dmitri was pleading now. “Talk to me.What’s the timer at?Let’s plan the next diameter increase. We’ll order that new sheath, the one you wanted.”
“It’s forty-one minutes,” she said, almost kindly. She tied the tourniquet high on her bicep, pulling it tight with her teeth. The veins in her emaciated arm stood up, a roadmap of blue roads leading nowhere.She swabbed a path.“Anya, don’t. Not with that.Not alone.” His fear was a cold anchor, but it was too far away to grasp.
“I’m never alone,” she whispered.“You’re here.” She positioned the needle. The probe inside her was a forgotten relic, a monument to an older god.This was communion. She slid the needle home with a practiced, intimate push.A fleeting sting.Then nothing. She depressed the plunger, slow and even, watching the clear ‘Zero’ vanish into her bloodstream. She retracted the needle, released the tourniquet, pressed the cotton ball to the tiny wound.A count of three.Then it arrived.It was not a rush. It was an erasure.The metallic meth buzz in her jaw vanished.The deep ache of the probe dissolved. The gnawing, perpetual hunger in her stomach blinked out like a switched-off bulb. The hum of the laptop, the flicker of the screen, Dmitri’s distant voice—all were smoothed into absolute, pristine silence.
She felt her consciousness not as a thought, but as a location: a single, dim point of observation adrift in an infinite, quiet black.Her body was gone. There was no panic, because there was no one to panic. Just the void, warm and complete and empty.Then, from the nothing, a tendril of primal signal.A fibrillation. A cellular misunderstanding.Her heart, confused by the sudden sensory vacuum, stuttered in its cage.
The single point of observation felt a lurch.A visceral, organic wrongness. The void shimmered, threatening to fracture.
From a continent away, Dmitri’s voice broke through, tinny and desperate.“Anya!Breathe.Say something! God, breathe!”
The command was meaningless.Breathe?She had no lungs. But the sound of his voice became a thread, gossamer-thin, spiraling out through the darkness toward her. A tether. She had a choice: let go into the silent, welcoming nothing, or grasp it and be pulled back toward the unbearable noise of being.Her diaphragm convulsed. A ragged, shocking gasp tore through the quiet, scraping her raw from the inside.
The gasp became a cough, then a chain of them, violent and hacking, each one slamming her back into the prison of her body. Sensation returned in a nauseating wave: the cold sweat slick beneath the latex, the profound, stretched ache inside her, the distant throb in her arm from the injection site. The silence in her head was gone, replaced by a staticky, high-pitched whine.“Anya!Jesus, talk to me. What happened?” Dmitri’s voice was cracked open, all pretense of control stripped away.
“It worked,” she rasped, the words tasting of blood and chemical residue. Her vision swam, the tower of toys a wavering monolith.She was utterly, devastatingly present. “It was… clean.Then my heart… freaked out. I’m back.” She focused on the spreadsheet still glowing on the screen.The timer for the probe was frozen at forty-one minutes. An objective abandoned.A column for ‘Zero’ waited, blank.
“Your heart?” The panic in his voice was sharp, immediate.“Is it racing? Are you dizzy?”
“It’s… settling.” She pressed a hand to her chest, feeling the frantic, avian flutter beneath bone and latex. It was slowing, deepening. The emptiness she’d coveted was gone, but in its place was a hyper-clarity, every detail in the room snapping into vicious focus. The dust motes in the blue screen light, a dried drip of lube on the chair’s arm, the faint tremor in her own fingertips.“It showed me the edge, Dima. The actual edge.”
“I don’t like it.” His tone shifted, hardening into something protective and frightened. “That chemist is playing with things he doesn’t understand. You’re not a lab rat.”
“What am I, then?” The question hung in the fouled air. She looked at the slogans on her suit, then at the empty vial.“I’m the experiment and the scientist. This is the data point.” A strange, cold energy was building in her limbs, a backlash from the void. She needed to move, to act, to document. She shifted in the chair, and the probe announced itself with a deep, internal shift that made her breath catch.
“You’re a person who’s forty-one minutes into a depth session and probably needs to conclude it safely,” he said, wrestling his voice back toward the practical.“Can you stand?You should release the pressure. Do it slowly.”
His return to protocol was an anchor. She nodded, though he couldn’t see.Her hands, unsteady, found the remote control for the probe. The molded plastic was familiar, a known geometry in the shaky aftermath.She thumbed the retract button. A soft whirring sound emanated from the chair, and the sensation of withdrawal was infinitely stranger and more intimate than the invasion.It was a slow unveiling, a recession of a claimed frontier. She felt hollowed out, light-headed, a shell with too much space inside.
When it was finally free, she let out a long, shuddering sigh. The relief was physical, but it left a bizarre sense of loss.The conquest was over. The spreadsheet cell for ‘maximum depth achieved’ could be updated, but it felt like a child’s sticker next to the seismic event of the vial.
She stared at the blank column for ‘Zero.’
“I’m going to log it,” she said, her voice firmer now.“IV administration, point-five milliliter dose. Primary effect: sensory erasure for approximately… ninety seconds.Secondary effect: autonomic nervous system rebellion, transient tachycardia. Subjective note: achieved target void state. Coherence of consciousness maintained.”
She typed it in, the click-clack of the keys overly loud.Dmitri listened to her clinical summary. “Anya,” he said softly.“That’s not a subnote for a spreadsheet. That’s a warning.Your body said no.”
“My body is a faulty instrument. It panics in a vacuum.” She saved the file.The spreadsheet was now fundamentally inadequate. It could not contain the experience of non-being.This required a new system.A new log.Maybe a separate workbook entirely. Her engineer’s mind, sharpened by the retreating chemical clarity, began sketching architectures in the air.“I’m calling you,” Dmitri announced abruptly.“What? No.” The disembodied voice was one thing; a visual check-in was a breach of their carefully constructed anonymity. They had never used video, only audio and text. The thought of his eyes on her now, in this aftermath, seeing the sweat-streaked makeup, the gaunt lines of her face in the harsh screen light, was a vulnerability too far.“Yes.I need to see you’re okay. Not negotiable.” A command, but it was frayed with worry.Her protest died. The raw fear in his voice earlier had changed something. The dynamic had tilted, just for a moment, from puppeteer and puppet to something messier. She fumbled for the laptop camera, her finger hovering over the enable button.The icon stared back, a dead eye.“Okay,” she whispered.
She clicked it.
Her own face bloomed in a small window on the screen—pale, dark circles like bruises under eyes that were too bright, too wide.She looked shattered. A second later, his window appeared. He was in a dimly lit room, maybe an office, his face leaning into a phone screen. He was older than she’d pictured, lines of weariness around his eyes, but his gaze was intense, scanning her image with a frantic, tender scrutiny.“Hey,” he said.
“Hey.”
They just looked at each other for a few seconds. The casual, filthy banter of their usual chats was impossible here. This was just two people, stripped bare by a different kind of exposure.“You look terrible,” he said finally, a weak smile touching his lips.
A laugh bubbled out of her, unexpected and harsh. “You don’t look so great yourself.”
“Worry is hell on the complexion.” He leaned back, running a hand through his hair. “Seriously.No more ‘Zero.’ Not without someone there.Me. Preferably a trained medic, but I’ll settle for me.”
“You’re not here.”
“I could be.” The offer hung between them, enormous and complicated.
The gaunt woman on the screen and the tired man in the little square—this was the real obscenity, she realized. Not the toys or the drugs, but this fragile, human connection stretching across the digital void. It was more frightening than the chemical abyss.
“Let’s… stick to the program for now,” she said, the words feeling cowardly even as she said them.“I need to clean up. Process the data.”
He studied her, then nodded slowly, reluctantly.“Okay.But you stay on audio. I’m not letting you disappear again tonight.”
“Deal.” She felt an overwhelming fatigue descending, the crash from multiple peaks finally arriving.The clarity was evaporating, leaving a sticky, shameful residue. She was just a woman in a filthy latex suit, sitting in a ruined chair.
“Go drink some water.Actual water.Not lube,” he said, a ghost of their old dynamic returning.
She managed another tired smile. “Yes, sir.”
KEEP GOING!
She clicked off the camera, but left the audio open. The silence now was just silence, not the void. It was filled with the hum of the laptop fan and the dull ache in her bones. She peeled the latex suit down her trembling body, the wet schick of it separating from her skin grotesquely loud. Each slogan—NO LIMITS, METH WHORE—stretched and distorted as she shed the second skin, leaving her standing pale and shivering in the room’s chill.
Her reflection in the dark monitor was a ghost of sharp angles and deep hollows.She traced a finger over her ribs, counting them like accomplishments. The post-void clarity had evaporated, leaving behind its opposite: a fuzzy, intrusive need to do, to plan, to correct.The spreadsheet was insufficient. She needed a new physical objective, a new constraint to shape the emptiness.Her mind, always solving, always optimizing, clicked into gear.
She opened a new browser tab, her fingers moving automatically to a bookmark labeled only with an asterisk. It was a fetish-wear site specializing in custom, medical-grade latex. The cursor hovered.Dmitri’s voice came through the speakers, softer now. “You still there?”
“Research,” she said, her voice thin.He knew. “What are you looking for?”
“Containment.” She scrolled through glossy, impossibly polished images of human forms encased in tight black and colored rubber. Her eyes didn’t see the models; they saw the potential for reduction, for compression.She needed a suit smaller than the last. One that would fight her for every inch, that would remind her flesh of its true purpose: to be overcome.
“Anya.” A warning.“I need the next size down,” she said, logic cool and detached. “The current parameters have been mastered.Progress requires a new baseline.” She found the custom order form. Her hands, still shaky, began filling in the fields. Garment Type: Full-Body Catsuit.Material: Black latex, 0.4mm thickness.Zipper: None. Entry: Talcum powder assisted.It would be a battle to get into. That was part of the point.
She typed the measurements with clinical precision, subtracting half an inch from every one of her last recorded stats—chest, waist, hips, inseam. The numbers were already lies; her body was smaller now than it had been when she’d last eaten a full meal two days ago. She was ordering a skin for a ghost of her former self. In the special instructions box, she typed her mantras, separated by commas: NO LIMITS ANAL SLUT, EMPTY FOR USE, DESPERATE HOLE, CHEMICAL VESSEL.
“Don’t,” Dmitri said, but there was no force behind it.He was part of this architecture.
“It’s already done.” The click of the ‘add to cart’ button was definitive. A tiny thrill, cold and sharp, pierced the fatigue. Then she navigated to another site, one that sold serious corsetry, the kind used for tightlacing and waist training. Her eyes scanned past the fashionable pieces, landing on the serious underpinnings: steel-boned, built with washers and rivets, designed for permanent reduction.She selected one in stark white coutil. The product description was a dry list of specifications that read like an engineer’s dream: spring-steel bones, front busk closure, back lacing with sealed eyelets. Her focus zeroed in on one detail: the pipestem waist. The corset was hourglass-shaped, but its narrowest point was a defined, two-inch vertical column of reinforced steel at the exact center. The size chart offered a brutal promise: if fully cinched, the circumference at that pipestem would be fifteen inches.Fifteen inches.Her current waist, measured just this morning, was nineteen. Four inches of compression.Four inches of flesh to be disciplined, conquered, erased. She imagined the steel tendons biting into her, the profound shortage of breath, the way it would force her posture into a perpetual, desperate arch.It would be a constant, painful reminder.A beautiful constraint.
She added it to the cart.On the audio line, Dmitri was quiet. She could hear him breathing, a faint rhythm in the digital space between them.“You ordered it,” he stated flatly.
“The corset too.A pipestem. It goes to fifteen inches.” She said it like she was reading out a technical specification for a server upgrade.A long exhale.“Jesus, Anya. Fifteen?You understand that’s… that’s organ rearrangement territory. That’s not a game.”
“It’s a goal.” She finalized the purchase, entering her card details with swift, automatic taps.The confirmation screen loaded.Two-day shipping. A notification would come when the packages were out for delivery.New data points were now inbound, physical variables to be integrated into the system. The hollowness inside her yawned, but it had a shape now, a future contour defined by steel and rubber.“What’s the endpoint?” he asked, his voice stripped bare. “Is there one? Or do you just keep ordering smaller and smaller skins until you vanish?”
She looked at her reflection in the dark screen again.“The endpoint is perfection.A perfect vessel. A perfect emptiness.” She said it with the conviction of a believer. “The ‘Zero’ showed me.The silence is the goal. The toys, the suits, the corset… they’re just the rituals to get there.”
He had no answer to that. The truth of it was too large and too dark to fit into their usual transactional banter.The silence stretched, thick and charged.
“I’m going to sleep,” she lied. She would lie in the dark, her mind racing over delivery timetables and lacing schedules, calculating the caloric deficit needed to make the new latex fit without tearing.“Stay on the line,” he said, not a command but a request. “Just… let it stay open.”
She didn’t answer. She minimised the browser, closed the spreadsheet, and pushed back from the desk. The room was a war zone of her compulsions. But in the center of the chaos, on the clean screen of her phone, two order confirmations glowed, promises of a tighter, harder, more perfect tomorrow. She walked unsteadily toward the bedroom, the laptop left open on the desk, his silent, listening presence a thin tether to a world outside her head. The momentum was already shifting, the crash turning into a weird, anticipatory calm.The next chapter of the experiment had been purchased. All that remained was the wait, and then the brutal, beautiful work of putting it on.