a prison, a body (nsfw)

[Strypgia]

"So," she said, cloyingly empathetic, "you are gambling your freedom away for a chance for at a designer vagina?"

Click to shrink...

Afraid she might say 'yes', Helen?

the erotic horror flicks from the early that her ex loved so much.

Click to shrink...

Missing a timeframe here after 'early', yes.

However trite he sounded, she couldn't help but to feel a kind of pleasure just by listening to him speak to her in this sweet, level voice of hers.

Click to shrink...

I think you switched pronouns accidentally here, since the 'he' speaking suddenly had 'level voice of hers' at the end?

He sounded less like a and more of a therapist,

Click to shrink...

Missing a word after 'a'. A what?

She wanted to know. So why did the opportunity to learn enrage her so?

Click to shrink...

Fear she might not like the answers, I'd venture. Fear of being wrong about something big.

Watched for more, Garg!

 

[Gargulec]

ix. helen. the one who got away

When the news broke that one of the NGOs she cooperated with had been, against all odds, awarded funding for their project, Helen found herself celebrating for reasons beyond just having an income for the next twelve months. The amount of work she was going to have to put into it was enormous already on paper, and she had enough experience with how those things tended to go to know that in practice it would be twice that at the very least. Mere fieldwork and initial data processing would render free time nearly absent from the next few months of her life, and as much as she hated that idea, it at least provided a hope that she would finally wean herself off Rowan. Of thinking about her and, more importantly, of watching her be gradually disassembled.

Over the past week, the Galatea-provided application had run constantly in the background of her laptop and her phone. Whatever it was that made her look at it time after time, she couldn't tell—maybe some kind of morbid curiosity bordering on self-harm. Every time she saw the naked body of her friend, whether incarcerated in its little glass cage, or being subjected to another round of horrifying exploitation, she felt her stomach revolt. It made her think back to that old docummentary she saw, the one about that rapist hardcore porn producer, the one called Graphic Sexual Horror. But while its aesthetic was all septic and rusted, a serial-killer's backroom, what Rowan was trapped in looked like an Apple Store of violation. The chic, high-tech way to get any dignity stripped out of the body. She could never watch it for longer than a few moments at a time.

But when she had to look away, there was also the text. Pages upon pages of reports, event logs, operating schedules. Detailed records of Rowan's performance, hundreds of pages of sexual data, information on when her cell was being filled with sleeping gas because she refused to sleep at curfew—all in itself a disturbing account of an absurdly strict disciplinary regime. But there was more—there was always more. She could also read, in detail, about the brainwashing schemes scheduled for her friend, and even though half of their meanings were obscured behind codewords she did not understand, she'd gleaned enough to realize that what Galatea wanted was to make Rowan completely willing to suffer whatever they had planned for her. Occasionally she made the mistake of looking at the list of "enhancements" the corporation intended to stuff into Rowan's body; she was quietly thankful that she did not understand what most of them were supposed to be, even if it did set her imagination into horrifying excesses.

It's monstrous, what you are doing, she wrote one night, and sent it to that Aphrodite person. She was angry, after two beers, and really didn't care if they cut her access for that. In fact, she almost hoped that they would. The previous half-an-hour she spent watching a figure sealed in white plastic methodically bruise and welt the back of Rowan with a series of whips and then—somewhat amusedly—report a "minimal to negative arousal".

The response from the Galatea representative arrived not long after—she really had to be glued to her computer, it seemed. It was, of course, a single line of text: Then why do you watch?

Helen typed in a response instantly: Because you let me, but then hesitated before clicking "send" and, finally, threw it into the digital garbage bin. The question Aphrodite had asked, as much as she hated it, was a good one.

Every time she looked away from the application, she came out feeling dirty. She was participating in an invasion of privacy, she was watching something awful and repellant. Even if Rowan had consented to all of that, it didn't matter. She had promised herself to stop more than once, and each time the promise never held.

So why did she keep watching it?

Every day, the application sent a report to her inbox—a kind of a digest. It contained an event log, the most important aspects of Rowan's "performance" and, morbidly, a "general appraisal of object's condition"—a paragraph where her overall mental and physical state was described. Out of seven reports she had read, all but one described Rowan as being in a "positive mental state" and "responding well to stimuli". Helen couldn't believe any of it. No one could do well in a situation like Rowan's. No one.

Obsessively, she kept re-reading that one report where it was stated that the object experienced mental stress of uncertain origin (potential causes: idleness, bodily dysphoria, first-wave regret, chronic mood swings?), causing lack of focus, restlessness and troubles sleeping. Pacifying agent administered to the holding pod at 2230 hours...

Uncertain origins. She gripped onto that idea that there was something wrong with Rowan, that the horror of her position was getting to her, that soon it would completely take her. So she had to watch, had to catch Galatea lying. Even if there was something perverse in opening the application and realizing that, somewhere in the back of her head, she expected or maybe even wanted to see Rowan miserable and broken. She'd realized that yesterday, and it had been enough to make her feel completely wretched for the rest of the day.

And so, the idea that she would have so much work that she could barely find time to think, let alone watch, Rowan, was a welcome reprieve.

Besides, the project would bring with itself its own set of petty frustrations, small annoyances and general issues which, she had hoped, would successfully occupy her mind enough to leave no room in it for endless considerations of Galatea's working.

She did not have to wait long for those frustrations; in fact they started before the work proper, on the light rail train line 51, where alongside Hank she drove to meet their first interviewee. Within fifteen minutes of boarding, he was already having that conversation with her. All over again.

"I still think this project is," he said, looking out of the tram's window, "low-key problematic. If you know what I mean."

She squeezed the hand-hold and rolled her eyes. Not like he could see her doing that, and not like anyone else in the train cared at all for their disagreement.

"We've talked about," she sighed, without any hope it would dissuade him.

"Yeah, bu—Helen, we're a pro-labour org, and this is not—this is not about labour. It's…," he paused. "It's about the exploiters."

"They are the victims of the system just the same."

"The fact that they've lost everything doesn't make up for their complicity in the exploitation of the labour force back when they were in power," he continued. "It still feels sleezy to give them so much attention that…"

The tram's PA system croaked to life. A vaguely feminine electronic voice crackled the name of the next stop:

"COSMONAUTS' PARK."

The train ground to a halt. Helen slammed the door button.

"Come," she called, shoving Hank out into the cool, morning air and following after him.

A few people stumbled out of the tram behind them, a few more jumped in. The machine chimed and rushed back onto its route, quiet like a whisper. The fact that the city had extended its light train tracks all the way to this part of the city kept baffling her. Compared to the hyper-modern, sleek tram, the area around the Park felt like it had been taken out of a different century. At least partially because it was. The grim, ungainly blocks of flats that surrounded this little green space had not seen a renovation in decades; the faded pastel paint that covered some of them recalled that brief period where everyone thought that it would be enough to paint the city bright yellow and green to erase the signs of the previous system. But, pastel or not, they continued on, obstinate.

From the tram stop, Helen could see inside the Park; the birches and poplars that were supposed to shield it from the rumble of the street were still leafless after winter. The bronze rocket of the Nuke peeked from between those bare branches. Technically, it was supposed to be a monument to Gagarin, but no one called it that. It was the Nuke, a giant metal missile on a pedestal, aimed threateningly at the sky. Unlike so many other monuments of the type, it had evaded the frenzy of the desovietization. Sure, there was always some talk about finally redeveloping the Cosmonaut's Park into something more representational than a few diseased trees, battered benches and a giant bronze Nuke, but it never went anywhere. All the better, Helen thought. The city was gentrified enough as it was.

"Look," Hank continued. "I think that we should be focusing on workers. That was our mission statement, that is what our work is all about and…"

"Hank," Helen grunted, glancing at her phone. They still had fifteen minutes before the appointment. Still, they had better get going. She turned away from the Nuke and headed down-street, towards the clumping of the flats. "Hank, this is literally the first time we'll be working with anyone else but the most narrowly understood workers, and…"

"Once a blooddrinker, always a blooddrinker," he said, shrugging his slender shoulders. There was something in that gesture that made Helen think back to that time when she'd introduced Rowan to him, and they'd spent an evening talking about dresses. Apparently, Rowan was dejected that he looked better in them than she did, though Helen honestly couldn't tell the difference. But…

...but why the fuck was she thinking about her again?

"Henraszewski is living in his mother's old flat in the fucking Northern Heights," she spat, more annoyed than she wanted to be. "Just process that. Northern Heights!"

"He was a CEO!"

"Well, now he's no one!"

She didn't realize she was shouting. Her voice echoed down the empty street; the few passerbys around all turned and stared. She looked down, embarrassed.

"Are you okay, Helen?" Hank asked, coming closer. "You seem really tense for some reason."

"Bad week, m'kay?" she mumbled. "Can you just drop this thing? Bring it to Anna, if you really want to. Let's just get the interview done, please?"

"Sssure," he responded. She didn't have to look up at him to know the false, compassionate smile he was putting on. She liked him a ton, but he could never really hide being worried, no matter how much he tried. "Sure, let's go talk with Henraszewski. Who knows? Maybe he won't even be an ass…"

"Hank."

"Fine, fine," he sighed. "Let's go."

***

When Helen imagined Anton Henraszewski, she thought of a hunched, soft-spoken older man, skin sagging and eyes marked by profound loss; the sort of a person she associated with welfare homes and documentaries about social destitution. After all, he had lost everything, and it was a sizable everything to the boot. How much his fall must have hurt, she couldn't even begin to imagine.

To her surprise, the Anton that greeted them at the door of his tiny flat looked not that differently from the man she had seen in the old press photographs. Sure, he had aged a little, his red hair thinned and greyed out, and his sweater and jeans had very little to do with perfectly tailored Italian suits he used to wear, but he was still recognizable as the man who once headed the most promising start-up in the country. Hell, even his apartment, tiny as it was, looked like a miniaturized version of a hyper-modern living space of a tech executive. The materials were all cheap IKEA, and the electronics that filled the shelves top of the line for the end of the last decade, but it still carried this air of expert minimalism and technological superiority that had been all the rage years ago.

If his loss showed somewhere, it was in his mannerisms. Before the interview, she watched old footage of him, interviews where he wouldn't allow anyone but him to speak, his press conferences where he would, without a hint of a doubt, declare the future of his enterprise as glorious. She even watched some material from the early days of the decline, where he still allowed no one to doubt that everything would work out for him and his accomplices. But now?

But now, the man sitting across the table from them, with a small glass of dark-red tea, was quiet. He moved carefully and slowly, spoke little, and it took a good twenty minutes of Hank working him with praise and gratitude to get him to open up. But even when the dam finally broke and he started to talk about the rise and fall of his fortune, of DigitEX systems against the backdrop of the startup goldrush, no hint of old energy showed through. There was regret, obviously, and quite a bit of pain—especially as he reached the part where his old "friends" ousted him from power and did their best to bury him in debt. But, above else, what dominated his tone was a faint sense of amusement.

"You would make silly money out of the stupidest things," he said, smiling wryly. "You could tell people you were selling them a scam, slap on a few hot buzzwords, and they would still buy it. They would still invest in you. Even though everyone knew it was bullshit."

"Why?" Hank asked. "Was there ever a rationale?"

"Everyone thought themselves the next Uber," he shrugged back. "The next big thing. The risk wasn't really losing money—the people who financed it had more of it than they could ever really lose. The risk was being late to the next disruption, of being behind the curve. Everyone wanted to be on the front-pages, everyone wanted to have a cult on Twitter. So they would throw their dollars and their euros at anything that looked remotely promising, and a lot of things that didn't."

"But the bubble had to burst," Helen said quietly. "Eventually."

"And that's why everyone kept pumping it," Anton laughed softly. "Aren't you socialists? You, of all people, should understand. Everybody knew it wasn't sustainable, so the job was to squeeze it out as much as possible before it all went bust. It was a feeding frenzy, and we lived for it! What else were you supposed to do? Take your absurd riches and walk away, when you knew you could go double down or nothing?"

"No one ever folded?"

"No one," he nodded, sorrow again creeping into his voice. "Well, there was one. The man who ran Pygmalion, I don't know if you've ever heard of it?"

Both of them shook their heads.

"Unsurprising. It was never really huge. They came in at the tail end of the machine learning craze, but still managed to get in some sweet VC. And then, one day, the guy in charge of it… what was his name…," he frowned. "Alzheimmer, I guess. I'll remember later. Anyway one day that guy just - sold off all of his assets and left. Vanished into thin air."

"Graft?" suggested Hank.

"Caught a whiff of the coming crash?" proposed Helen.

"Insider trading?"

"Yeah, none of that," Anton chuckled again. "I mean, that's what we all thought. Hell, it kicked off a small panic. But it came long before the crash, and as far as anyone could tell, there was nothing illegal about it. Nothing shady. He just decided, one fine morning, to leave it all behind. So yeah, one of us folded. I envy the bastard, not gonna lie."

A thought occurred to Helen, and then a question that she felt like she should ask. But before she could form it, Hank cut in with one of his own.

"Do you wish you did the same?"

Whatever it was, Hank's words had knocked it from her head, leaving behind only a nagging sense of something being off.

Henraszewski gave him a long, slightly amused look.

"Have you not been paying attention?" he said finally with a grin. "It's not about 'did', it's about 'could'. And I couldn't have done that. Look, even as the ground came alight under my feet and it was obvious it was the end, I still thought I could hustle my way out of it all. Make out like a bandit. But…" the smile faded. "You probably think we were some kind of parasites, no?"

Hank did not say anything; he looked away, anxiously fixing his glasses. Once again, Anton laughed, but this time without a slightest hint of joy.

"I've read your press. I've looked over your Twitter. I actually followed a lot of lefty stuff back in the day. So yeah, you don't have to hide it. You all thought that we were some kind of parasitic species, a blight on society, or, I don't know, Elders of the Silicon Valley. And you know what?"

Hank looked back at him, and opened his mouth to speak. But, for one moment, the man Helen had seen on the old footage was back. Henraszewsk stared Hank down as if he were no one, and then erupted with a guttural, furious growl.

"I wish we'd been any of that! But what we really were was a bunch of morons!" he thumped the table, making his glass of tea jump up. Helen looked up at the recorder rattling about the glass surface and winced, thinking about what it would do to the quality of the recording. "And the one injustice about it all is that not everyone ended up like me!"

The silence that followed was heavy, intimidating. Hank squinted, as if looking for an opportunity to argue, but for once no words of indignation came out of his mouth.

"We all had it coming," Anton finished, his voice once more quiet and tired. "We really fucking did."

***

Back at her apartment, she spent the rest of the day hunched over the computer, headphones on her head, transcribing the interview. The onerous work went surprisingly quickly, for once, so she moved onto trying to arrange all the interviews for the rest of the week. The issue wasn't tracking down those involved in the DigitEX collapse. It was enough to comb through a few of the innumerable archival articles about it to compose a long list of people who were varyingly responsible for and affected by it. The actual difficulty was in contacting then and convincing them to agree to talk about it. Unlike Hermaszewski, a lot of them still had quite a bit left to lose. They tended to react allergically to a suggestion of being interviewed, especially by people from an organisation which had the word "justice" in its name. One of them even threatened legal action before hanging up. Gradually, however, she managed to sweet-talk a few into an interview and even arranged a preliminary schedule for the next few days. Knowing life, it wouldn't hold, but it was still something.

By the time she was finished with all that, the night was well underway. A message on her phone reminded her of the standing invitation from one of her exes to get out for drinks; she checked the time. It wasn't yet late enough for that to be impossible. She hesitated, stopped to think.

She brought up the Galatea application window without really thinking about it. It wasn't a conscious thing—just a reflex developed over the past week, to check on Rowan when she had nothing else to do. She tensed immediately, and the question of whether to go out was displaced by the slightly nauseating realization that she was doing it again.

For once, the image the live-feed provided was not stomach-churning. Rowan was back in that glass cell they'd held her in, wrapped in the ridiculous transparent blanket and apparently soundly asleep, her back turned to the camera. Through those coverings, Helen could recognize blurred, reddish marks where her friend's body was still healing from "impact play testing". As far as she could tell, the bruises and welts were fading quickly.

With the familiar, noxious frustration welling up in the pit of her stomach, she glanced at the phone again. The invitation felt even more tempting than before. But no, she really shouldn't. She had a meeting early tomorrow, and knowing Dani, it would not end at "a few drinks". It never really did. She turned off the application and slammed the laptop shut. Half a day! She'd managed to get through half of a day without thinking about this Galatea nonsense!

The gratuitous approach of the corporation was increasingly getting on her nerves. It felt stupid, pointless. She knew enough about the realities of modern sex work to realize that this was not how any of it was supposed look. All those prisons, all that surveillance, muzzled showers, all of it had no actual purpose that Helen could discern. Why hold people like Rowan in glass cages? Why monitor their behaviour not just with casual workplace discipline, but with nozzles dispensing mind-altering drugs? The costs of this system had to, by far, outweigh any actual benefits it might have. The only idea that seemed to make sense was that it was about cruelty. That cruelty, and power, were the entire point.

But still, if they wanted to…

"Fuck," she muttered, lifting herself up from the computer. "I'm not thinking about it now. Cut me a bloody break."

She did her best to push the thoughts aside. She was tired, she needed to wash herself and go to sleep, not spend another night pondering the exact reasons why Galatea did what they did, or why it seemed like Rowan was actually enjoying herself. If she really was, and it wasn't a psy-op meant to give a horribly exploitative corporation some good PR from one of the "lefties". Not like it was going to work. Literally nothing that Helen had seen…

"Stop," she mumbled, shuffling towards the bathroom, to try to scrub away those impossible thoughts along with the day's sweat.

Henraszewski, she decided as she put herself to bed and wrapped the blanket tightly about her body, was right. The people running those corporations understood only excess. There was no rational reason behind anything they did. It was greed, and if not for power, then for something else. Greed to possess, to rule, to… just greed. There was no point in giving it too much thought; there was no explanation other than the unrestrained need of men to possess more and more, the same need that was ruining the society and the planet. This was all that Galatea and its horrors represented. Of all the people that Henraszewski knew, only one had had the presence of mind to call it quits. But what had it earned him? Who remembered the name Pygmalion now?

Pygmalion.

Helen sprung up from her bed, hand jolting towards the phone and dialing Henraszewski's number before she even had time to think about the hour. He picked up before she had a moment to reconsider.

"Hello?"

"Uh…," she wheezed into the microphone, feeling like an idiot, "Mr. Henraszewski, I'm so sorry to call you at this hour. It's Helen Hu, I was that woman who…"

"Yeah, yeah, that mannish one. I remember," he replied, his voice warm. "It's no big issue, Miss Hu, I sleep late, and so few people call me nowadays that it is a pleasant diversion. What brings you to me? Have I made that good of an impression on you?" he asked. There was a trace of flirtatious hope to those words that made Helen shiver. "How can an old man help you?"

"I…," she bit her lip, but there was no point in holding back now that she had actually had him on the line. Even if, on the second thought, it seemed just plain dumb. "I wanted to ask about Pygmalion. It's a really weird question, but… ugh," she stopped talking for a moment, trying to get her thoughts in order. Now that the initial rush of the hunch had passed, she felt a bit idiotic about the question she was about to ask.

"Are you all right, Miss Hu? You sound so very stressed."

"Yes!" she hissed, annoyed. "Okay, I just wanted to ask if there was any relationship between Pygmalion and Galatea Corporation!"

There was a brief pause on the other side, followed by a husky chuckle.

"What clued you in?" Anton laughed. "The company that bought Pygmalion assets? They're Galatea today. I guess they like their mythology."

Helen gasped. It felt like finding a loose thread in some grand conspiracy, unveiling a dark secret, it felt dangerous or important. Or maybe that was just Rowan's situation driving her insane.

"Do you… do you remember the name of that man, the one you've mentioned? The one who…"

"Oh, him?" Anton sighed. "I could look around. I'm sure I'll remember it. Maybe we could meet over a cup of coffee to share those stories, talk a bit, get to know each other better. What do you say… Miss Hu?"

What Helen wanted to say was you creep. But…

"I would be very thankful, Mr Hermaszewski," she murmured into the phone. "Until then, good night."

She dropped back onto her pillow, and sighed. There really was no getting out of this all.

 

[BlueForest]

I love how beautifully disconcerting this entire story is. It feels just close enough to reality to have that emotional connection but just absurd enough to still feel safe.

 

[Strypgia]

But while its aesthetic was all septic and rusted, a serial-killer's backroom, what Rowan was trapped in looked like an Apple Store of violation. The chic, high-tech way to get any dignity stripped out of the body.

Click to shrink...

It's somewhat astonishing that someone like Helen, who spends a good amount of time talking and thinking about feminism, gender roles, and sexuality, doesn't seem to have mental space for something akin to Rule 36: "Whatever you can think of, someone will find it hot as hell."
She can't seem to wrap her head around the idea that there are going to be people who find 'being treated like a sex iPod toy' is exactly what turns them on like nothing else...

Out of seven reports she had read, all but one described Rowan as being in a "positive mental state" and "responding well to stimuli". Helen couldn't believe any of it. No one could do well in a situation like Rowan's. No one.

Click to shrink...

...Or maybe just doesn't want to think her friend is one of them.

"You would make silly money out of the stupidest things," he said, smiling wryly. "You could tell people you were selling them a scam, slap on a few hot buzzwords, and they would still buy it. They would still invest in you. Even though everyone knew it was bullshit."

Click to shrink...

Shades of the 1990s tech bubble. Any stupid website pitch with 'e' or 'i' on it would get millions.

"No one," he nodded, sorrow again creeping into his voice. "Well, there was one. The man who ran Pygmalion, I don't know if you've ever heard of it?"

Click to shrink...

the Galatea application

Click to shrink...

Some people need to study more Greek myth, if they didn't see that faster.

"Oh, him?" Anton sighed. "I could look around. I'm sure I'll remember it. Maybe we could meet over a cup of coffee to share those stories, talk a bit, get to know each other better. What do you say… Miss Hu?"

Click to shrink...

Hitting on a woman who just interviewed you, and called back late at night with an intense question about a detail? No wonder you're dateless, buddy.

 

[Gargulec]

Hitting on a woman who just interviewed you, and called back late at night with an intense question about a detail? No wonder you're dateless, buddy.

Click to shrink...

Henraszaweski had a rough live which taught him a bit of perspective on the techbro culture. Just, not necessarily the gendered side of it.

 

[Gargulec]

x. rowan. the end of you

Celeste helped. She threw herself at the game with frustrated focus, desperate to have something on her mind other than her noxious thoughts. For a time, it worked. She helped the red-haired Madeline navigate the airy, mountainous ascent; she had something to prove to the world, and to herself. Rowan remembered reading somewhere that the game's creator suggested that the girl was trans.

She took a liking to her.

The thoughts that, just moments ago, threatened to swallow her whole, receded. For hours, there was the game, the mountain, and the furious clicking of controller buttons. No matter how frustrating planting Madeline into a bed of spikes or a mountain chasm could get, she kept playing. It really helped. But, at the end of the day, it was still only a game. It could keep her mind busy, but it wouldn't tire her body the way a day of testing promised to. She played it furiously until the entertainment system shut itself down to remind her to go to sleep. By that time, the others were already in their beds in their cells, exhausted by the day of toil that had been denied to Rowan. She put down the gamepad and stared at the one-legged girl, sprawled on the bed without even bothering to cover herself with the blanket. She envied her tired body, and the mind too numb to wander.

Blue text blinked across the screen, counting down the minutes before the lights would be turned off for the night. Rowan got the message. Reluctantly, she got herself to the sink and brushed her teeth. The reflection grimacing at her from the mirror was as unpleasant as ever, but at least without any hair—whatever Galatea put in the showers dissolved them all to the root, so she looked more like a kind of an alien rather than the person she knew as herself. For the first time in her life, she was without a beard shadow.

Small victories.

Just as she had feared, sleep refused to come. It went the way it always did: first, she pressed her eyes closed and tried to lie still and think of nothing, only to find that she could not help but to think about everything. The thoughts she pushed back came worming in one by one; the air in the cell was cloyingly warm. She tossed and turned under her blanket, struggling to find a comfortable position, then threw the blanket off altogether, letting it crumple on the transparent floor. She turned the pillow over, then back to where it was before. Her hand wandered to her groin; the only sleep remedy she hadn't tried yet was furiously masturbating, but it wouldn't work here.

The thought, instead, only managed to get her to feel her penis struggle to harden inside its plastic shell. She rubbed at it, to no avail at all. In fact, the attempt only aroused her further. Whatever hint of coming sleep was there around her vanished without a trace, leaving her with the sound of her beating heart and the infuriating blinking of the camera above.

During the tests, they would sometimes feed her some kind of a gas to make her drowsy; she wondered if her cell maybe had hidden nozzles through which they could pump it full of it and at least get her to get some rest. Kind of like a gas chamber. Her mind served her a fuzzy memory of that being an actual execution method the US government had once tried—putting a convict to permanent sleep. Of course, they'd bungled it up, but maybe Galatea could do better.

She didn't even have her phone to scroll through in the sleepless hours, or a dumb true crime book to read until morning. The only thing left were her own thoughts.

Aren't you happy now, a familiar voice asked, and aren't you looking forward to two more years of that?

Her fists clenched. No, it wouldn't go like that. Today was a glitch, a small error that left her too rested for her own good. It was always like that when she was too lazy to exercise or work, but here at least she would not have a choice. They were going to mount her on a stand and have some dumb business execs fuck her for a half a day, and then she would be at least exhausted enough to sleep. Or something to that tune. It would be like during the tests—they would tire and abuse her body enough that she at least wouldn't have to worry about her own thoughts.

What a remarkably feminist thought, the voice that was her thought to herself.

It was only ever herself, and that was the problem.

It was because of herself that she was now stuck in a glass cage, under a translucent blanket, taped 24/7, her one hope to serve as a cocksleeve for the world's biggest bio-tech. It was because of herself that she sold away her freedom, her friends, her life, her everything only to live out a sex fantasy, because she could never get a boyfriend to do those things to her. Or a girlfriend. Or any other gender of a partner. Not that it mattered. It was because of herself that she could never really find a partner, anyway.

There she was again, at the beginning of a thought pattern shaped like a spiral, which, which could only lead further down. She knew that place quite well. She knew she should stop it. But what was she supposed to do? The lights were turned off. Galatea wanted her to sleep, not do any of the thousand little things she had learned to cope. So it was really her fault that she was about to plunge head-long into this well of her own thoughts.

With the realization of the enormity of the mistake she had committed to, she sank into the warm embrace of misery. She thought of the awful thing that was her body, and of the even more disgusting lodger in its flesh and bone, that called herself Rowan now. What a piece of shit. Ditched family. Left friends. Kept teaching students about how important female empowerment is, but then went to belong to Galatea. Spent three years writing about the importance of protecting trans kids, because really, that was the closest…

"Stop," she yelped. "Stop. Stop. It's okay. Think of something else."

She tried. She forced her mind to retread some old texts. Thought about how she would write about her experiences, once they let her out. She thought of Helen, who tried to talk her out of it all, because she was a real woman who knew what women wanted, and it was none of those things, because…

"Stop," Rowan repeated, forcing her voice out. It was unsteady and so very ugly, because it came out of a throat irreparably destroyed by testosterone.

She had to jump out of bed. Turn the lights on. Play a game. Put some music on, loud enough that it would drown out her thoughts. Write to some friend of hers who lived on the other end of the planet and so was awake even though it was the dead of the night. She wanted to escape. But the room she was in was a prison, and the walls closed in to remind her that there was no fleeing from herself this time. And only because she wanted to be here.

Her fault. Only ever her fault. She was a trash human being, absolute garbage, waste, vomit…

It felt good to admit it, in the worst possible way. Like she'd finally faced the truth she had been running away from for so long. It was coming to terms with everything she pretended she didn't know, everything she kept at bay by forcing insincere help out of people who pitied her enough to play at being her friends, by blowing money on therapists who would nod along to everything, because that was their job, who could never just say what she needed to hear: that she needed to get a hold of herself, instead of doing the only thing she could do and wallow in self-pity, just as she was wallowing in it right now. Because it felt good, and she could never muster any kind of will to do the difficult thing. It was the point she would always return to. Lying alone in bed, and thinking to herself about just how awful she was, because to do otherwise was to look for a solution, and to find one would be to admit that she no longer had any excuses for the way she was.

She knew it all. She knew she was melting down. She knew she was powerless to stop it. She knew it was her fault. She, she, she…

"I'm a narcissist," she whined. "I'm filth."

Good, he reminded herself. But there is something else you're still afraid of. Come on, you're close. Why are you here again? Why did you take your body and sell it here?

A lound, beeping sound snapped her out of the collapse, however briefly. She threw her head up to see a blue text flash across the entertainment system's screen.

Administering sleeping aid. Do not hold breath.

There was a hiss, a quiet sound of something sweet-scented being pumped directly into her cell. She recognized the smell from one of the tests. Her heart raced with excitement and hope. They were going to help her. She gasped thirstily at the air, feeling it fill her lungs.

In the few dozen seconds between the pacifying agent melted her consciousness into a shapeless slurry, she could feel one more pang of shame at how readily she submitted to corporate discipline. But as sleep crashed down onto her and swallowed her whole, she could only be thankful.

***

The gas made the sleep stick to the underside of her skull in the morning, imposing a thin, smoky film between her and the waking world. The fact that there was no food on her plate in the morning, only a jug of water, did not register even as she drank from it; the fact of bodily hunger seemed distant and happening to someone else. The warden had to grip her by the shoulder as she gagged her for the chain-gang, Rowan swaying back and forth in her grasp, barely awake.

It was only under the showers that the heat of the water wiped the dreaming dregs from her. By that time, she could barely bring herself to think about the nights' hauntings. She allowed herself to be dragged forward towards her next use, quietly relishing the fact that she was not going to have many opportunities to think.

This time, the machine and the drone were ready and in the working order. Any momentary concerns that might have remained in her sphere of concern—the prickling hunger, idle anxieties about being beaten—broke away with the first blunt impact of a leather paddle thrown against her bottom. Unable to as much as wriggle, she yelped into the gag, and the sound she made was noted down and registered.

Then came the next blow, and then the rest of the day was a red blur, unburdened with thought.

***

Rowan woke on her own, before the warden made her morning rounds. She lay on her chest, head propped on the pillow, her entire lower back throbbing with a dull, warm soreness. It wasn't quite pain—or if it was, it did not cut through the protective layer of the ointment that the drone called "Catty" rubbed all over it after working it all red and blue over the hours prior. Yesterday confirmed what Rowan had long since suspected—that whips, floggers and canes just weren't for her. Galatea found it out quickly enough, but they had to be thorough in her examination. By the time they were done belting, striking and slapping every part of her body that could take it, she was sobbing through her gag, only barely aware of the supervisor dictating the results of the test into the recorder. They dulled the pain as best as they could, but no matter how good their chemicals were, they couldn't just get rid of the bruises, welts and cuts that turned her bottom into one of those oh-so-very-sexy "look at how much fun I've had" photos that hardcore masochists would post to their FetLife.

But as far as remedies for worries and fears went, it was among the best she'd ever had. Returned to the cell, she stumbled onto the bed in a punch-drunk stupor, physically unable to think the thoughts that made Galatea gas her into sleep the night before. Catty had, quite literally, beaten them out of her, and no matter how much she hurt, she could not help but feel a perverse sense of gratitude. Between the feeling of her body being one big bruise and the slow-running collapse down the spiral of self-loathing, she knew which one she preferred. Only the hunger gnawed at her; she hadn't eaten all day yesterday.

Still, as long as she remained motionless, the little pains and deficits of the body felt distant, belonging to a different, waking world that she wasn't yet ready to inhabit. Instead, she lingered in the warm middle place between dreams and wakefulness. She wasn't yet lucid enough to direct her thoughts, or gather them; they errantly wandered, and, as was their ken, dredged up memories.

It was late June, and the air in the therapist's office felt hot and heavy. A large fan whirred, its sound overlaying the susurrus of cars and people outside the window. A thick smell of fruit tea hazed between them, two steaming glasses of red drink on the glass tabletop, two spent tea bags drying in a ceramic mug right next to them. It was the receptionist's little kindness; she would always serve them tea, and that was one of the many reasons why Rowan took a liking to this clinic.

But it wasn't drinks that brought her there, but rather the person sitting across her, sinking into her enormous padded chair. She wore a summer dress stamped with some ridiculous, cartoonish print; there were sequins on her oversized sneakers. It was all just like her, an attitude slightly larger than life.

"We keep coming back to the same thing," she spoke in a sunny voice, one meant to disarm worry and entice others to speak.

"I just," she remembered herself pleading. Of course she sounded dejected, of course she struggled to get the words past her throat. "Am I making a mistake? Am I wrong?"

"Are you?" she asked back.

Rowan wanted her to get annoyed, wanted her to throw in her face some magical proclamation that would solve all of it, that would point her a clear way forward. Was it not why she was paying her?

She said nothing, then, and instead made this sort of a face she had hoped would convey silently a simple please, tell me.

"Sometimes," the therapist said after a while, "I feel like you expect me to be some kind of High Tribunal of Gender that will pass a judgement on you, that will validate the way you feel. But there is no one who can really do it but…"

She heard footsteps outside and the recollection of last year's therapy dissolved back into the sterile interior of her Galatea cell.

Again, there was no breakfast coming, and no warden.

Two drones in their gleaming black latex stormed into her cell, their heels clicking on the floor. A mixture of usual awe and utter confusion flashed in Rowan's head as they lifted her from the bed, their smooth fingers cool on her skin. She was made to kneel; one of the drones deftly forced the muzzle onto her head. Within seconds, they were walking her out, alone, past the showers, down into an elevator and into depths of the facility she had never seen before.

A morbid thought cut its way past the confusion. Wasn't it how they executed prisoners? Right in the morning, without any forewarning, to shock them into submission as they marched them to their death? She would have lingered on that image had she been given the time. But the drones hurried her out of the elevator and into a bright-lit corridor and she had to focus not to stumble. Even then, she could not help but to admire how adept they were in their preposterous boots.

At first, she mistook the destination they dragged her into for some kind of a massive machine room. Thick cylinders of smooth metal lined the walls of a hall easily as big as the cell-block. All around Rowan, machinery hummed in a low pitch; under the grated floor, chromed pipes snaked and tangled, giving out the sound of rushing water. It felt like entering a giant engine; any moment now Rowan expected unseen pistons to set the cylinders into their pace. But then, she noticed a screen by one of those giant metal fixtures. Numbers and graphs flashed past it in a cascade of colors, too fast for her to follow. But, above them, there was a line of text in blinking bold letters that she could easily read.

Programming in progress.

She gasped, the realization grabbing her by the gut. Galatea owned her body. It could starve her, cut her, make her into whatever their surgeons desired. But Galatea also owed her brain.

It was nice being you, a familiar voice crooned into the nook of her mind. Wasn't it?

It really wasn't, she wanted to say it, but couldn't. Not through the gag. Her mind erupted into a cacophony of thoughts. There was a base layer of animal fear, of knowing that even if she wanted to, she couldn't tell them no, she couldn't protest them programming her.They were going to brainwash her. Mind-break her. Turn her into whatever they needed, some slut, some dumb sex-crazed bimbo, some… It was real, it was terrifying, it was about to happen to her.

Her penis struggled to expand in its plastic shell. They were going to wipe her brain clean, they were going to destroy her—and through the fog of terror, her entire person quaked with arousal.

How—how the fuck can you want that? she thought to herself, or heard some part of her think. How could she? The drones held her leash taut, as if expecting that she was going to try to bolt, but no, she allowed herself to be led without protest. She was shivering; her heart was racing.

The tank readied for her awaited, its sides peeled back, metal panels agape like a great devouring maw. A man in the Galatea lab coat awaited her, along with a few more drones preparing the machinery.

There was a rail extending from the inside of the tank, and mounted on it, at a slight recline, was a wire gibbet, a human-shaped frame the size of Rowan, bristling with straps, cables and pipes, bristling with cables, conduits and pipes. It was ready for her.

"Mount her," the man in the coat commanded without even looking from the pad in his hand.

The two drones pushed her, tilted her forward into the gibbet, gloved hands pushing her tight into the metal frame as they adjusted her limbs to fit flawlessly in the clasps meant to render her perfectly motionless. Scenes from the Clockwork Orange flashed before her eyes, but her thoughts were rapidly becoming a disorganized chaos; she could barely follow any of them. She sank into sensations.

Dozens of little pricks came down all over her body as cool hands glued little wires to skin. Something cold dripped between her buttocks, and then there was a familiar sensation of her asshole being forced open as something was inserted into it.

Shining-black fingers came into her view, holding something fine and transparent, slender wires, cobweb-fine, trailing behind. Another finger held her eyelids up; she grunted in reflexive protest, but couldn't even throw her head back as the finger slipped a lens onto one of her eyes, then another. She barely had time to blink before a drone pulled the gag free from her mouth, only for another to bring up the end of a flexible pipe to her mouth. On sheer reflex, she tried to yelp in shock and surprise; the drone's hand darted forward to stop her mouth from closing. Futilely, she tried to find any give in the bindings securing her, but there was none. The tube went into her mouth, and all the way down the throat; a small frame secured it around her jaw.

Somehow, she didn't even gag on it.

Baffles went into her ears, more tubes down the nostrils. A helmet of some kind was fitted around her head, fixing all that piping in place. By the time they were done, there was not much of her left that could be seen from all the wires and cables connecting her to the maw of the tank. It must have looked as if she was being entangled by the tendrils of some deep-sea creature reeling in a fish into its gullet. Her body was wired in. She had no face, only the mask. Every opening was attended to by a pipe, by a seal, by an electrode. She tensed her muscles, but there was no slack in the bindings. She was webbed in, speared into the machinery that extended deep into her body. She breathed through nozzles; she would piss into another.

A dazzling array of shapes and colours flashed briefly in her vision; even as she closed her eyes, they would not go away. The plugs in her ears whined through the sound scale, then belched random bits of noise right into her brain. Her senses were theirs. It was just as on those stupid hentai pictures. Only worse, deeper, more tangible. Were they really going to just stuff her into a mind-break tank now? Could she make any sound, she would chuckle, or maybe sob. It didn't feel real. It was, as ever, only a fantasy. Only this time it really wasn't.

The drones danced around her, making fine adjustments to all that fine machinery. The technician muttered something she couldn't hear through the plugs in her ears. There was something gathering in her throat, but whether it was fear or her body straining at the pipe forced into it, she couldn't really tell.

No, it was fear. It had to be. But it also absolutely didn't matter. She couldn't run away, plead, try to break free. She could not as much as look back at the man behind her with panic in her eyes. She didn't really exist. There was only a body, and the mind that kept it prisoner, stopping it from ever being useful, from ever being what it really should be. But they could deal with that, too.

She was afraid. But she wasn't a factor. Not anymore. And the thought wasn't nearly as bitter and scary as it should be. She stared—not that she had much of a choice—into the pit of the tank, where she would soon disappear.

Motors whirred to life, and the assembly she was a part of lurched forward into the maw ahead. The tank's heavy metal shell closed around her with the hiss of a pneumatic seal. All was darkness, and all was silence. She could hear her heart race, her blood pump, she could taste the plastic in her mouth, she could be keenly aware of every little bit of machinery intruding into her body. She was alone, and soon, she imagined she would be not at all.

This is where your perversion has brought you, a familiar part of her noted. This is what you get. You wanted it, and now you stop being a person.

It was, of course, correct. But it was too late. She could not run away from the consequences of her desires anymore.

A warm trickle ran across her exposed back, dripping all the way down. Water. Within moments, hundreds of little jets pelted her body with warm liquid, submerging her in a womb-like warmth. Her sense of touch went haywire; she could not tell the limits of her skin from where the waters began. She was alone, in perfect emptiness, and that emptiness was the whole world.

Before her brain could process it in full, and break down, the sweet scent of the pacifying agent filled her nostrils, and there was no more consciousness to Rowan.

 

[NHO]

Girl needs lots of help to be happy with herself, indeed.

 

[Small Nerd]

It's kind of funny how often the part of a person's sexuality that's "kinks, turn-ons, turn-offs, etc" seems to tie into their psychology, isn't it? Poor Rowan. A mind that's never had any peace is a hell of a thing to live through. No wonder the idea of just not having a mind to be miserable with would appeal to her. Speaking of misery, I'm reminded of a description of an old movie about Joan of Arc I read a long time ago that I think applies to this story. Great art, but too painful to experience more than once.

 

[Strypgia]

I doubt you're a narcissist with all that self-loathing, hon.

 

[Gargulec]

She does spend a lot of time in her own head, though!

 

[Gargulec]

xi. helen. becoming loveable

"...so this will require a bit of effort, I'm afraid."

Helen did her best to focus on Anna's words, but it was an uphill struggle. Someone had left the heating in the meeting room cranked all the way up. Already cramped, it now felt suffocating to even sit inside. Squeezed between Hank to the left and Boghdan to the right, breathing was like drinking some hot, thick soup. She hunched forward, resting her head on her hands and straining to keep her brain from shutting down.

"Can we open the window for a moment?" she heard someone suggest—Barbara, probably. "It's just…"

"It's minus five outside," Anna replied coolly, "and I've just recuperated from a cold."

Everyone sighed, but no one protested. Anna was good thirty years older than any of them, and also the sole reason why the organisation ever took off. This did give her a degree of dictatorial powers over them which she employed with an old professor's glee. With the heavy red sweater she wore, it was a miracle she didn't get a heatstroke yet. Knowing her luck, everyone else in the room would faint before she felt even mildly inconvenienced by the temperature.

"Anyway," Anna continued, "we have much to discuss. Miss Hu, how did the interview with Hernaszewski go?"

"Uhhh," Helen groaned quietly. "Uh, it's… it was good?"

"Miss Hu," the superficial concern in Anna's voice concealed a tone of reprimand subtle enough to be blatantly obvious to everyone in the room. "Are you alright?"

"Yes," she mumbled back. "Yes. The material from the interview was really good. Henraszewski focused on the court battle, and that entire media fallout, but I think the part we'll have the most use of is what he said about his life immediately after DigitEX, this entire…," she paused, looking for a word, "realign… reabs…," it was on the tip of her tongue. "Uhh…"

"Reincorporation," Hank helped. "This entire saga of his return to the life of people who do not measure their income in millions. It was, to be honest, pretty entertaining."

"Good," Anna nodded. "And Miss Hu?"

"Yes, ma'am?" she looked up.

"Please get more sleep next time we have a meeting in the morning. Moving on..."

Her boss started to talk about the next project she had planned, and Helen took it as her cue to completely zone out. To be honest, Anna wasn't wrong—she really should have slept more. In fact, she'd actually intended to, had this great plan to go to bed early so that she would be, for once, rested for the dreary meeting. But what she'd done instead was stay awake into the deep hours of the night, glued to her phone, googling "Pygmalion Corporation" and getting increasingly frustrated by the results. First of all, three fourths of them had nothing to do with the Pygmalion she was after, but rather about either the myth or Bernard Shaw. Hell, her Pygmalion didn't even have a Wikipedia page—it redirected to Galatea Corporation's entry, where a short note indicated that Galatea acquired Pygmalion early into its existence. The reference cited was a dead link to some press release in Romanian.

This, really, was par for the course. What little she managed to find were some articles in Romanian, a few mentions in early dispatches about the meteoric rise of Galatea ("...having acquired the aptly-named Pygmalion, Galatea seems to be poised to take on the biotech world…") and very little else. She even scoured the Wayback Machine for Pygmalion's old webpage, but its snapshot was painfully incomplete and without the interactive elements that were supposed to introduce the visitor to the "innovative solutions from Bucharest".

At the end of the night, she'd ended up knowing little more than she'd started out with. Pygmalion was a startup company working in the then-fashionable field of machine learning, it apparently entered into a partnership with several medical industry companies (one of the articles she managed to find was a Medium post where someone warned of the danger of patient data being sold to a shady Romanian company—apparently, according to the author, it being Romanian meant it had to be a Russian front), and then was gobbled up by Galatea and promptly forgotten.

The worst part was that the guy who, according to Hernaszewski, got away before the bust, was nowhere to be found. In fact, the only trace of him that Helen managed to dredge up was a group photo of Pygmalion employees posing in their ultra-modern office against the backdrop of the Bucharest skyline visible through the window behind them. Or at least she assumed he was there—the description that was supposed to accompany it was lost to the depths of the internet.

What that all boiled down to was that she had to actually go on a date with Henraszewski.

She half-groaned, half-yawned, briefly launching back into alertness to see if anyone took notice, but Anna was too caught up in her plans, and, gratefully, there was no one else in the room who would care.

Creepy old dudes hitting on her wasn't really anything new, even if it had become vastly more rare as she'd butched it up. Being read as a mannish dyke did discourage at least some of them, or at least make her appear too intimidating to harass. Henraszawski, however, was smarter than the lot of them, or at least had more leverage. She had to give it to Hank, he might have had a point when he'd claimed that people in managerial positions had to be, without exception, scum.

Well, there was also always the option of just forgetting it. This entire Galatea thing was starting to wear on her nerves and…

Someone tapped her on the shoulder. She jerked her head to notice Hank standing over her.

"Wakey wakey," he chuckled. "Meeting's over."

"Oh," she murmured, embarrassed, and again glanced at Anna. This time, she was deep in a conversation with Bohdan. Small mercies. Helen packed her notebook away and lifted herself from the table. "Thanks," she mouthed.

The air outside the meeting room was fresher, even if reeking of the lime-scented detergent everyone in the building used. Holding mostly upright, Helen shuffled towards the kitchenette and put the kettle on.

"You sure you're okay?" Hank asked, prompting a pang of pointless annoyance to flash through her. "You look like you haven't slept."

"Yeah," she snapped, digging through the pile of coloured tea-boxes. "Yeah. Everything's fine."

"Okay," he shrugged. "If you say so."

She finally settled on some citrus infusion. Her mug, of course, was in the sink. Someone had used it and then hadn'tt washed it. Typical. She stifled a swear and reached for the sponge.

"We're interviewing that court guy tomorrow?" she asked after a moment, scrubbing the battered mug vigorously.

"Yeah. 6 PM. Maybe catch a beer after?"

"Maybe," she said, wiping the mug clean and slapping a tea bag inside. It was a real shame she had given up Red Bulls. She fished out her phone and typed in a quick message for Henraszewski.

Tomorrow, 4:30 PM. Wien Cafe?

She didn't have to wait long for the confirmation. He'd had his hopes up, it seemed. She scowled. Never a good sign.

***

Wien Cafe belonged to the category of coffeehouses that seemed to take pride in being as non-descript as possible. Its interior was carefully cultivated unremarkablness: white walls, some wooden furniture, a few prints of European old towns and a bunch of old books scattered about to give it a more urbane feel. It registered as familiar to people who had never set their foot inside and couldn't possibly offend any aesthetic taste by the dint of being so completely and utterly neutral. But their coffee was okay for the price, and being located near one of the city's administration hubs rendered it permanently busy.

Helen checked the hour on her phone, frowning. It was fifteen to five, and there was no sign of Hernaszewski anywhere around. She considered phoning him to ask, but decided against it; she really didn't want him to feel like she was eagerly awaiting the "date", especially not after the messages he sent her last night. If not for the fact that she'd read them starting with the apology sent several hours later, she would have just told him to fuck right off. Even now, she was sorely tempted. But if there was any data on Pygmalion online, she simply couldn't find it, and she couldn't afford to go to Bucharest to do an archive dive there. So, she needed this man.

And he was, somehow, late.

She looked at the morning paper arrayed next to her half-empty coffee cup. She'd spent the last half an hour reading through it, and as usual, there was nothing inside that approached even remotely cheerful. She fidgeted with the phone a bit, checked the mail, scrolled through her feed. Nothing interesting there, either. Her thumb hovered over the logo of the Galatea Corporation on the home screen, and she almost opened the app, before remembering that she was, after all, in a public space and probably shouldn't watch live-streamed pornography featuring her friend here.

Besides, she wasn't even sure if she could stomach looking again at what the application had shown her in the morning. The mere thought was enough to get her stomach to sink. The body, wired to machine, like a late-stage cancer patient about to breathe his last. And the eyes, the absent, empty eyes… She inhaled, and tried thinking of anything else. She didn't need that image dancing before her eyes. She grabbed the paper again, started reading an interview with some director describing about the wasted legacy of #MeToo. A little bit of outrage helped.

It was a further ten minutes until she finally saw Anton Hernaszewski push his way through the crowded cafe, red-faced and clearly embarrassed. He wore a navy-blue suit over a white shirt, the sort of a uniform that was mandatory for anyone business adjacent five years ago. In fact, Helen was almost certain she had seen this exact same jacket in one of his old photographs. She sighed quietly.

"Mr. Hernaszewski," she said, standing up and extending a hand. Her own outfit consisted of an old, shapeless blouse two sizes too big, and washed-out pair of jeans. Judging by the look on his face, he noticed and understood.

"I'm sorry for being late, He… Miss Hu," he replied, shaking it nervously. "I was stuck in traffic."

She sat down. He followed her, slumping into the pseudo-mid century modern chair.

"It's been half a decade," he muttered, embarrassment clear in his voice, "and I'm still not used to getting around with buses. It's..." he paused. "Sorry."

"I understand," she said neutrally, even as it baffled her. "Thank you for coming nonetheless. I really…"

"And sorry for that stupidity during the night," he cut in, rushing out his apology. "I was drunk, I swear. I understand that you are not…"

She felt a sting of pity. She'd heard him talk about his lost life and try to pass himself at peace and above it all. And yet, here he was, twitchy and nervous, like a little kid caught with phone in hands, pants down. Was he really that lonely? Did he really put that much hope into this longest of long shots? Only—and it was at that realization that sharp, bitter frustration cut through thin sympathy—it wasn't a long shot. It was no shot at all. He'd fantasized himself an opportunity he'd never really had.

"It's fine," she lied and watched him visibly relax. "So about…"

"Look, when you called, in the middle of the night, for a moment I thought that it was just an excuse, that you… Look, I just wanted to apologize, I understand that it was dumb, and that I should have checked my expectations."

Helen sighed, increasingly irate at him cutting in.

"I accept your apology, Mr. Hernaszewski," she said, a bit more forcefully. "Now can you tell me…"

"I just couldn't really understand why you would be interested in that kid," he continued undeterred. He must have really loved being interviewed, being allowed to talk uninterrupted. "And then it hit me. It wasn't about getting to me, it was about Galatea. You're taking them on, aren't you Miss Hu?"

"...what?" she blinked, momentarily confused. "What are you talking about?"

"I've read your piece. You're trying to dig out something on Galatea, to get back for what they did to your friend," he declared, a hint of self-satisfaction at figuring it out bleeding through the apologetic facade. "Revenge."

"Do you really read Gorgon's Laugh?" she blinked again.

"I googled your name. It was in the first five results," he replied. "It really isn't hard to figure you out. But, alas," he shook his head in an exaggerated gesture, "I can't help you. There really is no dirt. I don't have anything on Mircea. He really did the sale legitimately, God knows why."

Mircea, Helen thought. A name—he hadn't remembered it last time.

"You're talking about that Pygmalion guy, yes?" she asked, just to make sure.

"Mircea Leon, yeah," he said. "I actually met him, you know? Briefly. He was a weirdo."

"Can you please tell me more about him?"

"I guess? I mean," he added, looking a bit surprised, "just let me get a coffee."

He rushed to the counter, then spent a few minutes trying to figure out what exactly to order, looking nervously through his wallet. Helen wondered if it would be ethical to include this scene in the project. An old capitalist star, counting every penny at a cafe.

"Sorry," he mouthed, returning to the table with a single espresso. "Anyway, Mircea? I met him once, we exchanged a few words, but he skipped the dinner so we didn't get to network. I can't say I really knew him. Besides, there wasn't really that much interesting about him, I suppose, unless you count the gossip. Is that something you want to hear about? It's pretty out of date, I suppose."

She nodded.

"Well… He didn't exactly have the best of reputations, and... I'm not sure if I should share this," he said in the tone that meant he was going to share it all and then some, "but he kept getting talked about behind his back, in private conversations and like. He was a bit of a running joke in our circles because, well…" he smiled to the memory. Helen didn't like the expression at all. "He was a total nerd, and I don't mean it in the 'liked computers' way. A basement dweller, literally. His first office was actually in his dad's dank cellar, I'm told."

He paused, expecting laughter. When none came, he frowned and continued.

"I guess he was talented, or something. Certainly worked on some stuff that was good enough to attract a bunch of people who wanted to be his 'partners'. Lucked out, dodged the most predatory sort. Some of them actually helped him, if I recall right."

Helen thought back to the unsigned photograph. There was a man there, pudgy and awkward, wearing an ill-fitting flannel shirt, glaring at the camera as if it was threatening him. Was that Mircea?

"Anyway, most of that gossip was because, funnily enough, Mircea was a complete pervert," Hernaszewski chuckled. "You know, serious S and M, rubber, leather, the works. It really exploded after someone posted the photos of him in latex, almost killed half of us..."

She looked up at him; he was grinning ear to ear.

"Kill?" she asked.

"I mean, it was seriously gross stuff," he shrugged. "Just imagine a fat neckbeard trying to squeeze himself into a catsuit. Just, those bales plopping about, stretching it… he ended up looking like a tightly packed sausage. One that was about to pop."

There was something in the way he spoke that Helen found nauseating. It had to be this callous amusement he broadcast, as if it was the most obvious, universal thing to laugh at something like this. She had to glance away, hide her expression.

"And that was it?" she asked. "You didn't like his kinks, so… He didn't quit," she realized coldly, "he got bullied out."

"Please, the tech world is no high school," he waved her away. Any vestige of shame had long drained away from him. "Just a few laughs. I don't even think he ever found out. Not before he packed his bags and left for parts unknown. No one has heard from him since."

Helen took a moment to process that, eyes set on her empty coffee cup. She wasn't sure what she was expecting. Some kind of a breakthrough, some secret from the heart of Galatea. Not the history of an unfortunate, overweight man who had the misfortune of making it in a completely odious environment.

"The funny thing is," Hernaszewski took her silence for encouragement to keep talking, "is that he wasn't a moron. There was constant talk about how there was something he was developing that was going to just, you know, change the rules of the game. People kept circling him like sharks, waiting for him to give them an opportunity to get their hands on it. Everyone kind of assumed that he was going to get screwed over but," he said with a kind of grudging respect, "but that never happened. Like, as if he had some sixth business sense. It's why when he vanished, it spooked everyone the fuck out."

She thought about that; it was hard not to feel a degree of sympathy for a man who, apparently, had managed to disappoint every single asshole like Hernaszewski looking to con him out of his accomplishments.

"No one knows what happened to him?" she asked.

"Yeah," he shrugged again. "Well, there was quite a bit of investigating, because when he sold his entire thing to some nobody biotech out of Bratislava, people smelled foul play. But it was really air-tight, no irregularities at all. And he—well, he disappeared from view somewhere in the chaos. Obviously, it was suspicious, but what were we supposed to do? Hire a PI to track him down? You know how it is."

She wasn't sure what he meant by that, and she wasn't sure if she wanted to know.

"What people actually cared about was biotech," Hernaszewski kept on talking. "And for a good reason. It's Galatea now, the hottest brand in our part of the world. I don't know if it was because of their acquisition, but I can tell you for certain that there was plenty of soreness among folks who failed to grift Mircea first. But at that point, I was starting to have my issues with Herman, and, well, you know the rest. So I stopped paying attention. And that's that."

"Is it all?" she murmured.

"About him? Yeah. Was there something else you wanted to hear?" he asked, leaning in. "As I've said, not much there to hit back at Galatea, unless you find out that they, I don't know, assassinated Mircea to get his tech. But that's thriller stuff. He probably lives on a farm in New Zealand or something stupid like that. Not like he ended up short on money after the sale," a familiar note of resentment cut into Hernaszewski's amused voice. "The bastard," he finished.

"No," she looked at him, feeling the frustration return. She wasn't sure what was prompting it, this dull, futile tension in the pit of her stomach, but lately it was never far from her company. The entire thing felt like a tremendous waste of time. She'd come here hoping for answers and had received none. "Look," she tapped her phone, "I have work in a moment, I have to go. Again, I'm really thankful that you've decided to share all of this, but I have work, so…"

"Sure," he interrupted her one last time. "Sure, sure. Go, do your things. It was a great diversion, and really, if you are ever bored, I'm always game for a conversation with a cute woman like you."

She muttered something in response, trying not to be pointlessly rude, gathered her things, paid the bill (for both of them) and rushed into the cold outside.

***

The story of the man they were interviewing—some clerk peripherally involved in the DigitEX scandal—was mostly uninteresting. All he had to contribute were some irrelevant details about the network of court proceedings surrounding the story. As such, Helen was more than happy to let Hank lead the conversation and just stay at the edge of it, nodding strategically, and thinking of something else.

The frustrated feeling of having wasted her time still lingered, as did the slight sense of nausea left by Hernaszewski's palpable disgust of Mircea. It was typical, really; could Rowan hear about it, she would easily spin it into a story about the pathologization of imperfect bodies, all adorned with fancy words like "abjectual" or "libidinal". She missed that; she liked to listen to her go, even if sometimes it felt like Rowan was more interested in sounding smart than actually making a point.

She missed Rowan. The thought, more than anything else she had experienced today—maybe aside from what she had seen on the Galatea feed in the morning—hurt. And like so many other things that pained, it refused to go away even as she tried to focus on something else, like the clerk's boring story of capitalist court battles.

After the interview finished, she made up some excuse to Hank and left. It wasn't that she didn't want to spend time with him—he was a good friend after all—but there was just too much on her mind to enjoy a beer and an argument, and she knew there would be an argument, because there was nothing in the world that he liked better. She really needed to rest and relax.

She tried watching something on her phone on the bus home—it was a long route, and the alternative was staring dumbly out of the window, or trying to read yet another piece about the world going to shit, and she really didn't need that. But no matter what she put on, she just couldn't focus. Mutely annoyed, she turned the video off, then, moments later, opened the internet browser and typed in "Mircea Leon".

It was the sixth result from the top, right below Romanian Facebooks, Instagrams and LinkedIns of several other Mircea Leons. An interview, from almost a decade ago. "Up and Coming Startup Star Mircea Leon on Technology, Economy and His Favourite World of Warcraft Memories."

There was no face attached to it, just a photograph of the same office space that Helen remembered from the WaybackMachine search. She skimmed through the interview; most of it was boilerplate tech reporting, templated questions and answers, probably edited to hell and back for reader's comfort. As usual, the interviewer didn't bother to ask any important questions, and the good half of the conversation was just some idle banter about Leon's preferred video games. It was only towards the end that something stood out and caught her attention.

JACK: So what do you think about the future of technology?

MIRCEA: Well, mostly I am interested in how we will use it on ourselves. The stuff being developed today is incredible, and I think that in a decade, it will be just mind-blowing. Already there are some things that I think hold amazing promise in so many different fields. But, ultimately, I think we are approaching the point when we will be finally able to do something we've long since struggled with. We'll solve it for good.

JACK: What problem is that?

MIRCEA: Being unlovable.

She spent the rest of the ride, and then two hours more after coming back home, scouring the internet in search of any trace of Leon. But Hernaszewski was right. There was almost nothing on him even before his disappearance. A few tweets mentioned him, she even found an article by some Communist whom she vaguely recognized reminding his readers that even though he stepped out of the business, he was still The Enemy, but it seemed like the Internet—at least the Internet that she could access—had nothing on him. At some point, Hernaszewski's joke about Galatea abducting him stopped seeming so far-fetched. How does one disappear a person so completely? He was on no social media, traditional media did not care about him, Hell, he didn't even pop in conspiracy nuts' fevered dreams, and she'd once found one of her close friends there, decried to be a succubus for participating in a TV debate on income inequality.

A suspicion, unpleasantly outlandish, began to hatch in her brain. In fact, it felt like one of those conspiracies she had laughed at mere moments ago. But the lack of information about Leon and the spottiness of Galatea's early history just kept on bugging her. She wondered if that was how it felt before one took a headlong dive into crazy-town and joined one of those groups accusing Galatea of trying to usher forth the Kingdom of the Whore in preparation for the coming of the Antichrist.

Or maybe it was just due diligence. But being on the 20th page of a Google search for "what happened to Mircea Leon" and staring at an article exposing Mircea Eliade as a fascist as the top result didn't really strike her as anything diligent.

"You're driving yourself crazy," she mumbled, and then, as if to provide herself evidence of her own deteriorating mental state, she brought up the email client.

It was a spur of the moment thing, and had she been any less tired and frustrated, she would have never done it. But, in the moment, bringing out the conversation with Aphrodite and quickly typing in "do you know what happened to Mircae Leon after he sold his life's work to you?" before tapping send, seemed like the only real move left to her. She regretted it almost instantly.

The response arrived precisely five minutes later.

He found a place for himself, and is happy now.

She stared at it for a long, long while.

 

[Khona Moshr]

He found a place for himself, and is happy now.

She stared at it for a long, long while.

Click to shrink...

Both ominous but also potentially nice.

So I'm makjng a guess based off the interview and how he had that major deal with Galatea that part of the deal was Mircea being desperate for affection and no longer be laughed at by those around him wanted to be one of the first people that Galatea worked on.

And this also increases my opinion that Aphrodite is an AI.

 

[Strypgia]

"Please get more sleep next time we have a meeting in the morning. Moving on..."

Click to shrink...

How about you go outside and play hide-and-go-fuck-yourself, ma'am? You set the temperature like this, it's visibly making many people uncomfortable and you know that, and you are blaming other people for suffering from it. Petty office tyranny just makes your workers hate you for it.

The response arrived precisely five minutes later.

Click to shrink...

And this also increases my opinion that Aphrodite is an AI.

Click to shrink...

Things like the precise response in 5 minutes (consistently) makes me think much the same. Also 'Aphrodite, the Goddess of love, seems quite on the nose for a name for this AI.

 

[Gargulec]

xii. helen. pharmacopornography

"Couldn't we have handled this over the phone?" Helen grumbled as Hank packed their field notes into a lime-colored folder. "Did you really have to drag me here?"

She didn't mean to sound like she didn't like it here. On the contrary. She had been to his apartment a few times before; a small pad in a reasonably decent, if remote, part of the city, far more spacious and comfortable than its bare size would suggest. It wasn't by chance, either. He'd sunk considerable effort into making it feel open and airy. Everything around her, from the shelves lining the walls, through slender furniture, all the way to the abstract album covert art framed above the desk they sat at had been selected for this purpose.

The fact that he pulled it off was a testament to his completely uncultivated and deeply enviable knack for interior design. Helen had maybe a third of his books and none of his prodigious collection of vinyl, and yet she always found them spilling out of the shelves, littering the desk and the floor. Then again, she also didn't have Hank's inherited money. She glanced at the vintage, vertical turntable at heart of the hi-fi system unostentatiously concealed in the nooks and the crannies of the room. He'd spent a year looking for it and then refurbishing it so that it would end up looking brand new. He'd put enough money into it to buy three new ones, and then some. The fact that he wasted his life in the non-profit sector, working alongside the likes of Helen when he had resources like that, never ceased to baffle her..

"I mean," she added, waiting for him to stash the file somewhere where it wouldn't stand out, "you've made it sound like we've had more to talk about than just a few preliminary observations. I really didn't have to come over here just to look over those."

"Yeah," he looked back at her and smiled prettily.

He looked five years younger than his age, boyishly slender and golden-haired. There was a time, she recalled, when he'd grown out a pretty impressive, flaxen beard just to not get carded over and over again. But he'd left it behind to embrace what he had called his "andro" phase, and she had to give it to him: the look suited him. She remembered Rowan complaining about how easy he made it look. She winced, the brief illusion of a good mood gone in a flash.

"So, why?" she asked.

"Helen," he replied, sitting back down. "I've wanted to talk."

Oh for fuck's sake, she thought, rolling her eyes in annoyance.

"Seriously," she snapped. "Couldn't you have just told me, this is some…"

"No," he raised his hands in an apologetic gesture. "Look. Just—I'll get us something to drink and we'll talk, okay? Coffee? Tea? Wine? Let's make it tea."

"That's it?" she said as he disappeared into the kitchen, raising her voice to get it over the whistling of the kettle. "You just wanted a heart to heart so you made it sound like a big work thing?"

"Yeah," he shouted back. "I'm sorry for that!"

"Jesus Christ, Hank!"

She considered just getting up and leaving. What the hell was all that about? She really didn't need her friends playing childish tricks on her like that, not with all the shit on her head. She felt her face flush, mute anger crackling in her gut. The feeling registered so uncomfortably familiar as to make her double-check. What was going on? This was annoying, sure, but why was she getting that worked up? She exhaled, trying to blunt the edge of frustration cutting through her thoughts.

"Seriously," she said when he returned, dumping a pair of colourful mugs in front of them. "Couldn't you have just asked me to talk?"

He looked at her with a mixture of amusement and concern.

"Helen," he said softly, "the last three times I asked you to come meet, you said you didn't want to."

"We're both overworked," she replied, pushing a mug closer, hand half-wrapped around it, feeling at the heat. "You know that."

"There's overworked," he continued, "and there's falling asleep at the meetings and spending half of our interviews looking like you're in bloody Narnia!"

She frowned and looked away. Guilt mixed into frustration. He shot her the sort of a smile that was supposed to say look, I'm just saying. Something nasty bubbled up inside of her.

"Hank," she grunted. It surprised her how harsh her voice came out of her throat. "Come the fuck on, this is childish. You don't need to play parent for me."

"No," he said calmly, or at least trying to play at being calm. "I've just never seen you act like that, okay? It's so unlike you. Everyone sees that there's something eating at you. Anna, fucking Professor Anna Rymińska, who is about as self-centered as a gyroscope, asked me and Barbs if you're okay."

"That's none of…" her business, she wanted to finish, but—God, Helen remembered complaining so many times that Anna never bothered about her colleagues' well-being and now she was angry that for once she had?

She sipped from the mug, the tea still scalding-hot. Then she closed her eyes for a second and exhaled heavily.

"Fine," she murmured. "There's some stuff on my head. I guess it's wearing me thin."

"No shit."

They sat in silence for a while, Hank eying her expectantly.

"It's about Rowan," she sighed finally, feeling yet another pang of irritation flash through. She didn't really want to have this conversation. Not with Hank, not with anyone.

"Figured as much," he said, a faint hint of self-satisfaction in his voice. "You're still grieving her stupidity?"

"No, it's…" she started to speak, but realized that if it wasn't grief, then she didn't really know what it was. Why couldn't she stop thinking about her? Why had she agreed to surveil her, why did she make watching the life-stream of the violation of her friend into a part of her daily routine? Why was she unable to tear her mind away from it, even as she wanted to?

Hank—and others—were right. It ate at her. She spent hours upon hours digging through the internet just to find some more obscure information about Galatea, about Pygmalion, about Mircea Leon; it was what her thoughts drifted to any time there was an opportunity to and, sometimes, even when there really wasn't. If there was a way to get rid of them, she couldn't figure it out, not for the life of her. And somewhere, deep inside, it made her just plain angry. But why?

"I don't know," she said, feeling defeated. "I just don't know, Hank, okay? It's… nothing about it makes sense. Galatea doesn't make sense."

"What do you mean," he said, urging her to go on. "What do you mean by that?"

"They are top of the world in novel surgical protocols, but also… did you realize just how much of the pharma industry is theirs, at this point? Just how much groundbreaking tech they've introduced? Whole new categories of psychoactive substances, actual suspended animation technologies… Hell they've solved bedsores—and it's barely even advertised! You don't hear about it. What do they put front and center: their fuck farms. But those don't even make profit!" she spat out, voice raising to borderline shout.

"Okay," Hank raised his hands in a defensive gesture. "Like?"

She breathed out heavily. There was a kind of a dam inside of her, behind which she kept it at all—all the frustration with Galatea and Rowan that she couldn't share with anyone. And right now, the dam was crackling and leaking. When she opened her mouth again, she spoke quickly, furiously.

"Like," she said, "I've seen some people try to calculate the operations costs and profit margins. It's all approximations, but it's clear that Galatea is dumping money equal to the budget of several small countries just into maintaining holiday resorts for deviant old men. No one has any idea why."

"Porn industry is big," Hank offered without conviction.

"Yeah, but even then—that's just the operating costs, and to get it all off the ground, they had to do so much more. Even getting the legislation passed that allowed for their contracts. How many billions went into lobbying for that? And that's all on a biotech firm that sprang out of Bratislava less than a decade ago, bought up a small start-up in Bucharest and within three years were the hottest property on the planet, actually influencing labour policy like some souped up Amazon."

She swallowed a mouthful of tea. She was shivering just from saying it all out loud.

"I've seen some of their technology," she continued. "It's out of this world. And they are using it—you can't even imagine the shit they are pulling out behind closed doors. It's a pornographic fever dream. And… and it doesn't make any sense."

"So…" he said after a moment, voice soft. "You're depressed at that? It sounds like you've been researching it a lot, it had to be rough."

"No," she said again. "Look… I have to show you something."

Again, it was one of those snap decisions she knew she would end up regretting later. But right now, she needed to share this, throw the burden on the backs of her friends too, so maybe it would be easier on her. She reached for her bag, took out the laptop and opened it, bringing up the Galatea application window.

"What is that?" Hank asked, seeing the logo and the loading screen.

She didn't reply, just turned on the live feed.

There was no telling where the body ended, and the machine began. It hung suspended in a metal spider-web, hundred of little wires snaking around it. They wrapped and coiled around the thicker cables running from the bulky mask around its head, all the little pinpricks of electronics stuck over its skin, and from the strange devices affixed to its genitals. An occasional column of bubbles and the slight ripple indicated that it was submerged, drowned. The massive rebreather bolted over its face allowed it to live, but also made it look alien and inhuman. It couldn't move; only sometimes its fingers would twitch in response to an unseen stimulus. But it was not enough to make the image look like anything but a still tableau. It made Helen think of those half-formed bodies suspended in glass vials in sci-fi movies she used to watch with her brother—not dead, but not alive either.

"What the fuck," Hank whispered.

"She's been like that for at least two days now," Helen announced, staring at her friend. There was another camera, she knew, she could swap to. One that would allow her the view from inside the helmet, a look straight into Rowan's vacant eyes.

"But that's not a… That's a she?" he asked. "Oh…" the revelation hit him quick and hard. "That's Rowan. Holy shit, that's Rowan."

"Yes."

"How the fuck did you get access to that, Jesus Christ Helen, what in world..." he stared at her, wide-eyed. "What are they doing to her?"

She opened her inbox on her phone and found the email.

"The object was successfully installed in the programming tank," she read, keeping her voice level. "No hostile reaction to tank conditions detected. Initial response to the susceptibility protocol positive. Overall stress level low. Overall mental state suitable for commencing principal programming."

She put the phone away, the click of plastic on wood loud like a gunshot.

"It's Rowan," she said, feeling empty and sick. "Drugged up her nose and literally wired to some brainwashing machinery. And…" the words barely made it out of her mouth, "she wanted that, Hank. She actually wanted all of that."

"Bullshit," Hank growled. "No way. We both know that there's no way she could have wanted that," he pointed at the screen. "They deceived her. This is fucking criminal! You need to publish it, you need to…"

"I receive daily reports," there was nothing more than she wanted but to agree with him right there. But she couldn't. "She is happy. Do you understand? She is happy with what they are doing to her."

"Do you seriously believe them?" Hank almost laughed. "They can write whatever, they are doing it so that you don't, I don't know, send the footage to the media. They are lying to you. Shit, I wonder if they outsource this tech to the CIA, some fucking MKULTRA shit…"

What was she to say to him? That she saw how hard it made her before? That she watched her friend cry out in numb pleasure as bored lab-technicians ran her through with electricity through a metal dildo screwed into her ass? That she watched her sleep well and deep in a little glass cage meant only for her? She knew what he would say to that—the same things she had. The same things she still did.

"Why would they lie?" she asked instead, drinking the last of her tea. The dam had broken and whatever nauseating feeling it had been holding back flowed freely, leaving behind a damp, empty sensation. She felt more sad than angry, and very sick. "I have this footage on my own, Hank. They gave it to me, unprompted. If you want, I can pass it all, and more, to you. Just download the files. They already handed me the smoking gun. So… what if they are telling the truth? What if she is really…"

"You've said they're drugging her," he murmured, still staring at the video, as if unable to look away. "It's not hard to, you know, break someone's mind. You know full well what the US got up to, back in Iraq and then… they lured her in, they stuffed her full of chemicals, and boom. Happy little death of the mind."

"Yes, but…" she hated what she was about to say, she hated the fact that she felt like she needed to say it. "She knew. I've looked through the same catalogues she did, I've dug through the stuff she read through, I've talked with her just before. She wasn't stupid. She knew what she was getting into. She wanted that," she pointed at the screen accusingly, then allowed herself to slump. "She wanted that. And," she added after a moment, "I just don't get it. How could a woman want it? I'm trying to understand, and… I just can't. I. Just. Can't."

That was it. The simple, bitter admission of defeat. Days of watching, of thinking, of chasing after Galatea's shadow had brought her no closer to finding a reason why. She fell further in her chair, feeling very tired.

Hank noticed. She saw him tear his eyes away from the screen and look at her, as if about to say something. But he didn't. Instead, he shook his head sadly and reached into one of the desk's drawers, taking out a box emblazoned with the logo of Emerald Dreams. Despite herself, she smiled.

"Maybe that'll help?" he suggested.

"Yeah," she nodded. "Thanks, Hank."

***

They sat on the narrow balcony, tightly wrapped in their jackets. The vast spread of high-rises ahead warded off the worst of windchill. Perhaps the view they had wasn't the best—from his apartment, Hank had the great pleasure of watching rows of dour, concrete towers roll out towards the horizon, and little more—but at least the air here was surprisingly fresh. The sounds of the city came in distant and muted into an almost reassuring soft rumble.

They smoked in silence, reclined in plastic chairs. Helen shook off the ash into a jar half-filled with cigarette butts and watched the smoke haze about, quickly dispersing in the cool air. It wasn't calm that she was feeling, not precisely, but the parts of her that were all worn down and raw were, at least momentarily, numb. It wouldn't last, of course, but right now it was everything she could have asked for. She took another drag.

"It's fucked up," she observed, without heat.

"Yeah," Hank agreed, without asking for details. "But I guess it makes some amount of sense."

She doubted it, but said nothing. He smothered his smoke and spoke again.

"I knew her, you know."

"Yeah."

She remembered introducing him to her, during some event. A movie night, if she remembered correctly, something that the feminist film club on the campus organized. They were watching Bloodsisters, and there was a discussion afterwards. Hank was one of the few guys attending; everyone, including Rowan, had thought that Rowan was another. He'd ended up hitting on her a few weeks later, complaining afterward to Helen that "he" hadn't even realized that "he" was getting flirted with.

"Has she ever weirded you out?" he asked.

"Plenty times," Helen shrugged. "Mostly all of this nerd stuff."

"Heh, yeah," he chuckled. "But that's not what I'm talking about here. I have a few other trans women friends, and… none of them are like she was. If you know what I mean."

He spoke in a way she recognized quite well. She sighed.

"Just be blunt, okay?"

"Okay."

He said nothing; he looked out at the building ahead, frowning.

"Okay," he repeated. "It's—I have those friends. They are transitioning, they transitioned, they did the entire thing. And they are happy for it. I've watched them change, and work for that change. But Rowan? What has she done with herself, after coming out?"

"Not much," Helen agreed quietly. It wasn't a big secret. It was one of those things that Rowan would cry out about when they talked, about how she was fake and phony for how she handled her transition. Helen fed her the lines about how it was okay to take your time, but even that had started to feel hollow after the fourth or fifth time.

"She bought herself a dress. Wore it twice, I think? Finally settled on a name, after you refused to call her Robert anymore," Helen winced; she'd suggested Rowan after the woman herself spent two weeks agonizing over a name. "Wrote and published a paper about trans femininity. Had a fight with her family. That's not much for a year and a half."

"So?"

"So it's weird. She didn't even try to go on HRT, or get anything done formally."

"Maybe she didn't want to," Helen murmured, without much conviction. "You know it's just as valid to be trans without any of that."

"Yeah," Hank grunted. "You can. And if you are happy with it, power to you. But you know she wasn't. What she was was stuck and miserable. If…" he cut off abruptly.

Helen waited for him to continue, even as she knew what he was about to say. She hated it, almost as much as she hated the fact that it wasn't just him who was reaching this conclusion.

"I don't want to question her gender, but," he started, only confirming suspicions. She tensed. "But look—if you are right, if she really wanted all of this… stuff to be done to her… it's pure porn. It's the kind of things you find on really creepy websites for guys with really creepy fetishes. And…," he hesitated, glanced at her looking for signs of encouragement or reproach. She gave him neither. He sighed, then continued. "And maybe you're right, maybe no woman could want to end up like she did, but maybe she just had this fantasy of this being done to her as a woman, this very masculinist…"

"It's autogynephilia," she interrupted coldly. The sickening feeling was returning. "You're suggesting that Rowan's autogynephilic."

"I mean…"

"You know it's offensive," she threw the words out, bitter and angry. "You know no one is taking this theory seriously outside of the gender critical psychos, you know that…"

"But it does explain it, doesn't it?" he asked, and she shut up.

It did, she thought to herself, didn't it?

***

She decided to take a walk back home. It was a long way, and the wind was only getting worse, but even if it took hours she needed it. She would fall behind with her work, but for once, it could wait. She zipped up the jacket high, stuffed earphones in and put on a loud and fast playlist from her phone. An interchangeable midwestern punk band blasted a deafening wail into her ears, the white dude at the mike wailing about solitude and depression. It was just about perfect to set the pace.

The city spread around her, vast, grey and lifeless. Concrete towers raked the leaden sky; an endless trail of cars zoomed past her empty sidewalk, clouding her in the faint smell of catalyzed emissions, dirt and road salt. She was the only pedestrian she could see; no one in their right mind wanted to walk by roads like that. She cranked up the volume, allowing a song to roar into her head. It was loud enough to spur her into a half-jog, but not to drown out her thoughts.

She hated the idea of Hank being right. No, she knew he wasn't. It was some old, dumb bit of transphobic pop psychology, and she was genuinely ashamed to even try to apply it to Rowan. But it did check out—it really did. Hell, Rowan wasn't even into men, so… maybe there was merit to it, maybe she…

"Some friend I am," she mouthed to herself. Not only had she spent the last week just glued to the screen, watching Rowan's intimate violation like the feed was some kind of porn site, but now she was doing the one thing she knew she was not supposed to, especially not towards someone as close to her as Rowan was. But if it wasn't that, then what?

In a few weeks, maybe a month, the spring would come over the city, with warmth and rain, and put it to bloom. Bare sidewalks would blossom; the greenery would scurry over all the hideousness of old metal and concrete. But right now it was the dead season between, and the city appeared to her as some inhospitable, barren planet, its life trapped in vast habitats maintained by ever-hungry infrastructure. Without the cars, the grid, without the heating, this place would be a wasteland.

It made her think of the guts of the Galatea complex, of the windowless corridors and laboratories filled with arcane machinery—and of the bodies fed into them. Maybe that was the appeal of it, maybe it was just some statement on the human condition in the post-industrial hellscape of the modern world. Maybe Galatea was just a symbol.

No, she realized. Galatea was a symptom, not a symbol. And so was the fact that people—people like Rowan—could be lured into its hands and then exploited, human fuel for the furnace of capitalism. That made sense; if Galatea's actions seemed pointless and excessive, it was just an appearance. There had to be a logic to them, some greater design. A piece of infrastructure, taken in the absence of everything else, had to appear absurd. But it was just a matter of shifting perspective, surveying the greater picture.

There had to be a reason why Mircea Leon sold his life's work to an unknown firm, there had to be a reason why this firm had exploded into Galatea, there had to be a reason why it chose to build fuck-farms and populated them with mind-broken drones. There had to be a reason why it was so assured of itself as to allow her to see it all.

There had to be a reason why her best friend, who should have seen through it all, had instead given herself in. There had to be a good reason why she lost Rowan.

There had to be one, because the alternative was to admit that Hank had a point.

 

[Strypgia]

There had to be one, because the alternative was to admit that Hank had a point.

Click to shrink...

Rowan's departure is affecting her emotionally more than she can admit or articulate, hmm...

Still somewhat amazing that they'd sooner hit autogynephilia than 'maybe that's what she just wants?' Some people really are just happier being disassociated from the 'guilt' of enjoying their own sexual impulses.

I have some speculation that our mysterious founder of Galatea may have had some similarities to Rowan and made some breakthrough on AI leading to things like the eidolon, but mostly a guess for now.

 

[Gargulec]

xiii. rowan. my innermost apocalypse

Suspended in warmth and darkness, Rowan gradually lost track of her body. She knew it was still there—when she focused, she could feel where its orifices were spread open and intubated, or where soft bindings secured and immobilized it. But such focus came reluctantly; for a time now her thoughts had been moving slowly and sluggishly, and even as she tried to hold onto them, they kept dissolving into a trance-like bliss. To concentrate on where the belt pressed into the skin of her left thigh was to lose track of the one on the right and of all the others too; to try to feel the shape of the tube in her mouth and throat was to forget the ones in her nose, or in her back.

There was a point when she could find some certainty in movement. She would strain her muscles, trying to wriggle free of the bindings, trying to pull herself away from the gibbet encasing her. That there was no point to it, she knew perfectly well. Yet, the sensation of restraint, of having her movement denied, anchored her to the flesh that was her. When that tired her, she would instead try to move her fingers and toes, feeling them sift through the thick water she was submerged in. But in time even those bursts of motion ceased being securely hers. The machine would run gentle shocks of electricity through her muscles, making them twitch and contract and strain against their bonds. The less secure her grip on the body was, the less she could tell if it was her will that moved her to struggle, or the machine's. Could she even move on her own anymore? There were moments where it felt to her like she did not exist at all, and the sound in her ears was not her heartbeat and not the rush of her blood, but the mechanical music of some great mechanism she was only ever a part of. It became difficult to tell where she ended, and it began.

It grew hard to determine which side of the boundary between sleeping and wakefulness she was on any given moment. She had dreams, or maybe she was dreaming right now. Sometimes, the pitch-black of her tank would be interrupted, and she would see—before her own eyes—images unfolding. Wonderful scenes of subjugation, visions of a body she could have never had, brief bursts of pleasure and joy. Maybe they induced it in her, or maybe they were just the sort of dreams she always used to have. She was unsure if there even was a difference.

Time lost any meaning. It felt like she could stay in the tank forever, and wouldn't even notice the passage of the time of her life. She was neither hungry nor sated, neither cold nor warm, neither tired nor energetic, neither bored nor excited. Neither happy nor sad. Sometimes, quickly unraveling thoughts would flash through her mind, but they were gone all too soon. She drifted, deeply lost in the kind of calm that came only with cessation of everything else.

It wasn't exactly bliss, but it was, at last, peace.

***

The voice, at first, was a sound too fine and delicate to separate itself from the idle hiss of her body, or of the machine, that rustled in her ears. It was just another layer in it, another sussurating note weaving in and out of her faded consciousness. By the time she recognized it as speech, it could have been there, calling out to her for hours, or days, or maybe years. At first, she ignored it. Not willfully—it just seemed so tiny and distant and insignificant that to even acknowledge it was too much of an effort. But it didn't vanish into silence. It haunted her, worming its way into the sphere of her awareness over and over again until she finally recognized it as a voice, and a word.

"Focus," it asked. "Focus."

It was a challenging task, and a struggle. She half-forgot how to grab hold of her own thoughts—if, in fact, they existed at all anymore—and had to strain through a quicksand of calm to get them together into a state recalling concentration. But however challenging it was, the reward was easily worth it. As soon she managed to put her attention to those words, to center them before her mind, she felt a dart of pleasure. It flowed into her as the sweetest scent, and when it rested in her lungs, it spread through her entire, like ink staining water until it was all gold, until she too was sweet and content.

"Good," she heard a whisper in her ear. For a moment, only a crackle lingered, and then it receded, leaving behind a sated kind of silence.

The pleasure filled her for a time, slowly fading until she was left again calm and at peace, but wanting more.

***

"Focus."

She searched for the world in the bands of hiss and rustle, in the subtle grinding and clicking of her machine womb. She had been waiting for it to come again, and when it did, she sprang to focus, and again, was awarded pleasure. Sweetness swelled within her.

"Good," the voice praised her, before retreating once again.

She held onto the honey-like bliss, until it too went away.

***

"Focus."

Attention.

Pleasure.

"Good."

Longing.

***

It would come, and then go, each time the same little thing, until her attention was trained to pick the tell-tale crackle of it emerging from the noise, until her thoughts rushed to its attention the moment it asked her to. She waited for it expectantly—and sometimes it surprised her that she did not look forward to even more. But the moments when she heard were the only solid points in her drifting, the only milestones in the great, blank expanse of blank, meaningless time. Whether it was seconds between each calling, or hours, she did not know, and did not care.

"Focus."

Her thoughts stood at attention, and were rewarded. But this time, something was different. The sweetness—no, the sweetness was still there. Was it muted? No. It felt the same. But the other word—where was the other word. Did she do something wrong? Why did the other word not come?

Confusion bloomed in pleasure, and, as if through a thick fog, she felt herself become more lucid, struggling to find the cause for this breach, for this disorder. Her head tried to move; it couldn't. Her eyes twisted about, but all was plain black, pure dark. Or so she thought, until she saw it.

It came into view subtly, like a ripple slowly going through a still pool. She didn't notice it at first, mistaking it for some distortion of her eye, some figment of a suddenly hyper-active imagination. And maybe it was just that; after all, it was so little. Just an outline of a human shape, drawn as if with an unsteady hand, the fine white line silhouetting it ragged and shimmering. It had no solidity to it, no form, no feature and no gender. But it had a voice.

"See," it asked, and Rowan wanted to listen. Would there be a reward, too?

The shape stepped around her, and she found that she could follow it with her eyes even as it moved around her.

"You're ready," the voice whispered into her ear, and she felt excited, even if somewhere, deep inside, another voice, one that she hadn't heard in a while, screamed at her to stop. "Good."

It started to fade; the fine line diminishing until it was a shade of gray almost invisible against the black. And she understood she feared that word, she feared what it would mean, and that she wanted the sweetness to seize her again.

"I am sorry," it said, soft and delicate, "for what I will do to you next."

What the words meant, she did not know; her mind was too slow to process. And so, instead, she just thought don't go away and make me feel sweet and gold. She yearned.

She saw it shake its head, and—just before it disappeared—make a gesture as if lifting something from before her eyes.

A harsh, ammonia-like scent filled her nostrils.

***

She was suspended in a water-filled tank, strapped and wired into a machine. A plastic tube ran down her throat. She didn't gag on it, but she couldn't get it out of her mind, just the same as she couldn't stop thinking of the other tubing in her nose, in her ass, on her dick, or of the dozens of little electrodes attached all over her body. She couldn't quite keep track of them—the warmth of the water confused her senses and made it difficult to keep track of the surface of her skin—but they were there, and the occasional, electric shock made it impossible to forget them. The bindings pressed into her body—it was some wonderful technology that allowed them to be tight without making her limbs feel like they were about to wither. There was something in her eyes, and there was something in her ears.

The minutes and hours when lucidity returned to her were harrowing. It was like waking up from a deep sleep, only to learn that the paralysis wouldn't go away, and that she would remain bound to this bed for as long as her owners wanted her to. It was realizing that the machine would feed her and then drain the piss out of her when necessary, that the shocks would keep her muscles from atrophying, that she would be breathing through tubes. It was the soreness of her jaw clamping down on some bit of polymer preventing it from chewing on the tube. It was feeling her dick harden in the grip of the device affixed to it, and trying her best to thrust her hips forward just to get the edge off, but having them secured so tightly that they might as well have been bolted down. It was getting only more aroused off that thought and being ashamed of it.

It was, also, realizing that she had been drugged up her nose for God knows how long, and conditioned like a dog, trained to respond to stimuli and rewarded for it with—what, more drugs?

It was recalling her fantasies like that. It was thinking that it was the most awful, hottest thing that happened to her in her life. It was worrying that the numbing pleasure and dumb bliss would come back any moment now—or that they would never come back at all.

So this was it—the heart of Galatea's designs. Were those drones she admired born in tanks? Would she be, at the end, covered in molten latex and rendered, quite literally, into a biomechanical automaton? She laughed at that thought, or at least tried to: she could scarcely move her jaw. Even after all that that she had seen, it felt too outlandish. No, they would just soften her mind with chemicals and then mulch, and she was still so horny for it.

What would Helen say, if she saw you like that? a familiar part of her wondered, and she had to concur. Only that she wanted to see herself, too, see this pervert-machine interface she was a part of now. She would love how much into this you are.

Helen. She'd tried to talk her out of it, because she understood, probably better than Rowan ever did that no, you can't live through something like what Galatea offered and not have your mind go a little. If she could sag in her bindings, she would, but they left her no slack.

It surprised her how much clarity was there to her thoughts. Ever since she arrived in Galatea's hands, her mind was constantly busy, either with pleasure, or with self-denigration. But right now, she just felt… pensive? Was pensive the word? It was way past time for doubt. The great pharmacopornographic conglomerate by the name of Galatea had swallowed her, and she was being digested. There was no escaping, there was no safeword, and in a short time, she was reasonably sure, her mind would probably just get erased and there would be no more Rowan.

Maybe for the better, and she concurred with herself again.

A kind of weary sadness spread through her. She didn't really have to wonder much to know precisely how Helen would react to this sight. She'd seen it once before, and the memory had burned itself into her brain to be this sort of a shame that would come crawling back to her attention when she couldn't sleep and instead relived all of her greatest embarrassments one by one.

It had been when they watched Graphic Sexual Horror together. Rowan had suggested it because, back then, there was this stupid thought in the back of her head that maybe, maybe the snippets of hardcore InSex porn the docummentary contained would seem to Helen as hot as Rowan found them. But for Helen, to watch the women have their bodies shackled, abused and humiliated brought her to nothing short of disgust. And, well, the story of the person who'd created those images was just as sordid.

After the movie ended, they'd sat in Rowan's room and argued for hours. She'd cited papers about how it wasn't really that bad, how those images depicted something radical and new in sexuality, how the fact that not every performer got treated fairly did not negate that importance. That maybe there was something more to it than just patriarchal sadism.

In response, Helen had cited common sense, and that was that.

She had always known that Helen was right. Of course, back then she'd just gotten uppity, started lecturing her on how common sense was a tool of normativity, that to argue that women couldn't really live with such desires was an example of feminism's problem with sex—she argued all the things she'd read in books, and Helen had said a few things she'd known from her life. Rowan should have listened.

But if she had, would she have ever come to the conclusion that she was, in fact, trans? After all, was it not a sex thing for her, first and foremost? Was it not because at the end of the day, she just wanted to be that woman twisted into metal shackles and brought to a shouting orgasm with an overpowered vibrator? Wasn't that her primary point of reference for femininity? It really was. Had she listened to Helen, had she listened to her parents, had she listened to herself, she would have never called herself a she and would be happier for it.

You can't call yourself a woman because you think it's hot.

And so, suspended in a device meant to break minds, and about to part with herself, Rowan—Robert—finally admitted what he had been running away from for so very long. He was fake. And had he accepted that, he would have lived a happier life.

It was liberating, it had to be, to finally come to terms with himself. But, somehow, she only wanted to cry, and stop existing. Even if he knew that he would get over…

"Focus."

Her body reacted before her mind could intervene; her body tensed as her senses searched for the shape of the body, and the source of the voice. A memory of warmth spread over her body, a memory of sweetness.

And then, she saw the shape, filtering into view in front of her, seated, cross-legged, watching her with an eyeless face.

"Rowan," it said, "I'm here."

Confused, she tried to speak back, say something; her mouth moved over the plastic and made no sound.

"Just think," it said. "I will recognize your thoughts."

The darkness surrounding her vanished in a flash, replaced by a panoramic view of her own body, as it was in the tank. She saw it from the vantage-point of an unseen camera, dispassionately surveying a suspended, intubated flesh connected to vast, arcane machinery. And even though she knew he shouldn't be finding this hot, she still did.

The shape stood up, moved to the side; its feet barely touched the bottom of the tank; it turned away from Rowan, and looked at her body.

She just wanted to know what it was, what it was doing here, and why it felt the need to talk. Why interrupt her like that, instead of just dosing her up and finishing what it had started? It made no sense.

"I am an eidolon," the voice explained. A spectre, a shadow, a manifestation—Rowan remembered the word. "And I am here because you have to decide what happens next."

Even though her body yearned to pay attention to this "eidolon", Rowan once again found herself fighting for a laugh. Decide? Had she not signed away her soul already? Was this some joke, some petty sadism? Rubbing in her mistake? Can't it just go on and kill her already, kill her mind and self?

"I can."

Her heart stopped as she saw vicious, red liquid fill the tubes connecting her to the machine, pump into her body, as she saw blue electric arcs wreath her head, as she saw herself twist in the bonds trying to tear herself free and scream without words until even that was taken from her. She almost didn't realize it wasn't real. Just a projection. Just a vision. Nothing was happening to her body. Nothing like that.

Even then, the horror with which she watched her body cease to be hers, with which a sea of chemicals was injected into her, with which electric shocks wiped her mind clean like a useless hard drive, was visceral. But it wasn't just hers; the eidolon stood next to her, and watched the scene unfold. Briefly, it gained in shape, in form; there were features on its face, even if indistinct. They were painted with disgust.

"I don't want to."

What did it want, then? Was it a part of Galatea's game, so that he would open himself for a strike? But that made no sense. Rowan was already as powerless as it could get. She knew that if Galatea wanted it could melt her mind and condition her like one would a dog. So why bother with tricks and apparitions, why not just proceed with what they clearly wanted to do?

The view in front of her got distorted; it melted and shifted until it displayed a simple white locker room. Or a kind of it, at least; what peeked from one of the ajar locker doors belonged more in one of the laboratories Rowan was tested in. A naked, bald woman sat on a bench, hands on her knees, eyes half-closed, faint, damp sheen all over her exposed skin. Two drones in their trademark black shells shuffled behind her, digging for something in the storage.

Rowan's eyes focused on the woman. She was tall, boyishly built, broad-shouldered. Beautiful, in a way, even if it was a strange kind of attractiveness. And then, there was something more. She appeared familiar, like someone she knew. The proportions, the shape of the limbs, the waist, she had seen them all somewhere before. But where?

Fascinated, she watched the two drones come back carrying parts of a flexible white shell. The woman stood up, and they came close, to start to encase her in it, like they were medieval squires helping their knight with her armor. It was so wonderful to watch, so very intimate. The worries that plagued her retreated for a moment, replaced by yearning: how much she wanted to be that woman, only that he knew he never would.

One of the drones slid filament-thin pieces of electronics beneath the shell; the other clasped it around the woman, stretched and adjusted them. It was as she looked at the chest, compressed flat by the shell, that Rowan finally recognized its shape. It was hers. It was the body that she dreamed of having, though he knew was impossible to have. And she was seeing it, right there, before her. Her heart fluttered; even under all the machinery, she felt herself blush and tense.

"Is this what you want?"

What could she say? She drank the image of the drones finishing their work, of them sliding a gag down her mouth and encasing her head in a faceless mask. She thirsted for it, for how it would feel to be that person, for how it would feel to be that body. It was a dream, even though he should finally stop with his perverted yearning.

"Why did you come into my hands?" the eidolon asked. It moved through the frame like a ghost, a small distortion against the backdrop of a vision that Rowan desperately wanted to continue, even as he knew that to watch it was to keep with the pain of an unreal dream. "For this?"

Yes, she thought, but he knew it was wrong. He came here because he thought it would be hot to become a drone. It was, and it was also horrifying. There was nothing more to it. Nothing. Just stupidity and the horniness of a sad, lonely dude convinced that he could make himself something he never was.

"I can validate that."

The image shifted, and she saw herself—not the idealized, impossible, body, but the one he would have until his death—at the end of the contract. Tired, haunted, hurt. She recognized the look, she recognized the regret. It would be a lesson she could never forget. Yes. He would finally learn what's good for him.

"But I don't want to kill your soul."

The eidolon waved its hand, and the image disappeared, wiped clean. They were back in the tank, watching Rowan's body from the outside. The eidolon kept silent for a while, as Rowan readied herself for finally giving up. Then, it looked back at her.

"Was that the only reason?"

There was nothing else. He came here because of this mad hope that she could be like those drones. That she could sit and he should really stop thinking that, those thoughts had already harmed him enough, it would be good if he could just…

Rowan's lips moved, trying to form a simple "please". Not at the shape, but at herself. She could not hear her own thoughts over that voice. Over the part of her that she feared was right, but desperately didn't want to be. There had to be something else. It wasn't just a kink, it wasn't just a phase, it wasn't a stupid idea she had because she didn't know what else to do with herself. No, it couldn't be. That wasn't the reason she wanted all of it.

If there was ever a time to admit it to herself, it was now. She exhaled.

She was here because Robert really couldn't bring himself to believe that he could be a woman, and thinking himself as one hurt—but it was the hurt that felt good in the end. And that pain was the madcap hope that there really would be another life waiting, that one day he would no longer think himself that odious he and that there would be no more Robert, but rather someone else, who had once been him, but no longer. And he was so afraid that this hope would amount to nothing that he never pursued it. And it was the kind of hope he could never realize on his own, and could never admit it to anyone who could help him with it. So it ate at him, that vision of someone who would help him tear away all the chains that anchored him to himself, so that she could finally think herself a she with pride and conviction.

Thankfully he knew that it was not possible, that if he could not chase his hope alone, he should better abandon it. And…

"I can help you."

As it spoke, it reached out, towards the suspended body, its fingers brushing against Rowan's neck. She imagined feeling it; it was such a reassuring touch. Someone reached out. She never thought it could really happen.

"I can help you leave him," it promised. "It is what I was made for."

He knew he was being deceived, he knew it would only bring him pain, he knew that the part of him that had always been reasonable and right would convince him to retreat again and takes years of misery over trusting in…

No.

No, she thought with all the strength she could muster. Maybe she was right, maybe she should have never chosen that, but it would be better to trust the devil rather than live like she was. Maybe it was impossible, but he…

She.

She wanted to be herself.

"Then," the shape said, and it grew until it was all around her, a towering ripple against a disintegrating picture of the body that would be hers, and its voice rose as well, a shout, a cry, a clarion, "let me in."

And she did.

***

"Focus."

She stirred, her mind instantly at attention. She was no longer being rewarded just for that—well, most of the time. Sometimes, she would feel the familiar burst of sweetness in response, but only sometimes. Usually, she had to work harder for her pleasure.

Learning to associate the commands of the voice with joy was easy, once she had gotten past the initial hurdles. It required a degree of openness and excitement, but it was also wonderful and leisurable. She was being rewarded for her attention, for her focus, for thinking herself obedient. She knew that it was just the initial stage, that there would later be more programming, targeted specifically for her intended purpose, but before then, she was just growing to treat the voice as a part of her, one that would guide and command her, and one that she would obey with exuberance and excitement.

The rewards were easily worth it. Sometimes, it would be an orgasm of the sort that made her feel like her body would snap free of its bindings from the sheer force of it. Sometimes, it was a feeling of sweetness filling her until she felt like it was going to burst into a cloud of golden sparks. Sometimes, it was watching what she was going to become, and the body she was going to receive.

Leaving Robert was more difficult. He was a part of her, and she didn't want to kill him, and she didn't want to erase the memory of him. After all, had it not been for him, she would have never become herself. He still lurked in the back of her head, and sometimes struck with his hooks of doubt and fear. But slowly, she learned how to deal with those strikes, how to harden herself to them. She was rewarded when she did. Maybe, once, she would have been more disturbed at having the man deprogrammed from her mind, but why would she ever want to be him? His life was miserable, and she was glad he was finally going away.

"Good."

 

[Strypgia]

There's our eidolon. And very much feels like an AI custom made fir just this sort of personal transformation.

And ouch, does Rowan's pronoun confusion switching back and forth rapidly very much evoke how much misery she lives in.

 

[Gargulec]

This is, after all, quite literally Rowan in the belly of... well, something. Not sure if "best" is the right appellation here.

 

[Strypgia]

Not sure if "best" is the right appellation here.

Click to shrink...

Beast, you mean?

 

[Gargulec]

This is why people who help me edit are the best people on the planet.

 

[Elero]

So, after binge reading pretty much all of this at once, a few comments and thoughts that came up as I read. I was going to go back and quote relevant bits but I am lazy.

Man, poor Rowan. She's really struggling a lot with herself. Her internal doubts and misgendering, her self-hate... It really makes me want to see her become happy in the 'clutches' of the corporation.

Also wow asshole wardens, not helping the one-legged girl at all? What if her fellow prisoners didn't help her out? And relying on your future drones to show initiative and help her seems real weird.

The Helen bits provide an interesting insight into things from the outside, and I like the way she's investigating the origins of the corporation now. I admit I sometimes started skimming when she waxes about the finer points of feminism, though.

Speaking of Helen, she sure is trustworthy, running totally unknown software from a corporation she deeply mistrusts on her devices instead of using a burner phone or laptop for it. What if they really are the bastards she thinks they are and are reading all her emails and stuff, ready to delete all her data if she plans to negatively expose them? Of course, given how Galatea is probably the foremost expert on reading people and manipulating them, they could easily do things much more subtly. (Like putting a 24h time limit on the download, effectively ensuring she downloads and installs it. And once it's installed, the barrier to actually looking is much lower) Gauge her mental state based on typing speed, cursor movement, active vs. inactive screen time, picking up things via device microphone... And then they just have to reword things a bit in the daily report, swap a few things around in Rowan's training so that she goes through a reward circle just as Helen tunes in.

I can't help but feel that Catty will be a recurring character, interested to see more of her.

Sidenote, I know it's mostly a character study slash smut, but I'm actually really here for the (benevolent?) AI taking over society to make people happy angle. (and let's not pretend it's not an AI unless we've been thrown the biggest of red herrings.) Because that's what this has to be about, right? What they're doing isn't profitable, the whole super prostitutes for the ultra-rich thing is just a cover for the things they're really doing. It actually reminds me a bit of Manpower from the Honor Harrington series (partially because I've been reading a fan rewrite of one of the books on this site lately), in that Mesa uses genetic slavery and Manpower as a font for their conspiracy bullshit.

I am left to wonder why now, why Helen specifically was given all this information on this secretive corporation. Is Rowan going to serve as an example of the positive effect of the treatment, is the corporation planning to go 'public' with their goal? Taking someone extremely unhappy and troubled and giving her all the things she really wants, as documented by her extremely sceptical journalist friend? Or will Helen decide, in the end, to not expose Galatea, to not ruin the happiness of Rowan and people like her?

 

[Gargulec]

xiv. helen. the blowjob engine

Helen sat on the edge of her bed, phone pushed to her ear, her entire body tense with anticipation.

"Well…" the voice at the other end—one belonging to a woman who, she knew, five years ago, dyed her hair pitch-black and wore a Therion shirt to a group photo—hesitated. "No, I don't think I should do this."

Helen mulched a swear in her mouth and resisted the urge to toss the phone away.

"Miss Hryshko, I insist," she tried instead, but without much hope that it was going to accomplish anything. She could recognize a pattern. "This is very important, and could lead to…"

"I'm sorry, but I'm terribly overworked these days," the woman curtly replied. "Maybe we could arrange something in six months, but generally I don't think that talking to the press is something I'd like to be doing with my life. You're all liars, anyway."

Fuck you too was her first thought in response to that. I'm not press was the second.

"Can you at least recommend me someone else, then?" she asked instead, forcing herself to keep the brown-noser's attitude up.

"No. And please don't call again," she replied with the collected, calm rudeness of someone used to being in charge. She had to give it to Hryshko, her go fuck yourself voice was just about pitch-perfect. Before Helen could say anything back, the woman hung up.

Still suppressing the desire to just smash the phone against the floor, she dropped it onto her desk, then, reluctantly, reached for her notepad and scratched out another name from the list. Out of ten former Pygmalion employees that she had managed to identify, she'd found contact information for seven. Five of them had responded to her email or DMs, three expressing various degrees of disinterest in talking with her about their old work; one was polite enough to mention that they had no desire to talk with someone affiliated with a "communist" website. And then there was Marianna Hryshko, who'd asked Helen to call her only to blow her off as of about thirty seconds ago, and one Anatol Kownicki, who'd agreed to an interview. It'd made Helen extremely happy until she'd noticed that he was currently in Anchorage. There were apparently budget tickets available, but the idea of a round flight to Alaska seemed a little bit much for a pursuit of a personal obsession.She stared at the notepad hatefully, tapping the side of it with the pen. There was nothing to be mined from this.

The laptop waited on her desk, reminding her of the other work she had to do. But doing so would mean having to open her mail, and she really didn't want to see another urgent reminder from Anna about a deadline she was about to miss, or a strong exhortation from Hank that they should hang out so that he could convince her to "release the footage". Also, knowing herself, she would end up checking on Rowan again just to kill time and see her floating in that nightmarish tank. She was in no mood for that, and, disturbingly, not even because it would upset her. She had looked at that scene so much over the past few days that whatever shock it'd initially caused had long since diminished to a vague sense of distaste. Idly, she considered if that meant that she was just becoming hardened to sexual horror, but even if that was the case, it would be a concern for later.

It was entirely possible that Hank was, after all, correct in his assessment that the thing she should be doing instead was handing over the footage of Rowan to the media. At least theoretically, she could see the way it might work: that sort of stuff was bound to cause a scandal, and maybe even bring down some scrutiny over the sort of practices that happened in Galatea's laboratory dungeons. It was entirely possible that she should be working on that. But even if watching what happened to Rowan herself could no longer stir her to nausea, the idea that she could be the one responsible for publishing it to the entire made her sick to the stomach. How could she face her friend—if, by some miracle, she ever returned to the world—and admit that it was because of her that any weirdo on the internet could find out the exact recording of the years of her humiliation and abuse?

Maybe she could edit the footage, preserve the anonymity, but what would happen then? Wouldn't people see her body and go "oh look at this dude being fucked silly, he must be so lucky"? No, that would not do. Besides, if Galatea could change labour laws, then they could handle fallout for something like this—routinely, even. God only knew what kind of PR wetwork they could pull out to…

And what if they had done before? Maybe this wasn't even the first time they'd played a game like that with a friend or loved one of someone they'd taken. Maybe this was part of some arcane plan that kept everyone silent—why would Helen be so special?

Her phone rang with a shrill sound. She glanced at it, and then picked up instantly, so as to not give the other person a chance to reconsider.

"Helen Hu speaking."

"Okay," Hryshko sounded even more annoyed than before. "You want to talk to someone? Fine. Talk to Hurban. I'll send you the number. And serious, don't ever fucking call me again."

"Thank…" the woman disconnected before she could finish. But she hadn't lied. Fifteen seconds later, her phone buzzed, announcing that a contact had been passed to her, simply labeled "Hurban".

It was not a name she recognized, but that wasn't particularly suspicious by itself. As far as she could tell, she'd identified no more than half of people who, at various times, had worked for Pygmalion. This Hurban had to be one of those nameless faces from the photo. Still, she threw his name into Google. Unfortunately, however, he apparently shared it with some Slovak national hero. She tried Hurban Pygmalion, only to be asked by the browser if she meant "Urban Pygmalion", at which point she gave up and just dialed the number, dearly hoping that the man wasn't living in some time zone where it was the middle of the night right now.

One bell, two bells, three. He picked up at the fourth, just as she was getting ready to hang up.

"Hello, who's calling?" he spoke with a bit of a slur.

"Mister Hurban?" she probed.

"Who's calling?" he repeated, clearly annoyed.

"My name is Helen Hu, I represent…"

"Are you a telemarketer?" he cut in.

"No!" she called out quickly, hoping he would not disconnect. "I am from the New Labourers' Oral History Project."

"Never heard from it,"

That didn't surprise her.

"It's a NGO working to preserve the testimonies of workers in contemporary industries, and…" she began to explain, quietly praying that he would not find that too "communist", "...and I...."

"It's a mistake, I think," he said with a chuckle. "I'm no labourer. I don't even know how you managed to get my number, but…"

"I am aware, Mr. Hurban," she interrupted. "But I am presently working on a piece on the history of Galatea Corporation," a small white lie like that wouldn't hurt, she assumed.

"Go on," he murmured in response.

She breathed out a sigh of relief. He sounded interested.

"I am told you have worked for the Pygmalion before Galatea acquired it."

"I did," he said, after a pause. "How did you find me?"

She hesitated, but then decided that the woman had been rude enough so there would be no moral obligation to cover her. Thank God she wasn't an actual investigative journalist.

"Marianna Hryshko sent me your number and said you may be interested in answering a few questions," she said. Again, it was technically true.

"That bitch!" the man roared in laughter. "She's siccing press on me now. Classy move, Mari, fucking classy."

So the two had a history together, and apparently Helen was now becoming a part of it. Her heart sank. This did not bode well.

"I assure you, I have no ulterior motive here, I just wanted to learn about Pygmalion and Mircea Leon."

"Leon, that creep?" there was another burst of laughter. "Oh God, girl, there are some photos I could show you!"

"There is no need," she blurted. Was Hurban the man who'd leaked those? She felt less excited to be talking to him. "I am aware of those photos. It's not what interests me."

"Then what is?" he asked, genuinely surprised. "Seriously, that was the most interesting thing Leon ever did, at least before he fucking pulled the ground from under our feet."

"What did he do?"

"Oh, that's one hell of a story," Hurban murmured, "but miss, it's actually late here and I would like to get some sleep. If you want to know, call me tomorrow."

"Okay," she said, disappointed. "Five in the afternoon?"

"It's a date. 'Til then, bye bye."

He disconnected first, leaving her with a nagging feeling that something was wrong. Why did no one want to talk to her? Why the moment she found someone willing, he postponed the conversation? It felt like being stuck in one of those thriller stories. Was she about to find Hurban in the news tomorrow, mysteriously disappeared? The same way Leon went? Was she really turning into a conspiracy nut?

She scowled at that. Even since her talk with Hank, she felt generally better, or at least knew what her problem was. But this meant that instead of being constantly annoyed and frustrated, she just felt bitter and somewhat crazy. She was sinking more and more time into a desk investigation of a defunct company and voraciously reading everything published on Galatea. Broadly, it fell into two categories: tech people obsessing over miracle science that the corporation pioneered and feminists going completely apeshit over what the corporation permitted. She knew which category she belonged to.

But there was still something off, something weird, and she couldn't even google that without coming across increasingly preposterous conspiracy theories. She worried that one day something in her brain would just break, she would eagerly join a banned-from-Reddit community calling itself the "TruthSeer" or something like that, and go on speculating how reptilian aliens from Tau Ceti were what Galatea was really all about. There was a decent chance she'd end up getting completely redpilled in the process. The thought spurted out a laugh from her. She would probably end up the cranks' unicorn. "A former feminist on why Galatea is a plot by Zionist gender aliens from Planet Fuck!", coming to you live from Gab. That would rake in mad clicks.

In a way, it was refreshing to be able to finally laugh about it. Even if it was this "laugh 'til I cry" kind of a laugh.

She washed and sprawled herself on her bed. There would be a meeting tomorrow and she really didn't want to give Anna more reasons to be concerned, so she probably should go to sleep soon instead of obsessing any further. Normally, it would be easier said than done, but she had grown smarter than her brain and readied herself a medicine just for this occasion.

***

She sat in the office kitchenette, feeling generally queasy. The syrup did help her sleep, but it also left her sluggish and vaguely nauseous in the morning. The dregs of the night refused to leave. Again, she wished she hadn't given up on Red Bulls. But that was one line she wasn't ready to cross yet.

The tea she made for herself tasted awful; she really needed to buy some of the better stuff for the office, instead of allowing Bohdan to resupply. The man was clinically unable of getting anything other than the cheapest "hundred bags for 1 euro!" stuff that tasted like an infusion of paper dyed with graphite clippings. Not that he ever noticed. At least the drink in her mug was liquid and warm, so it was not a complete write-off.

"Helen!" Hank stomped inside, a broad smile on his angelic face and a brown envelope in his hand. "You've got mail!"

"What?" she grumbled, looking up.

"Arrived at the office today, addressed to you. Guess someone didn't have your home number?" Hank shrugged. "No return address."

Helen eyed the envelope suspiciously, before grabbing it from Hank's hand. Whatever was inside was a bit thick and rather heavy, like a book or a large magazine. She wondered if she could tell that a package would have a bomb inside. Would it be flexible? Or maybe trying to bend it would send it off? Could they even squeeze a bomb into a package that size? Or maybe it was poison? Why the fuck was she even considering that? She tore at the side of it angrily.

Two things slid out from the inside. A glossy magazine with a minimalist, viridian green cover bearing the word "automaton" in Futura Bold, and a handwritten note. She recognized the catalogue instantly, and couldn't hold back a gasp. What the absolute hell?

"I didn't order this…" she whispered through a suddenly clenched throat. The idiotic ideas about being in a conspracy abruptly felt more real, tangible.

"What is it?" Hank asked, reaching for the catalogue. She swatted his hand away.

"Galatea catalogue. Porn, basically, only wordy," she explained. "Is this blackmail?"

"'We have your work address and we'll mail porn to you'?" Hank chuckled. "In my teenage years we'd call that a 'weird flex'. And the note?"

She picked it between two fingers, as if it was something utterly disgusting, or possibly an insect about to snap and bite her. It was written on thick, expensive-feeling paper, with pale, blue ink. Not just written—calligraphed. Maybe not the best example Helen had ever seen, but workmanlike.

Dear Helen, it read. I hope that this little gift will not cause trouble for you. I am sending it even though I expect that you will not find it very enjoyable—however, if your quest is still to understand my designs, it may be of some help.

Sincerely,
Aphrodite

PS: I apologize for being a nag, but you still have not answered if you want Rowan to know you are watching her.

Helen put the note down and rubbed her head.

"The fuck," was all she managed to say, staring hatefully at the piece of paper.

"What did it say?" Hank said. He was still smiling, but she could tell he was getting worried again.

"Nothing," she replied, maybe too quickly. "Some bullshit."

"Can I see it?" he asked, extending a hand.

"It's private," she pushed the note hastily away. "Please don't."

"They're just screwing with you, you know?," he withdrew, then sat down next to care, careful to glower only at the catalogue and avoid even looking at the direction of the note. "Toying. First that live stream thing, now this. It's fucked up."

Was it? She looked at the piece of paper again. What if Aphrodite was honest, and just thought that she would like to be updated? After all, she had a bunch of the catalogues already—all that she could find, actually. But then that would imply that this Aphrodite knew that, and that in itself was disturbing.

But also, that post-script. Just looking at it brought up some indeterminate, obnoxious sense of guilt. She really did not want to even think about it, not right now. She folded the note in half and stuck it between the back cover of the catalogue.

"I guess it is," she exhaled, shoving it into her bag. She straightened, brushed away her hair and forced a narrow smile. There were other things she should be focusing on. "How about the interview today?"

"The guy bailed," Hank said, eyes still drilling holes in Helen's bag. "Or, to be more precise, got put in hospital. Broke a leg, apparently. So today's called off, unless you want to go over that report that Anna sent us."

"It can wait," she replied, secretly hoping that she could get Bohdan to deal with it instead. He was the one who liked going through documents like that. She pulled the bag closer to herself. "Do you want to grab dinner, then? And maybe something," she glanced at the cup, the garish-red BUDGETEA tea bag label dangled off its chipped side, "actually drinkable?"

"Sure," the beatific smile returned to his face.

***

After lunch, she spent the rest of the day readying herself for a conversation with Hurban and not thinking about things she did not want to think about. By five, she was prepared. Well sated, brought to lucidity by the passage of hours and several cups of strong tea, she sat by her desk, notebook in hand, phone ready. Perhaps it was all pointless—as she dialed in Hurban's number, she was already convinced that he wouldn't pick up. After all, she suspected a conspiracy.

He gave her two bells.

"Miss Hu!" his voice was genuinely cheerful. "So nice of you to call."

A burst of relief went through her. And surprise.

"Yes, thank you for deciding to speak with me," she started, but he didn't let her finish.

"My pleasure. But before you ask your questions, I kinda have to know…"

"Yes?" she grew tense. Was it now that penny was about to drop?

"You're not doing this just because Mari thought it would waste my time?"

Helen felt her eyes attempt to roll out of the skull.

"I mean," he continued. "She's a woman, and you're this woke warrior type and, maybe this is some, I don't know, trying to harass me…"

"No, Mr. Hurban," she said into the phone, doing her level best not to let him know just how stupid she thought the entire idea was. "I'm genuinely interested in the history of Pygmalion, and you're the only one who wanted to talk. Why?"

There was a pause. When Hurban spoke again, his voice changed. The levity and fake amusement vanished.

"Are you recording this?" he asked.

"No," she replied. Annoyance vanished, tension returned. This was it.

"Good. It's not a… big secret, I guess, but if others aren't talking, I don't want my name pinned on that. And I'm not going to give you some details."

"Understood," she said solemnly. "You have my full confidentiality."

"So," she heard him take a deep breath. "I remember you asked about Leon yesterday, right? So, you know what he did?"

"Sold the assets and the entire firm to Galatea for big money?"

"Okay," he grunted. "That's technically right, but really, it's bullshit. What he did was get big money for himself, and pitiful severance packages for us."

Helen recalled the conversation with Hernaszewski, and the talk about photos, and smiled understandingly. It made sense that Mircea was not keen on his colleagues profiting from his sale.

"But that wasn't the worst part," Hurban continued. "No. It wasn't just that he screwed us off some money, oh hell no. Do you know how to really make mint in our field? And I mean real big bucks, the kind that doesn't stop coming and sets you up for life?"

"Uh…," she mumbled, trying to think of something.

"Right, you're a communist, and clueless," he declared, and she didn't really have it in her to argue. "So I'll enlighten you—it's in government contracts. And we were about to have one. And not just any run of the mill 'provide software for the pencil-pushers', no. We were about to hit a jackpot."

"What do you mean?"

"Intelligence. Actual, confidential spy stuff," he said, and she could practically hear him grin. "The negotiations were almost complete. We were about to become an indispensable part of the subtle knife of the Western Civilization. And make fucking bank on it, too. But Leon dragged his feet. We were all ready, and he kept hesitating. And you know what happened?"

She nodded sheepishly to the phone, before going "no?"

"We walk into the office one day to find Leon gone and some pasty asshole from Bratislava informing us we were acquired and fired."

"Oh."

"'Oh' doesn't begin to cover it, girl. Better for Leon that no one knows where he bolted to, or we'd fucking murder him, and I mean it seriously. Shit, if I met him now, I'd knock his crooked teeth out with my very fists," Hurban seethed. There was a kind of stale, frustrated hate in the way he spoke that made Helen shudder. What the hell was wrong with people in this business? Why were they all like that?

"Did Galatea take over the intelligence contract?" she asked after a moment.

"Fuck if I know. If they were any smart, yeah. And given how rich they got, I'm sure they did."

That would explain it. Galatea was just a front for the CIA, or something like that. That was where all that tech was being developed. Jesus, Hank had been on the ball with that MKULTRA comparison. Maybe they really were just outsourcing their technology to some secret agency.

This really was a conspiracy. Or maybe this was the point where she was becoming a fully-blooded crank.

"Can you tell me what the contract was?" she mumbled into the phone, her thoughts racing in circles.

"Sure, why not," he snorted. "We were developing psychiatric software, basically. Leon figured a lot of it out, got to give it to that little shit, some miracle electro cure for the nutjobs. The spooks wanted it for something else though, and I'm not telling you what."

He really didn't have to. It was kind of obvious.

They talked for some time more, but she didn't manage to get anything more out of Hurban. Apparently after the sale went through and everyone got promptly fired, the entire team scattered to the four winds, all kinds of sore that they did not end up on the payroll of a pointedly unnamed intelligence agency. But, Helen thought to herself, Galatea certainly picked up the slack in that regard.

It made all kinds of sense. Maybe the fuck farms were some kind of a front? God, was that how CIA blacksites looked now? Not some dreary abandoned school in eastern Poland, but a high-tech brothel and a torture chamber for American imperialism in the back? Were those drones just brainwashed "terror suspects"? Or maybe it wasn't just the CIA? Just the intelligences of the Western world cooperating under the guise of the biggest pornographic industry in the world? Five X's instead of Five Eyes? It would explain so much.

She started pacing the room, pen in hand, punching at the air, or maybe drawing some kind of an unseen net.

No. No, that was impossible, a word would have gotten out already. A lot of people apparently survived their Galatea contracts. Someone would have spilled the news. After all, none of the clandestine shit that the CIA tried to pull off ever stayed secret for long. On the other hand, maybe there was stuff that they managed to keep secret? No one would have heard of it, after all. And if this brainwashing technology really worked, and they could just stuff people into tanks and erase their minds? How was anyone going to reveal that?

She resisted the urge to cover her windows and check if the door to her apartment was really locked. This was insane. If that was the case, if it was some mega-conspiracy, then why had Aphrodite just given her unrestricted access to their surveillance? Unless this was a ploy, meant to hide something. What if the footage was doctored, supposed to convey that there was nothing wrong afoot? But then, why show it at all? It was plenty disturbing, and if she was to release it, there would be scrutiny, so…

The box she'd bought from Emerald Dreams still lay on her shelf. She'd used most of its contents, but there was still some remaining, and she really needed to relax now. She tried to push the visions of a shadowy council of spies in cahoots with a biotech giant from her mind and just focus on rolling a smoke.

It helped, at least in the sense that she managed to stop freaking out. She considered writing to Hank and just laying it all out to him, but she wasn't feeling that crazy yet, and worse still there was the possibility that he would catch the bug. They would become conspiracy buddies, and that would be an unmitigated disaster.

Why was she doing this anyway? It wasn't going to bring her any closer to understanding what Rowan had done. So Galatea was a monstrous conspiracy. But she knew it was monstrous already, so that was no news to her. But why Rowan? Just thinking about her made the layers of frustration she'd hoped had receded swell back to bile-like, helpless strength. She wasn't any closer to understanding Rowan. Unlike the mystery of Galatea, Rowan's choice made no more sense now than it had when she'd watched her friend vanish into the maw of the corporate beast.

The catalogue was still in her bag; she hadn't opened it yet. But right now, it was either that or digging through the internet and getting gradually pulled into an increasingly crazy web of conspiracy theories probably fringing on that insane PizzaGate thing that refused to die even years on. After all, wasn't her idea what Galatea was all about basically the same theory?

She didn't really want to dwell on that. And so catalogue it was.

She didn't quite expect to reach a moment in her life when looking through a collection of genuinely baffling porn would register to her as calming, but unlike deep dives into the history of Galatea at least she broadly knew what to expect inside: a luxurious and well put-together collection that, in the end, wasn't at all that interesting unless you were a connoisseur of weird theory or disturbing porn. Probably that was why it had appealed to Rowan so much. She flicked through the first few pages, eyes skimming over the obligatory art photography of varied interior spaces. This time, apparently, the theme was industrialisation: vintage shots of assembly lines. The history of the factory. Modern installations: piles of arcane machinery littered in loft spaces, a bizarre fusion of sci-fi and ruin porn, followed pages of text against the back-drop of control panels and dials.

And then, there—finally—was the other content, the one she was sure people ordered those catalogues for. A full-page photograph of a head, mounted in some kind of a wall so that only it stuck out, the rest of the body obscured. There wasn't much face to it—white rubber coated it completely, other than for the crimson-lipped mouth, half open, a single drop of viscous, white liquid dripping from the corner. Right next to it, a panel of buttons was inlaid into the wall, looking like they were taken from a music player. There was one with a right-pointing arrow of play, fast-forward, pause, another labeled "mode". Just above, a digital counter rested at the number 44.

There was, of course, text on the opposite page, opaque as always.

Paul Preciado, it read, years ago wrote that "there is no machine capable of performing fellatio assembly-line style that can supplant the biomouth or any robotic masturbator capable of distracting the attention of customers who can get a hand job from a humanoid for ten euros in the Parisian bois de Boulogne". All of it is true, and all of it is false. There is no such machine if we limit our understanding of machines to be a pile of cogs, a combustion engine, an electronic contraption. An assembly line for fellatio, a blowjob engine, is possible, but only if sublimated from the flesh. For it is no longer sufficient to consider the human body a resource that is a breed apart from any other. The bodies we inhabit are tools and can be made into new utilities. Such rendition is difficult, and requires the body to be agreed to its new purpose, treated, trained and carefully fashioned. To sculpt away what holds it from becoming a tool takes effort, but it can be done. Yet…

Helen glazed over a bit. Intellectually, she was aware that it would be prudent for her to be more disturbed that, that she should rage at the exploitation of the female body—if this was a woman. But she had seen enough already. She wasn't looking for validation of her view on Galatea, or answers. She just needed something to take her mind away from melting into conspiracy madness. She flipped the page.

The next photograph showed a row of naked bodies, all nested and strapped to cushioned pads, electronic displays above them filled with information, rows of wires entangling them and connecting to them. Only their heads were not visible, disappearing into the other side of the wall. All but one of them, that was. Centered in the frame, two figures in rubber—the Galatea "drones"—tended to a standing man, his face away from the eye of the camera. One of the drones held a blanket to him, the other wiped his mouth clean with a piece of cloth. Their touch was delicate and attentive, and he seemed wholly trusting in their strange care. She bit her lip in surprise, looking for the rest of the text.

...yet to make a person into a tool mustn't be equivalent to unmaking them in personhood. The binary of ends and means misleads us, and naive Kantism can no longer carry us. We are each a machine, connected to the world through infinite and infinitely multiplying media. With each click on the internet, we feed the engines of information capitalism. Our quotidien gestures of consumption fuel it, not just in what we acquire, but what we produce in this acquisition. We are beyond that binary. If we are to find a place for ourselves in this ecosystem, we must acknowledge that we are always already tools, always already mechanisms, and none the less persons for all of that. And we must learn to care for ourselves as persons—and as tools.

Helen finished reading, then stared at the page for a while longer, frowning. She still couldn't understand what Galatea was getting at in those catalogues, and she wasn't even sure if she wanted to. Still, the purpose behind writing opaque, pseudo-philosophical rants to go along with their weird pornography kept eluding her. Frankly, the entire thing was just baffling. If it was a propaganda action meant to sell Galatea as woke and humane, it was the least understandable case of pinkwashing that she had ever seen. Which left the disconcerting possibility that whoever wrote those passages sincerely believed in their words.

She flipped through the rest of it, following the transit of the man from his station on the blowjob assembly line all the way to a cozy-looking room, not very different from the sort of the cell they had put Rowan in. What was she even looking for in this, anymore? An excuse to take her mind away from the outline of the conspiracy she had sketched out in her head? Galatea, a shadowy biotech being funded by even more nefarious intelligence groups: dark money and darker purpose. She had to admit—there was something fascinating about this idea, and it almost felt like she could be the one to unravel it. There were loose ends: the ultimate fate of Mircea Leon, the exact source of Galatea's vast wealth. If she could only follow one of them to the source, maybe then the picture would clarify, and the disturbing truth of Galatea exposed to—

Picking through the catalogue, page after page, she finally reached the note, stuck between the back covers. She stared at it in mute focus, the lines of the postscript taunting her in their serviceable calligraphy.

Was it why Aphrodite sent it to her—to distract her? To disturb her? She had to know that Helen would never let Rowan know about this, that it was her shame that she had to keep hidden from the world; she had already started to regret admitting it to Hank. To let her friend know would be a breach of trust, and admission of a violation, something so awful that she did not even want to dwell on it…

So Galatea's purpose was to make her consider and not forget? So that she could not put her mind to the task of solving the mystery? Maybe Hank had been correct in his assessment again—this was them toying with her. She should be paying this no mind, not even trying to answer. But then, why did she feel guilty all out of the sudden?

She shut the catalogue closed and put it with the rest, then laid her head on the desk, tired and anxious. Maybe she was just psyching herself out. Maybe there was no conspiracy after all. Maybe no matter how fascinating the ultimate fate of Mircea Leon, or the secret history of Pygmalion were, they were not going to bring her any closer to understanding Rowan's decision.

Maybe she was just running away from something.

She didn't want to think about that.

 

[Gargulec]

Speaking of Helen, she sure is trustworthy, running totally unknown software from a corporation she deeply mistrusts on her devices instead of using a burner phone or laptop for it. What if they really are the bastards she thinks they are and are reading all her emails and stuff, ready to delete all her data if she plans to negatively expose them? Of course, given how Galatea is probably the foremost expert on reading people and manipulating them, they could easily do things much more subtly. (Like putting a 24h time limit on the download, effectively ensuring she downloads and installs it. And once it's installed, the barrier to actually looking is much lower) Gauge her mental state based on typing speed, cursor movement, active vs. inactive screen time, picking up things via device microphone... And then they just have to reword things a bit in the daily report, swap a few things around in Rowan's training so that she goes through a reward circle just as Helen tunes in.

Click to shrink...

A lot of it has to do with the fact that Helen is about as non tech-savvy as one can get without actually becoming unable to interact with the modern world. Her laptop is a beat-up MacBook covered with stickers. She probably uses the same password for most of her accounts, and it is quite likely something like "Helen1234Hu". She doesn't really have any experience as an investigative journalist or anything like that - her work shares some points, but when it comes to actually doing the stuff that would protect her from retaliation. If this was a standard cyberpunk thriller she would end up either very dead, very early on, or adopted by a street samurai hacker showing her the ropes and preventing her from killing herself via bad security practices.

 

[Elero]

Oh god, stickers on her laptop? Ewww. Also, desire for cool street sam to dash in intensifies.

my designs

Click to shrink...

She's not even subtle about it at this point. My designs, not 'Galatea's designs' or 'The CEO's designs'. It's like she wants Helen to put it all together at this point. I guess she's organically leading her to the conclusion she wants without outright stating it.

A lot of people apparently survived their Galatea contracts.

Click to shrink...

So some don't? I hope the contracts at least ensure you'll be alive at the end...

 

[Jake]

Oh god, stickers on her laptop? Ewww.

Click to shrink...

Depends what kind of stickers, really.