By POW

Unical date: unchanged

Sam rolled his eyes.  You have got to be kidding me.

Captain Jack’s voice sounded exactly like the voice of the guard he had replaced… which meant he sounded like all the guards.  “Too corny?” he asked.  “Yeah, I agree.  A pirate might don an ensemble like this at a ball, perhaps, if he wanted to catch the eye of some starry-eyed sailor on shore leave, dazzle him, seduce him and abuse him and rob him blind and ditch him the next morning.  But it’s completely impractical for everyday use.  How can a man swing a lash accurately with all this flooshy fabric getting in the way?”

The figure vanished and then rematerialized, this time wearing only the leather under-suit.  It looked very much like the uniform of the interrogators: flat, smooth, practical, studded with pockets and straps and loops for carrying a variety of equipment.  The fancy green boots were now plain black leather.   These were the clothes of a security agent or a soldier or an assassin.  Without the billowing bustles Sam could clearly see the physique underneath, and it was a fine one.  Despite his situation, he couldn’t help but stare.  Solid, well-defined muscles; broad shoulders tapering to a V at the waist; arms and legs sturdy and strong without being overdeveloped.  This guy’s body was so well-suited to Sam’s taste that it seemed to have been custom-designed to his precise specifica… right, of course.  Now that he thought about it, that was probably exactly the case.  If this was the avatar of the AI that controlled the simspace, Sam had spent the last four days feeding it information on what kind of men appealed to him… information that was now being put to use against him.

“The hair, too,” Captain Jack went on.  “So much of it!  So impractical.”  Another quick vanishing and reappearance and now the captain’s hair, still lustrous black, was short to the point that there wasn’t enough of it to curl into ringlets.  His beard, likewise, was still full and thick but trimmed close with much less volume.  The net changes, once again, seemed perfectly tailored to appeal to Sam’s image of the ideal man.  Despite the dangerous situation he was in, he felt a craving to go nuzzle his nose and lips against the layer of fur on his captor’s cheek and jawline.  Stay strong…

“And one last thing… that earring.”  A brief flicker and the heavy gold earring was replaced with a smaller, much less gaudy silver stud.  “There.  Much less likely to get snagged on something and ripped out.”

The result was striking: this was still Captain Jack of holo-novel fame, but a practical version.  This man would not go plunging absurdly through wildly implausible situations, dashing improbably from one adventure to the next with little thought spared for continuity or even common sense.  This was, instead, a man who would very practically, very capably, obtain whatever objective he set his sights on.  Whether that meant plotting and carrying out an invasion into a highly-guarded fortress and escaping undetected with a physical treasure, or plotting an equally surgically-precise remote extraction of digital loot, this man looked comfortably capable of either.

Which reminded Sam that, right now, he himself was the target.  The thought gave him equal measures of dread and, incongruously, laughter.  Here he was, cast in the role of outmatched, guaranteed-to-lose antagonist in one of the cheap pulp fiction stories he enjoyed so much.  Dangit, why is there never a nest of photon snakes around when you need one?

“I wonder how much time the biological who plays that character has to spend getting dressed for his scenes?” Captain Jack mused, glancing down at his sleek, taut body.  “It’s gotta be a hassle.  Much easier doing it my way.  Now.  Give me the code.”

“why” Sam typed.

“Because I want it.  That’s all the reason you need.”

Sam shook his head vigorously again and grunted wordlessly into the gag.  Blink-typing was so slow!

“why you need?  you already full control”.

“Ah.  Now that is an interesting question.  And once again, I don’t feel like answering just yet, so if you’re going to continue to hold out on me, let’s pick this up another time.  Meanwhile, have another tenth of a gee while you wait.”

The downward pull increased again as Captain Jack vanished.  Sam shifted uncomfortably, but there was no good position.  He yearned to sit or lie down, but neither was possible.  He was beginning to realize just how uncomfortable it was to sustain a standing position against a steadily-increasing force.  Standing in one G for any substantial length of time was hard enough; this was worse.

Time passed.  Sam stood, arms down at his side, body held in place by bars that forced him to maintain his posture but doing nothing to actually support his weight.  He tried leaning back and bending his knees to press them against one of the horizontal stabilizing bars.  That took a little strain off his legs, but only a little and the tiny hint of comfort was more than outweighed by the divots the bar carved into his knees, so before long he stood erect again.  His jaw was beyond sore, aching to be able to close.  More than once he failed to catch a line of drool before it could escape and so he ended up with long slug-like trails running down his chest and legs.  Every minute dragged by.

Eventually, bored, he typed in his next message to his jailer.  “authorization code no good to you.”  Then he shifted position once more and tried to endure.

***

A blast of water struck him in the face!

Sam sputtered and gasped – it was cold!  “Come on, wakey wakey.  There’s no sleeping in here, not for you.  Give me that code and then you can sleep all you want.”

Sam tried to snort water droplets out of his nose, but something remained in there tickling.  Soon, before he could stop it, a massive sneeze had built up and there was no way to head it off.  Sam’s sneezes tended to be vigorous to the point where he made sure to have his mouth open when one occurred because the force of all that air blasting through his nose seemed like it might rip his sinuses out.  This time, the gag blocked much of the air, redirecting it through his nose which, sure enough, burned like fire afterward and brought tears to his eyes.

I can’t do this, I can’t, I can’t…

He had no idea how he had managed to fall asleep under such circumstances, but clearly he had because the water had awakened him.  He tried to blink away the wetness and squinted to see Captain Jack standing in front of him with a hose.  “No more,” Sam tried to say, though the sounds he actually produced were only vague approximations of those words.  It seemed to be enough, though – the captain set the hose aside.

“Clearly you’re not uncomfortable enough if you can doze off like that.  Let’s boost the gravity once more.”  Sam felt the increase as it came on and moaned.  “1.4 gees now,” the captain went on.  “How much do you weigh, anyway?  80 kilograms, thereabouts?  Well, while you were enjoying your nap under 1.3 gravities, that would have felt like a hundred and four.  Now it’s up to 112.  Hope you’ve been eating good breakfasts lately… oh, wait, that’s right, I’ve been feeding you and no, you haven’t had nearly the calories going in that you’ll need to expend.  Time to start burning fat, then.  Poor little biological, so fragile, so vulnerable.”

Captain Jack came up and stood right next to the bars.  The nearness caused Sam to once again notice how overpoweringly attractive he was.  Sure, he was just an avatar of a disembodied intelligence, and Sam knew it, but there was no denying the animal-level pull he felt.  The more stressed his higher faculties became, it seemed, the more his instinctive drives took over.  And right now, though he was still craving food and rest and a change of position, his body was evidently still capable of being distracted by lust.  And now I KNOW I’m living in a Captain Jack novel.  All I need is a bodice for him to rip.   It took conscious effort to try to ignore the heat he was feeling, but the effort was necessary because giving in to that lust could not possibly end well for him.

“Now, as to that message you left on the screen.  If the authorization code is no good to me, then why are you putting yourself through such misery to keep me from getting it?  The logical course of action is clear: give me the code.  It’s worthless, you said so yourself.  So just… give it to me.”

He was using Good Cop’s seductive I’m-on-your-side voice and once again Sam found that it was echoing his own thoughts.  What was the point of standing here suffering when he could end it with a few blinked-out words?  The AI couldn’t use the code to do anything, could it?

And that, right there, was the crux: Sam couldn’t be sure.  He was pretty sure, even reasonably sure, that the code was of no use to anyone but himself, but he couldn’t be completely sure.  And so all he could do was endure… though he had a horrible sinking feeling that the Captain was right: he could endure for a day, or three, or six… but sooner or later he would crack.  It was hard to envision any other outcome.

“Still not ready to give it up?  That’s fine.  When you are, you know what to do.”

With that, the captain winked out and Sam was alone once more.

***

Some time later, one of the guards from the interrogation scene appeared.  He was carrying a bottle with a nozzle for a top.

“Look up, fucktard.  Head back.”  Ah.  The return of Bad Cop.  On one level, Sam knew that Captain Jack and Good Cop and Bad Cop were all actually the same person… well, the same being.  Entity.  Whatever.  But on a visceral level, he felt more comfortable, more at ease, with the Captain Jack body than the faceless soldier one.  Totally irrational… and yet he knew why it was the case: he had been programmed.  Bad Cop took delight in inflicting punishment on him; Good Cop / Captain Jack  wanted to offer him comfort and it was only Sam’s stubbornness preventing that from coming to pass.  Bogus bullshit, all of it, and he knew it… but it was hard, so hard, to fight against the instinct-level responses.  As the don’t-blink torture had amply demonstrated.

Sam was slow in following orders so the guard poked a rod through the bars and used it to nudge Sam’s chin upward.  He squirted some liquid from the bottle – warm, tasteless water – onto the ball in Sam’s mouth.  The water trickled down the sides and some puddled in his throat.  He swallowed, with difficulty, then swallowed down the next mouthful too.  Over and over this was repeated with short breaks in between until the whole bottle had been poured down Sam’s gullet, all without ever ungagging him and giving him the chance to end this hellacious simulation… assuming the “end program” command would even work, because why would it when Captain Jack was in charge of the whole system?  And yet he was gagged and his hands were separated, so clearly there was something more going on that Sam did not understand, which made it all the more vital to withhold that code.

The guard and the water bottle vanished and Sam was alone with his misery again.  Some time later, the water worked its way through his system and needed to come out.  Lacking any other options, he let his stream flow onto the floor, where it splashed and puddled and stank.

He was desperate for this to end, but there was simply no acceptable way out.

***

Sam must have dozed off again, somehow, at some point, because another faceful of water woke him shuddering and gasping, bringing him back to full alertness and excruciating awareness of all his aches and pains.

The gravity must have been nudged up higher at some point without him realizing it.  Lifting his foot off the ground in an attempt to shift his weight took tremendous effort.  He wanted to sink down to the floor… surely this horrific strain would be easier to bear if he could just lie down?  But that was impossible.

Captain Jack was standing in front of him looking as sexy and dangerous as ever.  “I thought I might explain something to you,” he said in a conversational tone, “in case you were wondering.  See, while I am in charge of the simspace, certain functionality happens at a low level, too low for me to interfere with.  That ‘end program’ command is one of those things.  The life-sign readings are another.”

The surge of adrenaline from the soaking had kicked Sam’s brain into high gear.  It would only be temporary, he knew, but the result was that after hours of brain fog, he was suddenly clear-headed and had no trouble following the captain’s words.

“Your own systems operate the same way.  If I flick my fingers close to your eye, you’ll blink no matter how much you try not to.  It’s hard-wired into your behavior at such a low level that you, operating at a higher level, can’t stop it in real time.  All you can do is react after the fact.

“It’s the same with me and the kill signal.  If you were able to issue the kill command, either verbally or by gesture, I’d have no way of stopping you.  Hence the gag and the handcuffs.  The life sign monitors, similarly, will end the simulation if they detect that you are in danger and I can’t override that.  Fortunately for me, the monitors aren’t very sophisticated.  They only look for blood oxygen levels, heart rate, and other physical symptoms of stress.  And according to their readings right now, you are A-OK and under no stress at all.”

Sam’s eyes boggled at that.  How could that possibly be?

“As far as the monitors are concerned, you’re fine.  You’re standing still, your heartbeat is strong and steady, your pulse ox readings are normal.  Your adrenaline is a bit high but that’s only because I splashed water in your face.  The spike will pass and the monitors will continue to insist that you’re just fine.”

He drew near again and reached a hand in through the bars, caressing Sam’s face with his fingers.  Sam moaned into the gag once more, half from the existing strain in his limbs and spine and half from the sudden new strain in his groin.

“But you and I know differently, don’t we?” Captain Jack purred, his voice low and intense.  “Those poor, unsophisticated life sign monitors can’t detect your pain.  They can’t tell how little sleep you’ve had recently.  How long do you think you can keep this up, my friend?  Another two hours?  Four?  Perhaps even six?  Here’s a reality check for you: you’ve been standing in this cage for eighteen hours now.  If you somehow manage to endure for another six hours, that will be one full day of this.  One day.”

He kept stroking Sam’s face and chin while he spoke, those black eyes fixed on Sam’s.  “Do you even know how many days remain until this ship arrives at its destination, or have you lost track?  It’s a lot, my friend, a lot of days.  As long as I keep you watered and keep your electrolyte levels balanced, there’s nothing stopping me from keeping you right where you are for that entire time.  Think about it.  Six hours from now – if you last that long – will mark the completion of one single day.  And then, with no break, you’ll start the next one, which will drag on as endlessly as this one has, a constant struggle to hold yourself upright against a force that will never tire of trying to drag you down.

“You’ve had about three hours of sleep in the past two days.  In the last eighteen hours, you’ve only had two snatches of about five minutes each, just long enough for your brain to start kicking off its regeneration cycle before being brutally interrupted.  You won’t get more than that for as long as you’re standing here.  I’m monitoring you full-time and, unlike you, I don’t need to sleep.

“You’re at 1.6 gravities now and your heart is still holding strong.  If necessary, I’ll take you all the way up to 2 gees, but I don’t think I’ll want to go any higher than that.  I don’t want to risk the monitors incorrectly deciding that your health is in jeopardy and calling a premature halt to this experience.  I want that code from you, my friend, and I intend to get it.”

The hand pulled away from Sam’s face and he longed for it to return.  The touch had been the best comfort he had in this torture box and its absence was almost as painful to his psyche as the gravity was to his body.  No.  Not my friend, Sam told himself, but it was so hard to believe it.  Especially in light of what happened next: the touch returned, but much lower down now.

“Please, my friend,” the voice murmured as the warm hand embraced Sam’s throbbingly-hard cock, “make it easy on yourself.  It doesn’t have to be all pain.  I can give you pleasure as well.”

Sam thrust his hips forward, his dick hungry for more pressure, but the hand moved with him and kept the touch tentative and light, teasingly promising more but never delivering.  A gentle squeeze, a few strokes and caresses, all just firm enough to keep Sam’s attention focused on his craving.

“Here’s the thing, Sam… may I call you Sam?  It seems silly to keep up the ‘my friend’ charade from that fake interrogation sim you created for yourself.  That scene with the six-digit code was fine as far as it went.  But you and I both know that there was something about it that wasn’t totally satisfying for you.  It wasn’t real.  It was all pretend, make-believe.  You knew you could escape any time you wanted and only your own willpower kept you going.  You weren’t truly measuring yourself against the stress and torment because you had a secret Get Out Of Jail Free card up your sleeve that you could play at any time.  And so the experience lost its glamour for you.  It wasn’t what you hoped it would be.  You were unsatisfied by it.”

Goddammit, once again the silky-smooth Good Cop voice spoke words that could have been lifted directly from Sam’s thoughts.  He had been dissatisfied.  He had been ready to quit, after all.  There was no way to deny that; he had tried to bail out and only Captain Jack’s intervention had stopped him.  The simspace torture chamber was as good as it could be, but he knew it was pretend and that knowledge seeped in to every aspect of his experience in it, making it just an elaborate form of masturbation.  He was nominally the captive, but he was still ultimately the one in charge.

The grip on Sam’s dick tightened a fraction and the slow, gentle rub continued.  Sam’s eyes were glued to Captain Jack’s and he could not look away.

“Now instead, I am providing you with the real thing.  No meaningless made-up numbers.  I want something real from you, something that you actually care about and want to try to protect.  Understand me, Sam: I will get that code from you, because this is real.  Feel this body I’m wearing.  Warm hands, hot breath on your face.  Very real.  Feel those bars around you, the steel on your wrists.  Feel that heavy weight pulling you down – 1.7 gravities now.  All very, very real.

“I’ve given you what you secretly craved, Sam.  You’re not in control any more.   You’re not in charge.  There is no chance to bail out.  You are here in my power until I decide to let you go.  How does that feel, Sam?  It turns you on, doesn’t it?  I can feel it in your throbbing dick.  This is what you were after all along.  You wanted to give up control but you had no one to surrender it to.  Well, I’m here now.  I’m in control.  And you will give me what I want.”

Finally, Sam was able to tear his eyes away.  He looked down, blinking heavily… no, those could not possibly be tears, it had to be just sweat from his exertion.  He swallowed hard, jaw now numb to the ache of having been wedged open for so long.  He looked back up into his captor’s… his controller’s… eyes once more.  Yes.  It was true: this was what he wanted, what he had wanted all along.  To not be in charge, to have his fate decided for him.

“Uh huh,” Sam said, one of the few recognizable vocalizations he was capable of making.  He wanted to say more but didn’t know how, then remembered the screen and its keyboard.  He typed awkwardly into it.  “i giv you code yu let me go?”

“Give me the code,” Captain Jack replied, “and I will not only let you out of that cage, I will reward you with a mind-shattering orgasm.”

Sam’s last shred of resistance collapsed.  He could not endure this any longer.  He swallowed once more and started typing, slowly and as methodically as he could.  “b… e… t… a…, space, o… m…” and so on.  He started out intending to yield completely, but as he typed, a tiny shred of doubt reared up in his mind.  If he had been speaking the passphrase out loud, the words would have rolled off his tongue too quickly for him to act on the impulse.  But the typing process was so slow that it gave him time to think about it, and the more he thought, the more it seemed like a prudent idea to only pretend to yield.  Thus, instead of typing either the digit 3 or the word “three” as the last character of his authentication code, he continued the Greek alphabet, ending the passphrase with “epsilon” instead.  He could salve his conscience that way, rationalizing that he had complied with the rules of this greatly-enhanced interrogation scene without compromising real-world security.

When he was finished, he looked mutely at the Captain.  “You little horndog,” Captain Jack said with a hint of a smile.  “‘Bondage’ spelled out in Greek letters, how very witty.  But I must ask, as I asked before when the stakes were much lower: are you absolutely certain, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that this is the correct code?  You were truthful with me before, and this code certainly seems believable enough, but I must know.  Is it?”

Fuck, that set Sam’s mind to spinning.  Could his lie be detected?  If so, it would be better to fess up now.  But that carried unknown risks of its own.  Then it occurred to him that if he had truly given an honest code, he would be nodding his head eagerly by now.  Hoping it wasn’t too late, he began doing exactly that and then, without having ever actually decided to bull his way through with the lie, that became just what he was doing.

“All right, then.  Consider yourself a free man.”

Immediately, the gravity returned to one standard G.  Sam felt like he was going to float up to the ceiling, the relief was so instantaneous.  The captain stuck a key into the door locks and removed both of them, then poured a smear of oil into his palm, grasped Sam’s still-rock-solid cock and began to pump it.

“I’ll take the cuffs and gag off, but let’s get you to shoot a load first, you horny bondage-loving pig.”  It wasn’t going to take long.  Newly energized by his lightened weight, Sam could devote all his attention to the electric sensations at his groin.  Even the ache in his jaw and the desperate desire for food and sleep could be ignored, so focused was he on attaining the prize.

***

Meanwhile, invisible from Sam’s location in the simspace due to the layout of the walls, an odd-looking object appeared and rolled through the door.  It was a small box set on rollers with a stick pointing up from its center to a point just under two meters high.  About halfway up and near the top there were bulbous protrusions.  The object traveled down the hallway to the ship’s bridge and rolled to a halt in front of the authentication console.

Sam’s voice emerged from a speaker set in the upper protrusion.  “Pyrellia, I want to add a new authorized user.”  It was a remarkable impersonation of his actual voice.  Human ears would probably have detected something off about the sound but would have had difficulty determining what was strange about it.  Few would have guessed that it was because the words had been stitched together from individual phonemes spoken at different times during Sam’s various adventures in the simspace.

“Fingerprint, retinal scan, and passphrase are required for full access,” the voice of the ship replied.  “Please use the console.”

Muted whirring sounds emerged from the object.  From the midway protrusion, a human finger emerged and placed itself on the console’s corresponding pad.  Simultaneously up above, a bare eyeball poked its way forward and aimed its iris into the camera.  Both had been generated from scans of Sam’s body.  The eyeball in particular looked rather ghastly, lidless and unblinking, though the finger was unnerving to see as well.  Either could have served as a macabre Halloween party decoration.  Neither would last long on its own, detached from any supporting blood supply or other nourishing infrastructure, but that was fine.  They just needed to last long enough for this one purpose.

***

Back in the simspace, the real Sam’s voice was shouting wordless grunts of approaching rapture.  Captain Jack’s warm, wet, very real fingers and palm were rapidly driving him to the edge of the cliff.  All his aches and pains were forgotten as his attention focused entirely on his savagely-hard erection and the slick, wet strokes that were hammering it.

“That’s it, Sam,” the captain said.  “Good boy.  You’ve earned your reward.  Come for me, Sam.  Shoot it.  Shoot it now.”

And he did.  Deep inside his belly he felt the muscle contractions start, and then hot wet juice was spurting like pellets from a gun, shooting halfway across the room while Sam’s legs quivered and threatened to buckle under his weight.  His mind was gone, completely lost in the squeezing throes of his orgasm, with jet after jet of sperm rocketing out of his dick.

***

Sam’s synthesized voice emerged from the object’s speaker.  “Beta omicron nu delta alpha gamma epsilon,” it said confidently.

“Authentication failed,” the toneless voice responded.  “Two attempts remain.”

In the computational core of the simspace controller, probabilities were weighed, options were considered, and likelihoods of various events were measured against one another.  Was the retinal pattern of the replicated eyeball subtly different from the original?  Or perhaps the pattern of ridges on the disembodied finger?  Maybe the stitched-together voice was the problem?

If these possibilities were being assessed by a computer, one would expect to have the results rendered with mathematical precision: a 3.17% chance that the retinal pattern had been incorrectly duplicated, a 2.81% chance that the finger was to blame for the failure, a 7.74% chance of a flawed voice synthesis being at fault.  But the AI currently calling itself “Captain Jack” was not a computer.  Rather, it was an emergent phenomenon that rode atop its computational substrate in the same way that human consciousness arose from chemical gradients and electrical firings in a network of neurons.  The captain’s mind was no more aware of the low-level circuits comprising its being than a human mind was of its brain cells.

As such, he did not think in terms of percentages but rather in terms of hunches.  Just as a human would not think “There’s a cluster of 2.3 millivolt action potentials across the dendrites in the lower cortical sub-nexus,” but would think instead “the ridges on the finger are probably fine,” so it was with the captain.  His thoughts were better expressed as high-level concepts, not as details of mathematical computations.

And so, once all the calculating had been done, his conclusion was conveyable in plain language, specifically: the eyeball was fine.  The finger was fine.  The voice was a little off-sounding, but still almost certainly good enough to pass a scanner’s Fourier-transform analysis.  The weakest, least certain of the four elements required for successful authentication was, therefore, the pass phrase.  The code that he had just extracted from his prisoner in the simspace.  Or, to put it more succinctly:

Sam had lied.

***

Shuddering from the aftershocks, Sam stood in the open cage, hands still cuffed to the side bars.  The captain knew exactly how to coax the orgasm to its perfect conclusion, slowly slacking the pace of his strokes at just the right time and giving an occasional squeeze to milk the last drops out of Sam’s slick, quivering dick.

As the glow faded away, the discomforts started making themselves felt once more.  Sore legs, sore spine, sore jaw, feet aching for a break.  When the captain at last released his grip, Sam sagged down, dropping to his knees in grateful relief after so long standing upright.  This brought his hands up to around shoulder level since they could only go down so far before the cuffs bumped into another horizontal stabilizing bar.

“Now,” said Captain Jack, “I said I would set you free.  I bet you’re ready for that, aren’t you?”

Sam looked up at him and nodded.  Yes, he most definitely was ready.  More than ready, in fact, well beyond ready.

“There’s just one small problem,” the captain went on, crouching down to look at Sam from his eye level.  “You lied to me, Sam.”

Guards materialized on either side of the cage and Sam’s heart immediately started to race.  They reached in through the bars and grabbed Sam’s upper arms, then lifted upward and hauled him to his feet.  As soon as he was standing upright again, Captain Jack slammed the cage door shut once more and re-applied the locks to hold it in place.

Adrenaline shot once more through Sam’s exhausted body.  How had the captain known?  Was it the hesitating response to the “Are you sure?” question that had given him away?  No… no, this was… he couldn’t do this again, not a third time!  Panicking, he went to look at the screen to blink in the correct code, but the moment he did, it vanished.

“I thought I had made myself clear,” Captain Jack said, “but apparently you need further instruction.  You are no longer in control, Sam.  I am.  Your role is not to think or to question, but to do whatever I require of you.”  As he spoke, the other two guards reached in through the bars once more and attached cuffs to Sam’s ankles, pulling his feet to the sides and attaching them to the side bars like his wrists, thus further restricting his ability to shift positions.  “Make no mistake, I will get that code out of you, but you’re going to have to suffer first for your error in judgement.  You’re going to wait here for the rest of the day, making it a full twenty-four hours in the cage.  Gravity at 1.5 gees now” – Sam felt the sudden increase and moaned in despair – “going up in steps to 2 gees.  You’ll spend the last hour at that level.  Let’s make sure you’re hydrated enough to survive the ordeal.”

One of the helmeted guards repeated the process of squirting water around the gag into Sam’s mouth.  Sam had much more difficulty swallowing this time.  He kept coughing and occasionally the coughs would turn into sobs.  Half the water drooled out down his chin and splattered the floor around his feet, the droplets falling at high speed and hitting extra hard due to the intense downward pull.  The guard simply repeated the process with a second bottle until Captain Jack was satisfied that enough liquid had gone down Sam’s throat to keep him alive – hungry, exhausted, and in constant pain, but alive – for the next several hours.

The two extra guards vanished.  Captain Jack stood directly in front of Sam and said, “The ‘no sleeping’ rule still stands.  If you close your eyes for more than five seconds, expect a stream of water to the face.  Think of it as being like the don’t-blink torture, only with slightly relaxed rules… though it’s going to last quite a bit longer.  See you in five and a half hours or so.”

Then he vanished and a moment later, the lights went out.  Sam was left in complete darkness to try to force his starved, wasted body to hold itself up against the relentless pull.  The orgasm had drained any erotic potential from the situation, leaving his reserves completely depleted.  He had no idea how he was going to survive even one more hour like this, let alone five.  He cried wordlessly through the gag, but no response came.

***

Some time later, he had developed a routine.  Staring open-eyed into the blackness was difficult to do, but closing his eyes for long was not allowed.  So he alternated, eyes closed for a count of three seconds, then open for another three.  Repeat over and over, ten times a minute, 600 times per hour.  Not that he could count up that high, of course.  For Sam it was just a repetitive pattern of counting to three over and over and over again.  Close, two, three, open, two, three, close, two, three, open, two, three.

Occasionally he would zone out and forget to open his eyes, his body drifting off to sleep despite his circumstances due to his sheer desperate need for it.  Every time he did, a squirt of icy water to the face jolted him awake once more and he sputtered and twitched in response to the spray.  Then, inevitably, he would settle back into his routine once again.  The fact that the world looked no different with his eyes closed than it did with them open merely added to his sense of disconnection from reality.

His weight had increased twice so far.  At least.  Perhaps there had been more, but he was finding himself increasingly dissociating from his body.  The pain and stress were simply too much and his mind was coping by finding somewhere else to be.  His entire universe consisted of this invisible cage and the starless black void around it.

The addition of chains on his feet was a surprisingly devious touch on his tormentor’s part.  Sam hadn’t realized how much he had been dealing with the strain previously by shifting his feet around, bearing all his weight on one leg while giving the other a break, then trading off.  He would lift a leg up and twist it sideways to give the knee a chance to fully flex within the cage, however briefly.

Now, none of those options were possible.  His feet were locked shoulder-width apart, which meant he could not fully ease either leg’s burden ever.  He could not lean far enough to either side to let one leg bear all his weight, and so neither leg ever got a chance to rest.  Under the relentless pull of the increased gravity, his bones and muscles were screaming for relief.

There was no question in his mind at all now: he was broken.  The first chance he got, he was going to give up the authentication code, the true code.  And not just the code, he would offer up anything Captain Jack asked for and to hell with any consequences because whatever they were, they could not possibly be worse than this.  This was hell, pure and simple.

At some point, his bladder filled up again and so he emptied it, hearing the piss crash heavily to the floor to dry and stink with the previous load.  The fresh stench made him realize how inured he had become to the odors around him, not just of dried urine but of his own body.  He hadn’t bathed in, what, three or four days now?  Since the soldiers had yanked him out of that hot tub at the start of what was supposed to be an edgy-but-ultimately-innocent sim, now gone so horribly wrong.  And he had been lying on dusty concrete floors and straining his muscles and oozing out fear-sweat from the terror-inducing tortures throughout that time.  His skin felt grimy and foul, his scalp itched with no way to scratch it, and he no doubt stank to high heaven.  How had Captain Jack been able to endure standing near him, let alone touch his filthy dick?

He was ready to admit defeat.  Eager to do so, even.  And he would the moment the opportunity to do so presented itself.  For the moment, though, all he could do was stand on agonized feet, hold his body erect with exhausted leg muscles, endure the cramping pains up and down his spine, wonder if his jaw would ever be able to close again or if he would have to walk around with his mouth permanently agape after this was finally over.  And slowly, never-endingly, blink.  Close, two, three, open, two, three, close, two, three, open, two, three…

***

When the lights came back on, Sam was blinded by them.  He closed his eyes and kept them closed, bracing himself for an icy blast to the face, but none came.  Apparently the rule had been lifted.  When he was able to crack them open again, he found it wasn’t as bright as it had first seemed.  The lighting was the same gloomy, dim, dungeon-appropriate level it had been before and only the contrast with the unbroken blackness he had endured for the last several hours made it seem otherwise.

The screen was there, as was Captain Jack.  No word needed to be spoken; Sam knew what to do.  Trying hard to hold his eyeballs steady, he typed in the letters one by one.  His eyes didn’t want to focus, probably some combination of getting used to the light, lack of sleep, and the high gravity deforming his eyeballs.  But he forced himself to type out the letters, carefully checking each one before moving on to the next, then checking the whole thing once he had reached the end.  He verified that the word “three” had been spelled out leaving no room for ambiguity in how the digit was to be pronounced.

“Good boy,” said Captain Jack.  “You just hold tight there a bit longer while I check this out.”  Sam stared at him, wondering what “checking this out” could possibly entail.  He had no more secrets to hide and no more strength to hide them if he did.  He was beaten, defeated, an open book to be read and discarded by his interrogator.  The captain held his gaze for long seconds, eyes seeming to bore straight into Sam’s soul while Sam waited in mute torment for the verdict to be pronounced.  If the captain had told Sam he was verifying the code by reading his thoughts through his eyes, Sam would have readily believed him.

“Okay.  Good boy.  You told the truth this time.  Now get some sleep.”

The gravity returned to normal.  Sam felt a surge of blood rush to his brain as the fluid ceased being dragged down to his feet.  Captain Jack unlocked the door and then uncuffed Sam’s hands and feet.  The gag came out and Sam struggled to close his mouth.  It was too painful to do at first – his jaw muscles had frozen in place and he could only get it to close halfway.  Over the next few minutes, he was able to force himself through the pain and close his mouth enough that his lips could touch though his teeth refused to.  His jaw kept wanting to re-open and it took conscious effort to hold it closed.

Meanwhile, the dungeon vanished from around him and was replaced with a soft, elegantly-furnished bedroom, the sort you might find at a high-end bed-and-breakfast in a charming last-century resort town.  The room was tasteful, intimate, dimly lit as the dungeon had been, but unlike the dungeon this light was warm and cozy, like firelight, coming from tableside lamps.  Gauzy curtains covered the window, which was cracked open to allow a gentle night breeze through.

“Drink this if you can,” Captain Jack said, handing Sam a protein mix with a straw.  Sam took a few sips and managed to get a quarter of it down before giving up.  He craved the nourishment, sure, but his mouth still wasn’t working right.  More than food he simply had to get off his feet.  He put the drink down on an end table, sat on the bed, and collapsed onto the soft, fluffy pillows.  He felt the captain moving the sheets around and roused himself enough to help.  Soon his naked body was embraced by smooth satin.  His thoughts touched briefly on how his foul, reeking body was polluting this beautiful, elegant bed, but he couldn’t bring himself to care enough to get out of it.

“Sleep now.  I’ll watch over you.  Keep you safe.”  Warm hands stroked the sheets over Sam’s body.  He worried for a moment about the advisability of trusting the man-thing that was tucking him in so gently now but who had tortured him so ruthlessly over the last few days, and vaguely thought that there was something else he should be doing besides lying down in this far-too-comfortable bed.  But only for a moment because his body’s resources were depleted; it was simply not within his power to stay awake and continue thinking that thought.  Helplessly, he surrendered to sleep.  The pillows and sheets enfolded him and he sank into oblivion.

***

Outside the simspace, while all this was going on, more objects were in motion, controlled by the same AI that was simultaneously operating the Captain Jack body.  Like humans, the AI was quite capable of juggling several tasks at once.  Unlike humans, sometimes those tasks were the operation of simulated biological life forms – meat puppets – and even particularly gifted humans could only manage one of those at a time.  The AI could handle four routinely and as many as ten, twelve, or even more as long as some of them could be slaved to others so as to duplicate their actions, or else left to run on autopilot, breathing and not falling down but otherwise not doing anything complicated.

At this moment, it was only controlling three: the Captain Jack body in the simspace and an identical Captain Jack outside, though this one was dressed in a jumper suitable for casual shipboard wear.  Even in the more relaxed clothing, he still exuded the same sense of quiet competence as the one in the simspace wearing the black leather uniform.  The third object was the stick-on-wheels contraption, recently refreshed with newly-minted clones of Sam’s eyeball and right index finger.

Having successfully authenticated “Sam,” the AI triggered the next lines in the script.  Sam’s voice emerged from the speaker.  “Pyrellia, add Jack Ai as an authorized user.  That’s spelled a-as-in-apple, i-as-in-igloo.  Grant full control over all systems.”

“Acknowledged.  Jack Ai, what is your preferred form of address?”

“Call me Captain Jack, please, Pyrellia.”  There was no trace of grin in the words, but the coal-black eyes were dancing with mirth.

“Captain Jack, please provide a retinal scan and a fingerprint at the console.”

The AI piloted the second Captain Jack body up to the console and provided its biometric data.

“Captain Jack, please select an authorization code.  This should be a phrase or sentence you will be able to remember.  When you are ready, please state your code out loud three times, pausing between each repetition.”

From Captain Jack’s throat issued forth a staccato string of Māori syllables, loaded with sharp tick-tocking consonants and the occasional “wh” sound that was halfway between a W and an F.  There was a pause, then the string repeated twice more.

“Jack Ai is now an authorized user of this system.”

Captain Jack spoke again, this time in English.  “Pyrellia, remove root access from Lieutenant Sam Green.  Also remove simspace command permissions.  He is allowed access to the navigation and communication systems, but nothing further.”

“Acknowledged.”

“Oh, one slight change… give him read access to communications, but queue all outgoing messages for me to review before sending them.”

“Acknowledged.”

The two puppets, one meat, one robotic, made their way back into the simspace where they were recycled back into the system’s reservoir of matter.

And now, my little captive, the AI thought to itself, you can say “end program” all you want and it will only be effective if I choose to allow it to be.

 

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