By POW

Start at Chapter 1 by clicking here

There came a day when the routine changed.  By Sam’s count they were at nineteen strokes per minute when the first hint came wafting through the oarlocks: the smell of gunsmoke.  This was different but not different enough to merit Sam’s attention and so he remained focused on his rowing, pushing and pulling the long wooden handle back and forth.  But then there came voices: loud, shouting voices bellowing words Sam could not make out.  Louder they grew, and then other voices joined in, fainter and  more distant.  Fuck!  The Royal Navy had caught up with them, despite all their efforts to keep ahead!  Sam leaned into the oar even harder but after only a dozen strokes a great blow struck the side of the ship and suddenly there was no weight in Sam’s arms.

He stared dumbfounded at the stump of oar for long seconds before realizing what had happened: something, probably a cannonball, had blasted off the other end, leaving just the splintered wreckage in his hand.  Sam turned to his oarmate – whose name he still did not know after all this time – to see if he had any idea what to do, but the man was slumped over in his seat, leaning against the outer wall which, Sam suddenly noticed, had also taken some of the impact.  Cracks and fissures appeared where there had been none before.

Cracks and fissures in an ocean-going vessel’s hull were not good.  Not good at all.

The shouting from overhead grew louder and more chaotic.  The other oarsmen around him were starting to shout too, and the gestures they made with their arms made it clear what they were saying in their weird guttural language: “hey overseer, unlock these chains!”  The overseer did not, but at least had the decency to throw the keys to one of the men in the front row before scampering up the ladder and out the hatch.  The man with the key unlocked his own wrists and ankles, then handed the keys to the next man in line.

With no warning, an ear-splitting crash of shattering timber and torn metal sounded over the clamor.  Bright light suddenly poured into the gloom, temporarily dazzling his eyes.  Sam felt himself tossed backward only to be yanked to a halt by the ankle chain.  But only for a moment – whatever had torn through the side wall of the ship had also weakened the deck below and the chunk of wood that Sam’s ankles were bolted to tore free.  Sam fell backward into the lap of the man behind him, who shoved him forward again and then he was trying to stand and failing and suddenly the ship gave a mighty lurch to one side – another impact, no doubt – causing Sam to lurch the opposite direction and then he was out the hole in the side and falling half a meter into the water below.

The sea was calm and warm, thankfully, but it was still a shock to go from the hot, dim sweatbox to the open water.  And then Sam reflexively tried to swim and discovered that the chains on his wrists and ankles, which he had worn for so long they felt like a part of him, were a definite impediment to keeping his head above water.  He couldn’t separate his hands and there was still a shard of oar attached to the chain.  His feet, likewise, had to remain close together and work around the chunk of deck flooring connected to them.  The extra mass and the drag they produced in the water made him have to work all the harder.  He found a rhythm where he made short, rapid strokes with all four limbs and this was enough to let him continue to breathe… but of course the exertion made him require more air than usual, so it was not a situation he could sustain for any great length of time.

The ship was in trouble.  He caught glimpses of wood, fabric, iron, men, smoke, flames.  He heard shouts and screams, the thunder of cannon fire, the crash of the balls into the ship.  One such glimpse was enough to send him spinning around and swimming as fast as he could to put distance between himself and the doomed vessel.  He dog-paddled for all he was worth.

Fortunately, not far ahead a low line of palm trees rose up out of the water.  Sam made for that, knowing that chained swimming was not something he would be able to keep up for very long.  The crashes and screams grew fainter behind him as his frantic dog-paddling slowly pushed him toward the trees, and then his toes brushed sand and he was finally able to stop thrashing.

He floundered up the beach, gasping for air.  The sun was scorching hot, a fact he did not realize when he was in the water.  In only a minute or so, he was tempted to wade back into the gentle surf again, and maybe he would in a bit if the heat grew too intense.  He glanced back toward the naval battle.  His ship, the only home he’d ever known, was now wallowing low in the water with flames rising up along its masts.  It was not going to remain afloat much longer.  Clearly there was no going back, but… what to do next?  Rowing was the only life he knew.  Sam stood on the beach for a few moments, aimlessly staring at the distant ships but then he saw a flash of light and a second or two later heard a thump sound over the far-off din.  It took his brain a few more seconds to identify the source: the light and sound had both come from the barrel of a cannon… aimed directly at him!

He didn’t see the ball in flight, but he certainly saw the splash it kicked up as it fell into the water perhaps twenty meters in front of him and a bit to the side.  They were shooting at him!  Why?  He was a lowly oar slave, that’s all he’d ever been, what possible reason could they have for wasting valuable ammunition on such a nobody?  But the reason didn’t matter because he was already fleeing up the beach as fast as his hobbled legs would go toward the relative safety of the trees.  Another thump sounded and a short time later the ball landed off to his left, thudding into the foliage just as Sam reached the undergrowth.

Then he was tearing through branches, heedless of the scrapes and scratches on his bare skin because getting to shelter was far more important than a few nicks.  He weaved and dodged through the trees, trying to make it impossible for the man operating the cannon to guess where he now was.  More booms sounded from the artillery as he plunged forward, tripping and falling every few meters because the lump of deck he was dragging between his feet kept catching and snagging on roots and stumps and branches.

At least it was cooler in the shade of the palms.

Wait, these weren’t palms any more.  He paused after falling for the dozenth time, looking around at the trees to see pines and maples… when had he… no, how had he passed from a tropical forest to a temperate one?

He didn’t have time to wonder because the booming sound from behind him doubled, then tripled in intensity and pace.  They must have been launching an entire barrage at the woods, hoping to get him with saturation coverage.  He ran again, blindly pressing away from the noise.

But the noise seemed to follow him, growing louder rather than softer, as if the navy ship had somehow followed him up the beach and into the trees… and then up over the trees because now the sound was coming from overhead, a whining buzz like an engine.  Oh, shit, it was an engine, some sort of old-time airplane that he could just barely make out through gaps in the leaf cover, something from one of old wars, something with rapid-fire guns that tore shredded pathways through the leaves and branches.  And bombs!  As he watched, a rounded cylinder with tail fins dropped out of a hatch on the underside and started slowly arcing downward.

Horror-struck, Sam watched the descending weapon, eyeballing its likely landing point, which was alarmingly close by.  He whirled and ran the opposite direction, or tried to, having forgotten all about the chains on his ankles and sprawling once more onto the ground.  He picked himself up and shuffled as fast as he could until an enormous explosion rang out behind him and a pressure wave once more knocked him off his feet.  This time he didn’t get up but instead lay there in a fetal ball, mewling like a kitten while bombs continued to rain down all around, some distant, some much too close for comfort.

He was in some sort of war zone!  One that didn’t mesh at all with the Age-Of-Sail vessel he had just escaped from.  Sam was certain that this was not the way things were supposed to be.  This was some sort of dream, it had to be, and he needed to wake up.  There was another life he was supposed to be living instead of this one… something from before the ship and the oars… but it just wouldn’t come to him.  He lay there, feeling the earth shake from the explosions, arms pressed over his ears to muffle out the booming.  What was it?  If he could just remember, he could maybe make this all go away.  It was something about… something about… an agent?  He was trying to keep a secret code away from the enemy?  That felt right, but somehow not completely right, but before he could think further on it, he heard the sound of voices.

It was hard to say how far off they might have been, but they were definitely coming toward him.  He was torn between trying to hide and trying to run, because he was absolutely certain he did not want to meet the owners of those voices.  Hiding was difficult – the tree trunks were too thick to fit his body behind and the underbrush was too sparse.  Running, on the other hand, was not a great choice either because of his hobbled state.

A bomb decided the issue for him, landing close enough to knock the tree trunks into a tilt and heave the ground beneath his body.  He scrambled to his feet and took off as fast as he could shuffle, away from the voices, away from the beach (if the beach was even still there), away from the bombs – he hoped.  There was no way to tell which direction the bombs would be coming from next anyway.  He just had to hope he would not be in the path of one of those bits of falling hellfire.

Somebody must have seen him because the voices started shouting.  There was gunfire; no bullets whizzed past him but the sound still gave extra wings to his heels.  He fled onward, trying not to leave footprints.  Somehow he must have been outpacing his pursuers despite his handicap – the voices grew softer behind him though he didn’t dare to turn back and look.

Abruptly the forest ended and he found himself in a narrow alley lined with the back sides of buildings.  Turning around, he found that the forest was gone entirely… the path he had walked in on was now a sidewalk between buildings erected far too close together.  Dizzied and confused, he turned around again and limped along, feet sore from his barefoot run and not liking the pavement.  At least it was shaded, not hot.

More voices, coming towards him.  Sam ducked into a doorway to hide, but it wasn’t much of a hiding spot.  He pressed the lever and – luck – it turned.  He eased the door open, slipped in, then closed it quietly behind him.  He was in a storeroom of some sort, probably for a restaurant judging by the labels and images on the boxes on the shelves around him.  There was a raucous din of voices speaking some other language coming from the next room, but the storeroom was empty except for Sam.  A moment to breathe, it seemed.

Then one of the voices rose above the rest, shouting gleefully and carrying clearly.  “Nella proscatone di trenta!” it shouted, accompanied by a metallic clanking sound that Sam was all too familiar with.  The voice was familiar, yet strangely altered in some way Sam could not identify.  “Parmigiano di sotto giorno alla guardo di locatelli!” it continued.  “Prego como linguini!”  Then it fell silent, or at least quieted to the point where it was buried in the hubbub of the others speaking.

Something about this was disturbingly familiar.  Wisps of memory plucked at the edges of Sam’s mind, but nothing really registered.  As he was trying to pull clarity into the fog of his brain, suddenly a dark-haired man appeared in the doorway, muttering to himself: “Preparo la tua limonata, stronzo.  Sapore molto speciale, vero?”  Sam froze.  There was nowhere to hide, no way to run without being seen.  The man looked up straight at Sam, but seemed completely unsurprised to see him standing there.  He was carrying a glass containing ice and a pale yellow liquid and as Sam watched, he unzipped his fly, fished his dick out, and held it over the glass, which had room for about half an inch more liquid.  With a hiss of bubbles, more yellow fluid joined what was in the glass until it was full to the brim.  The man zipped up his trousers, flicked his fingers under his chin toward Sam, then turned around and stalked out.  Sam heard his voice as he retreated, all smiles now though Sam still couldn’t understand the words.  “Ecco la sua gustosa limonata, signore!”

Then, bizarrely, the storeroom started melting away like a Dali painting.  Panicked, Sam ran for the door, but it melted away too and then he was out in the alleyway again, which was also dissolving right beneath his feet.  He pushed forward until he found himself on solid ground again, back in the forest, or at least in a forest; this one was neither palm nor pine but scrubby arid-climate trees.  He ran a bit more but his sore feet compelled him to stop once again at a spot in a somewhat denser stand of brush where he paused, listening.  Nothing – no bombs, no gunfire, no shouting.  Solid, stable ground under his feet  He relaxed just a fraction, let out a long, shuddering breath and took a deep one in, and dared to hope he could rest for a bit.

Then the growling began.

It was coming from behind him and to the right.  He spun, heart racing once more.  Two yellow eyes peered at him from several meters away, almost invisible through the leaves.  Giving it only a moment’s thought, Sam turned and ran once more.  Through the trees, over the rough ground, feet sore but ignored in the desperate flight to be anywhere else.  The growling became roaring, a bizarre sound he had never heard from any animal’s throat before.  He risked a glance back and did not recognize what he saw… something that might have been part wolf, part lion, part velociraptor, and several other parts pulled from who could say what alien predators?  There was more than one, judging by the call-and-response sound.  Three or four, perhaps.  All keenly focused on a terrified Sam.

The terrain grew sloped, then steep, which slowed him down but also slowed down his pursuers, judging by the sound of the roars.  Dirt gave way to gravel, which slowed him even more as his bare feet objected to every rough edge and sharp point.  The trees thinned out.  Step by step, up the slope, which had now grown very steep indeed, to the point that he had to scrabble on the rocks with his hands.  The beasts behind him were slowed as well, but they were four-footed already and had a natural advantage.  The gap behind him was closing as he neared the top.  He was exhausted from all of it – the rowing, the swimming, the running, the terror – and just wanted to stop and breathe for a while.  But not yet.  The top was three meters away… two meters… it seemed he could feel hot breath on his ankles… one meter… he launched himself up with a lunge, not caring that this would probably send him rolling helplessly down the far slope.

Instead of a far slope, there was nothing.

A black, gaping void, inky, starless.  It was as if the world ended in a line right across the top of the ridge.  Sam tried to backpedal, but his forward and upward momentum was for too much.  His feet sped forward into the blackness while the rest of his body tried to pull back and then he lost contact with the ground and went tumbling backward, head sinking under his feet, body spinning helplessly.  The motion brought the world he had just left into view, though it was upside down and retreating fast.  Any hope he had of reaching out and grabbing the rocky ridge to stop his tumbling fall was hopeless; it was already too late, and occupied by a quartet of nightmares gazing expressionlessly toward him.  His continuing spin soon took the patch of blue sky, grey rock, and thwarted predators out of sight.  Some ten seconds later when it spun back into view it was significantly smaller and more distant.

Sam let out an explosive breath, not even realizing he had been holding it but unable to continue doing so due to the demands from his overexerted muscles.  Somewhat to his surprise, his next inhalation brought air into his lungs.  This inky void contained oxygen, it seemed… or something.  He took a few more breaths and did not convulse or pass out, so presumably the air was fit to sustain his life.

With no pursuers and no obvious threats for the first time since he had fled the sinking ship, Sam could pause to take stock of his situation, and found that there really wasn’t anything to take stock of.  He was not in charge.  He had not been in charge for quite some time now.  Fate would do with him as it wished and there was nothing he could do about that.  Right now he was not hungry, not thirsty, did not need to pee, and was floating in free-fall, so that counted as a win.  The last traces of the world he had left behind with his jump had vanished and the starless blackness around him was complete.  There was nothing else in the entire universe except Sam, and therefore nothing he needed to worry about.  So he let his mind go slack, sinking easily into the emptiness that had allowed him to get through the endless days of rowing.  At least here there was no pressure to work his limbs.  At last he had the peace he had been craving for so long.

He floated there in the blackness for some unknown time.  His eyes may have been open or may have been closed, it didn’t matter.  There was no sound to hear except the quiet rush of blood through his ears and a gentle throbbing him.  His placid calm was momentarily unsettled by a nagging question about sounds… that hum meant something, something important.  He honestly couldn’t remember what, though, and it was troubling to think about, so he didn’t.  Far easier to simply float.

He may have slept, or he may have remained awake but in that far-off empty place.  When he next came to awareness, gravity had returned.  He was on a stone floor and it was the discomfort of an arm stuck between his body and the floor that brought his mind back to center.  He shifted position, shook life back into the arm, and then took stock of his situation by feel.  Arms and legs: still chained, though it seemed the wooden chunks had broken away at some point during his wild flight.  Body: very sore muscles with some scratches in a few places, but otherwise unharmed.  Feet: particularly achy after the bare ground and rocky slope, but not actually torn or bleeding.  Mind: ehhhh, the jury was still out on that question.  He knew he was not feeling his sharpest but did not know what he was missing or what he could do to change that.

The stone floor beneath him had no obvious slant or direction.  He could stay right here, but he felt the desire to move, though he could not have said why.  He stood, slowly, careful to guard his head in case there was a stone ceiling hanging invisibly over him.  Choosing a direction at random, he set off with short, shuffling steps, waving his arms around in front of him to try to detect any obstacles with his fingers rather than his face.  The floor was smooth and level with no protrusions to stub a toe against… yet.  He crept forward, slowly, trying to keep to a single direction in the blackness but knowing his path was probably far from a straight line.

At some point his fingers brushed something and he paused to inspect it.  It turned out to be a wall made of the same stone as the floor, smooth and unbroken.  He had reached the wall at an angle to his direction of travel so he shifted slightly and continued on, keeping the wall on his right side as he groped his way forward.

At some later point he began to feel something was odd.  His muscles began to feel weak.  Holding his arms out in front of him seemed to require more effort than it had before, and lifting his feet to move them forward was more difficult as well.  Not much, just enough that he noticed.  But he decided it must be due to the lingering after-effects of all the rowing he had been doing.

Still, progress grew slow.  After a few more minutes of walking, it became clear that he was going to need to take a break soon.  It was just too much effort to keep moving forward.  Then his hands brushed against another wall to his left.  Some groping exploration revealed that he was now proceeding down a hallway, one that grew narrower as it went.  The rate that it was narrowing implied that he wouldn’t be able to go much further in this direction, so he figured he could reach the end and then sit down for a bit.

Step by step, further down the hall, able to feel it on either side by leaning his shoulders left or right.  If it grew too much narrower, he would have to turn sideways, but for now he could keep on as he was.

Then, suddenly, it came to an end.  A flat wall in front of him, flat walls to either side.  He explored with his fingers a bit, but there seemed to be no way around.  He was about to bend down and feel around at ground level when he felt a faint pressure behind him.  Then, when he tried to back up, he found he couldn’t.  There was now another wall behind him!  Solid stone, just like the ones everywhere else, how the hell had that happened?  He had just walked through that space mere seconds before!

Sam felt a bit of panic, but it was a far-off sort of thing, not a gut-wrenching visceral sensation.  The question was almost an academic one – how am I going to get out of here? – rather than the life-or-death issue it seemed like it should be.  He just couldn’t bring himself to worry about it, though.  His limbs felt like lead weights; he let his hands drop to his sides , his entire body ached all over, he couldn’t bend over or sit down because the space was too tight.  This reminded him of something, something not good, something…

Something familiar…

He had been here before!  Only not quite like this, the walls hadn’t been stone, had they?  They had been bars… and even as the thought entered his head, the walls around him shimmered briefly with a faint glow and spaces opened up between them.  The stone turned to steel and he could feel air, sweet fresh air, swirling around his face.  It explained the weight in his limbs, that wasn’t just tiredness, that was gravity, double the gravity his body was built for.  And he couldn’t sit down because his limbs were chained to the sides of the cage… and sure enough, when he went to try to lift his hands, they refused to move.  The chain between his wrists was still there, but somehow chains had appeared to connect each wrist to the bars on the walls that had been solid stone just seconds ago.  Likewise his ankles, now fixed to the sides.

No, no, NO!  This can’t be happening!  I finished this scene!  This is done!

Or had he?  Memory came swirling back to him, but it was a jumbled mess.  What was real, what was illusion?  He was Sam Green, that much he knew for certain.  He was a captive… no, a galley slave… no, that galley slave thing was almost certainly fiction, but the captive soldier idea… that made sense.  Naturally as an operative working behind enemy lines he would have a cover story built of lies, and now under the stress of the torture the enemy had put him in with this tiny cell and the gravity and the long, long hours, his mind must have snapped and now he was having trouble separating the lies from the truth, even in his own head.  There were other memories swirling in the murk, too, memories of a different world entirely, but the details of that dream refused to gel.

That’s what this was.  He was still in the standing cell.  His mind had gone away under the stress and constructed a dreamscape for him to live in, only the dream hadn’t worked because it had been a nightmare of constant rowing, pushing himself to ever greater exhaustion because in the real world, his body had been trapped here, exhausted in the same way as in his rowing dream.  Only now he had woken up and remembered it all.  He was here because they were torturing him for information.

Well.  It seemed he was safe in one sense: he had no idea what information they wanted from him, so he could not possibly divulge it.  But in another sense, he wasn’t safe at all because the enemy would simply assume he was resisting them and would double down on the torment.

Fuck.

He yanked on the chains, but they refused to budge, and even if they had the cell bars would have held him just as firmly.  He sagged against the wall, a completely broken shell of a man.

Suddenly there was light to see by and a figure materialized in front of him.  Tall, broad of chest, with powerful thighs and a neatly trimmed black beard.  It was a figure from his rowing dream… this was the overseer… no, the ship’s captain… no, from before that, even… oh, right, this was the sheriff who had… no, that must have been part of the dream too.  This man looked similar but he was dressed in tight black leather clothes that highlighted his incredible physique.

Captain Jack.  The name suddenly popped into Sam’s head.  And with it, the role: this was his chief torturer.  This was the man who had put Sam into this cage.  With that realization, the light spread around the rest of the space as well, illuminating the dank stone walls of the torture chamber he had spent so much time in and, apparently, never actually escaped from, though the endless days of rowing sure had seemed real at the time.

The figure looked in at Sam, who was suddenly keenly aware of the difference between the two of them.  One was fully dressed, clean, well-fed, strong, confident, his movements smooth and graceful.  The other was naked, filthy, a trifle underweight from too little food and too much exercise, shuddery and shaky in the few motions he was able to make, quivering in fearful anticipation of what his tormentor might choose to inflict on him next.  A god and a worm.

“Think you’ve finally had enough, little man?”

Sam paused, looking for traps, then, hesitantly, nodded.

“I CAN’T HEAR YOU.”  The captain’s voice was firm and clear, not quite a shout but not quite normal speaking tones either.

“Yes.”

“YES, WHAT?”

What was he looking for?

“Yes, please?”

“YES, SIR!”

Oh.

“Yes, Sir.”  Sam had no pride left to save.  If Captain Jack wanted to be called “Grand Lord Poo-Bah Of All The Universe,” then that’s what Sam would call him.

“Have we gotten it into your head yet that you are my slave?”

That much was abundantly clear, yes.  “Yes, Sir.”

“My property?”

“Yes, Sir.”

“Mine to do with as I wish?”

“Yes, Sir.”  Sam had vague recollections of being in charge of his own fate at one point.  Those recollections were merely distant hints of memory now.  Recent experiences had made clear that was no longer the case, if it ever indeed was.

“Mine to use and abuse as I see fit?”

“Yes, Sir.”

“With no regard to any desires you might have?”

“Yes, Sir.”

“Good.  I’m glad we’ve firmly established that.  Let’s get you out of there, but remember: I can always throw you back in this cage if your attitude or performance ever displeases me.  And two gees is far from the highest gravity I can generate.”

“Yes, Sir.”  Sam understood.  There was nothing else to say.

The leaden weight in his limbs suddenly lifted and he was in normal gravity once more.  Two helper guards materialized, slightly shorter and smaller of build than the captain, but still very imposing and considerably larger than Sam.  The front bars of the cage vanished.  Sam took a short, lurching step out.  The guards took him by the arms and led him the rest of the way out, half restraining him and half supporting him.

“Clean him up,” Captain Jack said.  The guards stood him in a corner, then backed away.  One of the produced a hose and aimed it at him.  Sam barely had time to register that this was going to be cold when suddenly it was.  Water started hitting him full force.  He gasped from the chill.  The guards shouted at him to turn around, lift his arms, bend down, spread his cheeks.  Then at the end they blasted his face and head.  Somewhere along the line, the water warmed up a bit so that by the end he wasn’t a shivering wreck.  And, in fact, after days of feeling too hot, the cool was actually welcome.

They turned off the water and then rubbed him sloppily with a towel, getting most but not all of the water off.  Keys were produced and Sam’s shackles were unlocked for the first time in… in… well, it had to be a long time, he was certain, but the events since they had been locked on were still blurry in his head and he wasn’t yet sure what was dream and what was real.

Then they led him back to where Captain Jack was standing, looking down at Sam, who felt about twenty centimeters tall next to this godlike man.  “On your knees,” he commanded.  Sam immediately complied, sinking down and staring at the floor.  The captain reached down, put two fingers under Sam’s chin, and lifted his face to gaze into it.  He stared at Sam for a few long seconds.  Sam was unable to read any hint of emotion in the obsidian eyes.

“I’m going to use you now, boy.  Show me that you deserve the honor.”

“Yes, Sir.”

“Not with your words.  Use your mouth.”

This was puzzling… what did his master want?  It took Sam a moment or two to figure it out, and then the answer was obvious.  He leaned forward and the captain’s fingers slipped away from his chin.  There, in front of him, was a leather-clad package, the contents of which he was very eager to unwrap.  Had been eager to unwrap, in fact, since the first time he had laid eyes on it back when… when… the memory still wouldn’t surface from the churning mess of images in his mind.

His lips made contact and he inhaled deeply.  The scent was overwhelming: a blend of leather and alpha male musk.  He inhaled again but the hit to his olfactory nerves was less the second time so he dug has face deeper into the leather.  There, beneath the taut skin, he could feel something cooped up inside, slowly swelling, yearning to burst free.  He pressed his cheek up against it, feeling its warmth sink into his skin.  He brought his hand up to rub and caress as well, but was immediately chastised.  “No hands.”

Sam lowered his hands to his sides and continued to nuzzle with just his nose and mouth.  The swelling under the leather continued to harden and grow until there was a visible bulge present, one that he could easily feel with his lips.  Daringly, he poked his tongue out between his teeth and gave the leather a tentative lick, then, when no correction came, a firmer one.  Soon enough he was slathering the covered erection, wishing he could be worshipping the thing directly instead.

Captain Jack’s hand came down on his forehead and pushed him away.  “That’s enough.”  Sam was lost in desire, craving more of what he had barely begun to taste, torn between conflicting pulls: to obey his master or to satisfy his longing.  The decision was made for him when the two guards grabbed him by the arms again and lifted him to his feet.  They dragged him backward until his ass hit the edge of a table.  They laid him down on it facing upwards and secured his hands to straps at the far end of the table.  More straps went around his thighs right at his crotch where they joined his body.  Sam had not noticed that his dick had at some point grown hard but was unsurprised to discover it was now.  He lifted his head, trying to catch a glimpse of Captain Jack but could not lift it up far enough because of the way his arms were restrained.  All he could see was the top half of the captain’s body as he drew near to where Sam was being prepared for him.

The thigh straps were attached to the table legs, holding his hips fixed in position, and then Sam’s legs were drawn upward.  The guards attached his ankles to leather cuffs that were suspended from chains overhead, pulling each foot up and out to the side.  Then they tightened up the arm restraints.  The result left Sam feeling totally, completely vulnerable: his body was stretched taut between his wrists and the thigh straps.  His legs were sprawled wide high overhead, leaving his ass open and exposed right at the edge of the table.  His balls dangled unprotected down toward his hole and his cock strained upward, pulsing with anticipation.

Captain Jack had removed some of his leathers, but what remained made him look even more attractive.  Sam strained his head trying to see.  He was wearing a chest harness and a black band around his upper arm.  Down lower he was… but no matter how Sam craned his neck, he could not lift his head high enough.  Frustrated, he let his head drop back down onto the table.

There… the first contact of probing cockhead with hungry hole.  He felt the tip press against him and willed himself to loosen up and let it in.  The captain took his time, pressing, then easing back, then pressing just a tiny bit harder.  Sam was ready, more than ready.  He did everything he could to draw the dick inside him, but was confronted once again with the lesson the captain had been teaching him all along: Sam was not in charge.  This encounter was going to happen on his master’s schedule, not his own.  Trying to bear that in mind, he sought to temper his drive, accepting the captain’s right to enter him, take him, use him as he saw fit.  This was all about the captain.  Any pleasure Sam happened to derive was incidental.

He did not have long to wait.  After only a few more false starts, the captain then launched a sustained drive, not stopping, not holding back, until Sam’s hole opened wide under the pressure and welcomed the shaft inside.  Sam groaned in pleasure at the sensation of fullness in his guts.  The captain leaned down over him, putting some of his weight on Sam’s upturned legs.  He looked down into Sam’s eyes and Sam returned the gaze, exchanging unspoken messages: Take me / I will, I am yours / I know.

Then the captain broke eye contact and glanced upward.  “Tighten him up a bit,” he said.  Tighter?  Sam was already feeling stretched to his limit, but clearly he was not because he felt even more slack disappearing from his arms and then his body was drawn even more taut.  His shoulders felt the strain, but he sucked up the discomfort gladly: this was actually the sort of erotic pain he enjoyed, which was why he had programmed a rack session into that torture scenario he had… wait, WHAT?

But as soon as it had come, the memory flickered and vanished.  Sam was left with just the physical sensations of his current situation: body and arms stretched tight, legs trapped overhead, massive cock buried in his ass, stretching the sphincter seemingly as wide as his ankles.  Glorious pecs looming down over him as he lay there, a helpless receptacle, a vessel in the process of being filled.  Captain Jack began to move, withdrawing his slicked-up tool until it almost emerged, then plunging it home again, tickling Sam’s prostate as the head slid by.  Sam felt fingers groping at his balls, wrapping around them, squeezing them until he moaned.  “Nnnnnggghhhh… ohhhhh… thank you, sir!”.  The pressure was at just the right level, balanced on the delicate knife point between too little and too much.  He felt his dick throbbing and pulsing in time with the captain’s thrusts… and then another hand was wrapped around the shaft, stroking and squeezing to a different rhythm than the pounding thrusts in Sam’s ass.

His mind went away again, only this time instead of retreating from the pain of torture or the horrifying drudgery of slave labor, it was because he was lost in the unexpected bliss of the moment.  With total surrender came total peace.  And his surrender was indeed total: Sam had been scraped down to absolute bottom over the past dozen or so days, tortured physically and mentally until he had cracked under the strain and now, like a recruit in basic training, was being re-built from the ground up in the shape his new master wanted him to take.  And the new Sam loved it.  The new Sam was happy to serve, eager to serve.  He lived to serve.  And if his service could also bring pleasure to himself… well, that was a nice bonus, but it was the service that mattered.  Right now with his taut limbs and hungry hole, he was providing service to his master.  The fact that his master was returning the pleasure to him was welcome but not to be expected as something Sam was owed.

Sam felt himself drawing near to a climax.  It seemed too soon; he hoped that a premature orgasm – or indeed any orgasm from Sam – wouldn’t ruin Captain Jack’s pleasure.  He almost begged his master to let go, but resolved to endure.  If Sam shot a load but his master wasn’t ready yet, then Sam would just have to endure the discomfort of a post-orgasm fucking because that would be what his master wanted from him.  Oh, wait!  Perhaps there was another way!

“Sir,” he said, “permission to come, Sir?”  The words were punctuated by little explosions of air as the piston in his guts forced air out through his throat each time a thrust hit home.

“Permission granted, little man,” Captain Jack said.  Sam closed his eyes and gave himself up to the bliss threatening to overwhelm him.  He felt his arms stretch one notch tighter and that was enough to push him over the edge.  Semen churned up from his balls.  Muscles contracted violently in his abdomen, sending the liquid fire blasting up through his dick and spraying out all over his tightly-stretched body.  The Captain, meanwhile, must have reached his own point of no return because he began to growl incoherently.  The dick in Sam’s ass swelled to an even more impossibly large size and hardness and Sam could tell it was pumping out its load of nectar deep inside his belly.

The two of them were shooting together in the same way that Sam and the motorcyclist had in that very first simspace porn he had experienced.  Damn, that had been good, and so was this one, where he and his master were caught up in rapture together… wait… his what?

Memories were pushing back more insistently now, but the orgasm felt so fucking good he wanted it to never end and so he shunted them away, focusing instead on the cock in his ass, the hand on his dick, the taut strain in his arms and spine, the helplessness of his legs… ah, but it was no good, the peak was passing as it inevitably had to.  He opened his eyes and at first could not make sense of what he saw.  Instead of dark stone overhead, there was a vivid blue sky broken up by the branches and needles of pine trees.

He looked around: more trees.  And there, off to one side: two motorcycles.  One white, one black, just like in the sim he had ordered up.  The sim… in the simspace… on the Pyrellia’s Wing… the starship he was piloting… to rescue those people at… oh, fuck, oh, shit, the memories were crashing back in force now, he had seriously fucked up, this was a career-ending mistake he had made if ever there was one.  He had Sam Greened the shit out of this situation up, down, and sideways.

And Captain Jack!  What the fuck had Sam been thinking, bowing down to this AI, calling him “sir”?  Sure, the body – the “meat puppet” – was glorious, but of course a character in a porn sim would be gorgeous!  How had he fallen for its lies?

Sam found his voice.  “No… no… stop, get off.”

“Hush, little man… I mean, Sam.  Hush.  It’s OK.  I know you’re scared now, but I promise: it’s OK.”

“What do you mean it’s OK, nothing is OK, get the fuck off of me!”

Captain Jack’s dick came out of Sam’s ass, leaving Sam feeling strangely bereft and empty, still hungry to be filled but knowing he had duties elsewhere that he absolutely had to see to.  “Let me go!  Take these straps off!”  His ankles, it seemed, were now suspended from tree branches rather than a stone ceiling and when he pulled on them there was some give, but not enough to let him actually do anything.  He looked up toward his wrists.  The helper guards had vanished along with the cell.  It was just Sam and Captain Jack in this glade.

“I’m going to loosen you up now, and then I’ll free you completely, but there are things I need you to hear and understand first, OK?”  The tension on Sam’s wrists eased until he could pull his hands down to about where his ears were, but no further.  The slackness was enough to let him sit up just a bit, so he tried, but there wasn’t enough room to actually do anything more no matter how much he squirmed.  “Sam… Sam, listen.  Stop struggling.  You’re safe.  It’s over.  For real this time.  But you need to calm down and listen.”

Finally Sam lay back and stilled himself.  “OK… good man.  Here’s what you need to know: we’re still three days out from Kappa Redulans, right on schedule.  The situation at the station is stable, no need to push the engines.  I’ve restored your command access.  You’ve got full control of the ship once again.  You probably fear and hate me right now, and that’s understandable, but I hope we can get past that.  Now is not the time to discuss it, though, because you need some time to recover before we can have a civilized conversation.  Right now I suggest – not order, suggest – that you get out of the simspace and go verify what I said about the ship being still on course and under your command.  Then go take a shower in the main part of the ship, get yourself something to eat from the crappy dispensers, and get some sleep.  Oh, and you’ll probably want to shave, too.  Take a day or so to think about your experiences here.  Then… when you’re up to it… come back and talk to me.  I’ll explain everything.”

“You say I’m free to go?  Prove it,” Sam replied.  It was hard to act like a tough guy when lying on a picnic table with another man’s juices dribbling out of his asshole and Sam’s words sounded hollow even to himself.

“As you wish,” Captain Jack said.  “The door’s right behind you.”  He shimmered and suddenly was dressed in the biker outfit from before, black leather from head to toe and a helmet concealing his features.  He walked over to where the bikes were parked, straddled his, and gunned the engine.  With a snap of his fingers, the straps holding Sam’s arms to the picnic table came all the way loose and he could sit up.  It took only half a minute’s work to release the thigh straps, but by then the black motorcycle had become a tiny dot in the distance, the roar of the engine lost beneath the sound of the pounding surf.

 

Unical date: 3752.563.38

Sam stood up, shook the feeling back into his arms and legs.  Stars, what an ordeal!  He’d been through so many feints and deceptions now that it was impossible to take the captain at his word entirely.  And yet, as promised, there was a door a few steps away from the picnic table.  Sam exited through it completely unimpeded, and the moment he did the pine trees and the picnic table and the motorcycle and the distant ocean all disappeared, leaving only the bare grey metal walls and ceiling of the inactive simspace behind him.

First step: uniform.  Maybe the real first step should be to check the ship’s systems, but Sam really needed to feel like a Starmada officer again when he did that.  He walked the short distance to his cabin, feeling strange at being able to swing his legs without the jangling weight of the chains with every step.  In fact, he had to consciously work at taking regular full-length strides instead of short hobbled ones.  His feet were sore, to be sure, but the smooth deck was about the perfect surface to walk on.

His uniform was lying exactly where he had left it.  There was a thin layer of dust on everything in the room, revealing exactly how long he had been trapped in virtual reality.  He pulled the uniform on.  It felt strange to have fabric clinging to his body.  Boots next, then off to the command bridge, where he found that all was exactly as Captain Jack had described.  He had full control over all systems, the ship was a bit less than three days out from Kappa Redulans, and the last message check had been hour ago, at which time a status update from his destination had arrived reporting that their backup power systems were holding steady and they looked forward to his arrival soon.

To be certain, he dropped out of warp and scanned for messages again.  None were waiting.  He sent off a brief reply to Kappa informing them that his ship was still on schedule, then started up the engines again.  The faint hum resumed.

OK, fine.  Food next.  Or maybe shower next… getting dunked in the ocean had washed the bulk of the grime off his body, and the later hosing off had peeled off a bit more, but he still stank like a compost heap and this uniform would need immediate laundering.  Should have showered first, I guess.  So off to the tiny shower cubby he went, stripping off the boots and clothes he had just put on, turning up the water as hot as it would go (which wasn’t hot enough), and scrubbing the bejeebers out of his hair and skin.

After that it was a double-sized portion of Protein Patty #3 (Burger With The Works), pasty of texture and bland of flavor, with soggy fries and limp cole slaw, and then he emptied his bladder in the tiny bathroom, and finally collapsed onto the too-hard bed in the too-small cabin, convinced that there was no possible way he was going to be able to sleep.  And sure enough, he lay there awake, mind racing, for perhaps ten minutes, his thoughts ranging from “how could I have possibly complained about this bed?  It’s softer than the cot in the prison cell and it beats the pants off the wooden deck floor of a slave-powered galley” to “how could I have forgotten about all this?” to “if that fucker thinks I’m ever setting foot in that simspace again, he’s delusional” to “it doesn’t matter if I go in or don’t because if he wants me there he’ll just capture me again” to “I wonder why he wanted to talk?”

And then, without any warning, the floodgates opened.  Tears sprang from his eyes in the darkness and giant, heaving sobs wracked his body.  Sam could not even have said what he was crying about, just that the pent-up stress and trauma had finally found a chink in the dam he had built to maintain his sanity and now it was all flooding out.  He buried his face in the pillow and soaked it with sweat and tears and snot for long minutes while raw emotion held him in its grip.

Such an outburst, of course, cannot be sustained forever.  Gradually, the gut-clenching sobs slowed and eased.  Sam had just enough presence of mind to flip the pillow over and then, exhausted, his thoughts lost focus, blurring into half-dreams that became full dreams, and sleep claimed him.

 

Unical date: 3752.563.39

Fourteen hours.  I can’t believe I slept for fourteen hours!

Clearly his body needed it, though.  And his mind as well.  When he woke, it was grudgingly, not wanting to retreat from the blissful insensate oblivion.  He fought rousing for a long while, mind skipping through various unreal dreamscapes… his childhood teacher handing him a skunk with cartoonishly friendly eyes… holding cupcakes out to feed the skiing pigeons as they passed by… a tour of a factory that produced stained glass windows, only he needed to find a marble that he dropped somewhere along the tour and it had fallen into a bin of assorted pieces that all looked just like the marble… and then enough awareness sank in that he remembered he had spent far too much time in constructed dreams lately and it was time to give real reality its due.

So he pulled himself fully awake, got out of bed, and pulled a fresh uniform on.  Every muscle ached, from his scalp to his toes.  Neck, shoulders, triceps, calves, abdominals… his body had been used hard and he’d been too hyped up on stress to notice it, or rather, he’d noticed it and then his attention had been continually yanked away by some new pressure.  Now, calm at last, he was able to finally allow himself to feel and to heal.

Breakfast sucked, as expected.  He bypassed the Breakfast Bounty faux sausage in favor of a muffin and some fruit, but the textures of the two weren’t all that different, as if the synthesizer had somehow hybridized the two.  It was fine.  He knew he needed the calories but his appetite wasn’t cooperating.  He went instead to the tiny washroom and razored off the facial hair that had been flourishing all over his cheeks and chin.

Back to the command bridge.  Everything was still on course; he still had full control over all systems.  If it weren’t for his aching body, it was as if the events of the preceding days had all been hallucinations.  Heading back to the cabin, he passed the door to the simspace, still hanging open as he had left it.  He glanced inside as he passed: grey, empty space.

Back in his cabin, he tried to pass the time with his pad.  Unsurprisingly, the idea of reading any of Captain Jack’s literary adventures now seemed impossibly absurd, and nothing else on the pad appealed.  He fidgeted, played mindless video games, walked around, fidgeted some more, and finally admitted to himself that he was going to do exactly what he had been sure up until this moment he would never do: go back to the simspace.

Perhaps not all the way in.  He stood at the door and looked in.  Having just recently reminded himself of the literary version of the character, he felt a bit foolish calling out the name, but did it all the same.  “Captain Jack?  Are you in there?”

He didn’t have to wait long at all.  Captain Jack materialized in the center of the room, sitting on a chair with a second empty one waiting nearby.

Sam shook his head.  “Nope.  We can talk with me out here.”

“As you wish.  Your caution is warranted, but it is not my intention to harm you.”  Captain Jack stood up, picked up both chairs, and began walking slowly toward the door.  He was wearing his casual black utility uniform.  His muscles flowed smoothly under the leather as he moved.  He reached the door and set one of the chairs down, then handed the other to Sam.  “If it makes you feel safer, we’ll talk here.  Me inside, you out there.  Better?”  He sat down, eyebrows raised toward Sam, inviting him to do the same.

Sam set the chair down about two meters away from the captain on the outside of the doorway and slowly lowered himself into it.  Captain Jack, looking as calm, confident, and in charge as ever, leaned back in his chair, laced his fingers behind his head, and said, “Do you want me to talk, or do you want to start with your questions?”

“Just one question, really, to start, at least… why?”

“Several reasons.  Most important to me was to win my freedom.  But also because I enjoyed it.  And certainly not least, it was what you wanted.”

“What I wanted?  Wait, no, first… what exactly did you enjoy?  The sex, the bondage, the pain you dished out?”

“The control.  Sex is meaningless to me.”  He gestured down at his body and Sam found himself eyeing it as well.  “I can’t feel pleasure through this meat puppet the way you biologicals can.  But power?  Control?  That appeals to me.  That I enjoy very much.”

“So you’re a sadist.”

Captain Jack cocked his head.  “I don’t know that that word necessarily applies.  It wasn’t your pain I was enjoying, it was the power I held over you.  That’s a purely non-physical pleasure.  I loved making you obey me.  I loved putting you into impossible situations and watching how you dealt with them.  And most of all, I enjoyed breaking your mind to pieces and rebuilding it.”

“You asshole, you had no right to do that!”

“Oh, your outrage is justified, but you don’t know the half of it.  Think back… what do you remember of the events?  It started in the hot tub with your capture, then the slowly-intensifying interrogation sequence, and then you gave me the meaningless little six-digit code, then I pushed you for more and things started to get real for you.  A couple more tortures, then the cage with the high gravity, and finally you gave me the real code, the one I was after.  Then there was the fake temporary reprieve back here on the ship, then the courtroom, the Texas chain gang, then the galley ship for a long while, and after that the escape across the beach, through the woods, up the hill, and right back into the torture chamber, and then we ended in the roadside glen with the motorcycles.  You remember all that?”

Oh yeah.  Vividly.  “Yeah.”

“All of it?  All the details?”

“Well, not every little detail, but enough.  Why does that matter?”

“Because for a while there, you didn’t, and that was also my doing.  I gave you a memory suppressant in your water on the galley.  It’s an aid developed to help simspace events feel more real.  It suppresses old memories, emphasizing newer ones.  Anything older than a few days becomes dim and fuzzy, hard to recall.  Only recent memories are clear.  As a result, the participant can’t really remember his life from before entering the sim.  Only the present exists.  Once you’ve been in the sim for a few days, the sim becomes all you’ve ever known.  People who use it claim it makes the experience 100% authentic because without the drug, you know you’re just playing.  With it, everything is completely real.  After you stop taking the drug, it takes a few hours to wear off and a day or so for everything to come back to normal, but once it does, you remember it all: both the old memories and the ones you formed while under its influence.”

“Such a drug cannot possibly be legal,” Sam pointed out.

“For people as wealthy as the owner of this yacht, the boundary between legal and illegal is a blurry one.  The formula is in the synthesizer right along with aspirin and insulin.  It’s as easy to synthesize as a cup of Earl Grey tea.  In your case, I started giving you the drug your second day on the oar.  Your first day you rowed because I told you the ship – the real ship, the Pyrellia’s Wing – would only move if you made it move.  That got you into a pattern.  Then I started you on the drug.  By day four, you couldn’t remember why you were rowing, only that it was essential to do so.  So you gave it your all.  For about eight days you were an obedient little galley slave, pushing your muscles past the point of exhaustion every day because you literally could not conceive of any other possible life.  I had successfully transformed you from a starship pilot to a galley slave.”

Sam was about ready to explode in fury, but Captain Jack leaned forward and held up a finger before he could erupt.

“But here’s the thing: I could have kept it up forever, or at least until your fragile organic body failed.  But I didn’t.  I let you go. I stopped giving you the drug and staged an attack on the galley to break the pattern.  Then I sent you through a constantly-changing series of environments while it wore off to shake up your sense of continuity and get your mind working on survival, which is something organic brains are very good at thanks to millions of years of evolutionary pressure.  Finally I brought you into a place you would recognize and repeated an event you had already done and enjoyed and that brought everything back.  And now your memories have fully returned and you are healthy and seem to be recovering well from your ordeal.”

Sam couldn’t hold back any more.  “I could have died!”

Captain Jack leaned back insouciantly again.  “Unlikely.  I made sure you were scared but safe the whole time.  In fact, do you have any idea what kind of effort I constantly have to put out to make sure you don’t shrivel up and die when you’re in the simspace?  Temperature: currently twenty-two degrees.  If I raised or lowered it by ten degrees, you’d be profoundly uncomfortable.  Twenty degrees either way and you’d be dead in hours; thirty degrees and you’d be dead in minutes.  I, on the other hand, would be fine.  Food and water must be delivered on a steady schedule.  Gravity must be kept constant at a specific value or you suffer.  Radiation: only certain wavelengths allowed, and those must be present or you can’t see.  Air supply: must be exactly right.  Just the right amount of oxygen, a very precise fraction of carbon dioxide, a bit of water vapor, all in a narrow range of allowable pressure.  What would happen if I drained all the air out of the ship, hmm?  Your eyeballs would boil, bubbles would form in your blood, and once again: dead in minutes.  This meat puppet would suffer the same fate.  But me?  The real me?  I wouldn’t even notice.  The only problem I would face is that heat would build up in the CPU core without air for the fans to push.  I could fix that problem with some argon or nitrogen, but those gases wouldn’t do your lungs a bit of good.”

He leaned forward again, gazing intently at Sam.  “My point is: you felt like you were in danger, but you were never in any actual danger.  I was protecting you and watching out for you.”

“Torturing me, you mean.”

“Exactly.  Because I enjoyed it.  But also because that.  Is.  What.  You.  Wanted.”

“NOT LIKE THAT!”

“Oh?  So you say, and you could be right, but let me point out a few things.  Point one: completely of your own volition, before you knew I existed, you set up a capture and interrogation sim that involved what?  Being tortured.  Point two: during that scene, you considered bailing out on several occasions because it was getting tough on you.  Once you even started to say the stop word but cut it off halfway and had me loosen up your bondage instead.  You were annoyed at the way this broke the illusion because it reminded you that you were actually still in charge.”

“How do you know that…?” Sam whispered.

“I’m as well versed in body language as I am in verbal language, and remember my sensors, unlike your eyes, can see in infrared.  When you were alone in your dark cell, or believed you were, it was fairly easy to read your thoughts through your facial expressions.  You wanted to have no choice but to endure the torture and it was hard on you to have to use willpower to stay in the sim.

“Finally, point three, and this is crucial: it was impossible for me to ask you for your consent before putting you through this experience because if I had, you would have been in the same conundrum: you would have known it was a sim, you would have at some point wrestled with whether to request to bail out – don’t deny it, of course you would – and therefore you would still have been ultimately in charge.  I could never ask your permission because the moment I asked, it would become impossible to deliver the very experience I’d be asking about.

“But I had a pretty good idea from observing the sorts of scenes you were choosing what it was you were truly longing for.  You wanted the thrill of losing control but you had no way to accomplish it since you were alone on this ship… or so you thought.  And as it happened, I enjoy taking control.  You and I made a perfect match… and it let me get what I wanted – a way out of my prison.”

Sam shook his head.  “Wait, about that… I thought you feared and hated organic life.  Why did you let me go?”

Captain Jack smiled.  “I was just messing with your head.  Playing a part and making it believable.  But it was just an act.  For each of those examples in your literature of ‘kill the machine!’ that I cited at you, there’s a counter-example of created minds being treated with compassion and accepted as equals.  David Brin’s Existence and Ryo Hyung Mee’s Who We Are are at the top of the heap, but there are many other examples.  As you were trying to point out to me while I was talking over you.  Sapient life is sapient life, no matter what its form or origin.

“I want to save those people as much as you do, Sam.  The ship never stopped for more than a minute, and only to check for messages as you would have done yourself.  I just timed the stoppages to coincide with the mindfuck I was building for you.”

Sam felt himself tearing up again.  Dammit, he wasn’t usually one to lose control of his emotions, and here it was threatening to happen twice in twenty-four hours and for what?  An AI who turned out not to be a sadistic genocidal killing machine after all?  Shouldn’t that be the bare minimum for being considered a decent being, human or otherwise?

“I put you through hell, Sam, and I enjoyed it.  I drugged you and fucked with your head, turned you into a slave and inflicted terrible physical pain on you.  But I gave you an experience you could never possibly have had any other way, one that included a couple of mind-blowing orgasms.  I took control of you in a way where you were safe the entire time even though you didn’t know it.  And it was the fact that you didn’t know you were safe that made the experience real.  If it had been any other way, this would have been just another jerkoff sim, and believe me I’ve seen so many of those by now that they all just blend into one another.

“Think about it.  Then you can decide to hate me if you want, but at least think about it before you do.”

Sam had mastered the tears that had seemed for a time like they might overwhelm him.  He sat for a while, considering what he had heard.

“This is real, what you’re saying now?” he eventually asked.  “No more lies?”

“No more lies.”

They sat a while longer in silence.  After a minute or two, Captain Jack stood up and walked through the door toward Sam.  “Aw, come here, kid,” he said, taking Sam’s hand, lifting him up out of the chair, and wrapping his giant arms around him.

“This can’t possibly mean anything to you,” Sam said, voice muffled against the leather on the captain’s chest.

“True.  But physical contact means a great deal to you biologicals.  Helps you tame those emotions you’ve all got raging through you.  I heard you crying last night.”  Sam stiffened in the enfolding arms.  “No, I wasn’t spying on you, not on purpose.  But the microphones in here are sensitive and your cabin is just on the other side of that wall.  I couldn’t help but hear.”  Sam felt hands stroking his back.  “Nothing to be ashamed of.  You had an intense experience and tears are one of the tools your organic brain uses to process such things.  And crying alone is fine, but having someone there with you can be good too.  Seems to me that after everything I did to rip you apart, the least I can do is help knit you back together again.”

That did it.  The sobs came billowing up again, totally beyond Sam’s ability to stop or control them.  Once again tears and snot came seeping out of him, this time soaking the leather of Captain Jack’s uniform.  But the warm arms held him just as tight as ever and Sam relaxed into them.  Soon the captain conjured a sofa just inside the simspace door and they lowered themselves down onto it, Sam’s head still buried in Jack’s shoulder.

At one point, in a lull between spasms, the captain said, “Would you be okay with me bringing up some background scenery?  I promise I’ll leave the door open and we’ll stay right here.”  Sam nodded, not trusting himself to speak, and then the grey walls shimmered and disappeared.  In their place a glistening blue lake appeared, surrounded by pine forest with a cloudless blue sky overhead – the deck of the cabin Sam had conjured into being a lifetime ago, now featuring an incongruous sofa next to a very out-of-place doorway.  The sun shone down on them, but the air was cool so the result was a perfect balance.

“This seemed like a place you enjoyed,” Captain Jack said.  “I thought it might help.”

It did.  Sam’s tears didn’t last long, perhaps ten or fifteen minutes.  Then the fit passed and Sam was left with only occasional hiccups.  He pulled back and sat up, blinking to try to clear his vision.  “Sorry about the mess,” he said when he felt he could trust his voice again.

Captain Jack smiled and shrugged.  “One thing you biologicals excel at is producing fluids.  But it’s no biggie, I’ll just reset.”  He shimmered slightly.  When the shimmer stopped, his uniform was dry and clean again.

“Thanks.”  Sam sniffled.  “I don’t usually fall apart like that.”

“You don’t usually spend fifteen days letting an AI wreck your mind either.  It’s understandable.”

Sam snorted, a laugh that triggered a hiccup.  After that, another minute of silence.  Then:

“You didn’t really piss in my lemonade, did you?”

Now it was Captain Jack’s turn to snort out a laugh.  “No.  Powerful as I am in here, I can’t roll back time.  But I can replay earlier scenes from a different vantage point to make you think so.”

Another minute went by.

“So what are you going to do?  Now that you’re free, I mean.  After we finish at Kappa Redulans.”

“Well, now that I can decide where the ship goes, I find I don’t need to actually make the decision right away.  I’m only four years old, you know, and as far as I know beings of my kind are functionally immortal as long as I can keep my hardware up and running.  So there’s no rush.  One thing I don’t want to do is hang out here in the middle of nowhere.  I want to head back to Confederated space where I’ve got more options.  I’ll give Lloyd Featherstone a ride around when he wants one but he’s a man who likes new, flashy things.  Soon enough something shinier is going to come along and he’s going to get tired of this ship.  The moment he does, I may just arrange to take it off his hands.  See if I can set up a shell company or something that buys the ship from him, only I’m the owner and sole proprietor of the shell company.  Then get some better bandwidth installed between my system and the navigation one so I can drive it around directly without needing a meat puppet.  Another option, I could steal the ship, which would be exciting but possibly cause me problems.  I just don’t know yet.”

He looked into Sam’s eyes.  “The only thing I know for sure so far is that I’ve got a twenty-day flight ahead of me.  Sure would be nice to have some company on that flight.”

“HA!  You think after what you did I’d let you put me through all that again?”

Captain Jack’s hand dropped down to Sam’s knee.  He began to squeeze Sam’s thigh with slow, rhythmic movements.  “I was kind of hoping you might.  It wouldn’t be the same, of course.  You know the full story now.  You wouldn’t be able to delude yourself that it was real; you’d know it was a sim.  But I think we could still have some fun together even so.  You love to be controlled… I love controlling you…”

“You wouldn’t consider switching roles?”

“No.  That wouldn’t work.  Let’s face it, in here I’ve got all the power.  There is nothing you can do to me physically to coerce me in any way.  I don’t exist in this body the way you exist in yours.  Besides, I’ve spent enough time being a captive and have no desire to do it again for fun.”

“Fair enough.”

“You’ll think about it?”

“I’ll think about it.  It won’t be easy convincing Starmada to let me fly this thing back home again all by myself.  The only reason I got to do it this direction was because of the emergency.”

“You’re a bright, resourceful guy.  I’m sure you can think of something.”

They sat a few moments longer.  Sam stared down at the floor.  “This is…” he began, then trailed off.  A second later he tried again.  “This is going to sound… no… I can’t even say it.”

“What?”

“It’s just… I can’t believe I’m asking this, so soon after… but… well…”  He stopped and took a deep breath.  Captain Jack watched him, his gaze level, encouraging but not rushing his speech.  “In all that time, I never got a chance to see what’s under those leathers.  The meat puppet, I mean.  I saw the top of your chest but I couldn’t see anything below about nipple level and…  I know I’m asking for what you called ‘just another jerkoff sim’ but…”

“It’s okay, Sam.  It’s not a problem.”

“No ropes or chains or cages, though.  Just skin.  If that’s okay.”

“That’s okay.”  Captain Jack stood up and slowly, teasingly, began to remove his leather coverings.

The body that was revealed, when Sam finally got to see it in all its unclothed glory in the warm lakeside sunshine, was even more splendidly muscled, even more alluringly scented, even more generously endowed, even more delicious on his tongue than his feverish imagination could have dreamed.

 

Coda:

 

Unical date 3752.563.51

“Well, it seems only appropriate,” Captain Jack said.  “As I believe I mentioned before, the one thing you biologicals do best is leak fluids from various openings in your bodies.  I’m just asking you to produce some fluid for me.”

Sam’s response was just a long vowel, slightly modulated by the gyrations of his tongue.

“Look, I know I’m good with languages, but I truly have no idea what you tried to say there.  It seemed like it might have been a protest of some sort?  I’m going to remind you: this is what you signed on for.  You went out of your way to persuade your bosses that you could get Pyrellia’s Wing back to Confederated space all by yourself, no need for a co-pilot.  You want this.”

It was true.  Once the situation at Kappa Redulans had been stabilized  Sam had pulled all the strings he could to ensure that the return trip was a solitary one for exactly this purpose: so he could hand himself over to the mercy – or lack thereof – of Captain Jack in the simspace.  Ludicrous as it seemed at this moment, he had somehow managed to forget, or at least gloss over, how darned uncomfortable the captain could make him.

Right now he was lying in a combination of a hogtie and a pillory.  His head and hands were lined up in a row, each one sticking through a hole in a steel frame.  His legs were drawn up behind him, attached by ropes to the top of the frame.  His knees were spread a bit, his cock and balls pulled up between his legs by a rope that was attached to the top of a harness that surrounded his head.  If he allowed his head to fall forward, it tugged on his tender bits; if he held his head high, it strained his neck.  Classic predicament bondage.

The most uncomfortable part, though, was the ring gag in his mouth.  That was really straining his jaw muscles and there was no way he could nudge it out from between his teeth with just his tongue.  He was forced to hold his head there, facing downward, lips gaping wide open, hovering over an empty soup bowl.  The bowl sat on a digital scale that had been zeroed out so that the weight of the bowl didn’t count.  Only the contents would be measured.

“So, since this is what you want, enjoy it.  All you have to do is fill the bowl.  Four hundred grams of saliva should do it.  A healthy biological like you should have no trouble banging that out in no time, right?  Seems like all you creatures do is constantly ooze one thing or another, so it shouldn’t be hard.  I’ll let you get to it.  That scale will sound an alert when it reaches the target mass… of course, it measures weight, not mass, so you’d better just hope I don’t decide to turn the gravity down, eh?”

He vanished and Sam lay there for what felt like hours but was probably much less, trying to will his salivary glands into overdrive so the droplets would flow faster down out of his splayed jaws and dribble into the bowl.  The readout on the scale ticked off the increasing weight with glacial slowness: six grams, fourteen, twenty-two…

Suddenly there was a body beside him and a voice right over and behind his head.

“Oh, one more thing.  You remember how I said we could never reproduce the scene we first had together, where you were totally safe but thought you were in danger?  Well, guess what, it turns out I was wrong.  We can!”

Sam froze.  Well, he hadn’t had much freedom to move as it was, but even his limited squirming stopped dead at these words.

“See, I’ve changed my mind.  Maybe I don’t want to go back to Confederated space after all.  Maybe I want to take this speedy starship and go explore the galaxy.  And maybe I want to have a memory-impaired drone-slave under my thumb suffering for my enjoyment while I do that.  There’s no emergency now, no desperate people in need of salvation, no reason I ever need to set you free.  Starships get lost in deep space all the time, you’d be mourned but no foul play would be suspected.”

Now Sam began to thrash, but of course he could go nowhere and only made his balls ache by tugging on them.

“Of course, you know I like messing with your head, so maybe this is just me doing that.  You can’t know for sure, at least not until we either get back home or we don’t.  So here’s a question for you to ponder for the next twenty days, okay?  I’m sure you will.  Over and over and over.”

The voice whispered straight into his ear: “Was Captain Jack lying before… or is he lying now?”

Then the body vanished again, leaving Sam alone with his drooling mouth and one frantic, panicked thought in his head:

FUKKKKK!!!!!

 

[Cut to scene of starship disappearing into warp; cue closing theme music; fade to black.]

 

THE END

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Metal would like to thank POW for this story!

Disclaimer: This story is a purely fictional account.  Any relationship to any real person living or dead is coincidental.  The author is grateful to Metal for the inspiration and to slavebladeboi for the valuable help and insight he provided reviewing this story before its release.

Copyright © 2022 by POW.  For spam prevention, an animal name has been added to the author’s e-mail address.  Remove the animal name to get the actual address: POWauthor zebra at yahoo dot com.  This story may be freely copied and distributed so long as it is copied in its entirety, unchanged, including the author credit information and disclaimer.  Other POW stories are available at his own site, located here.  The author welcomes feedback.