A Measure of Control Ch. 02

Triggers and Warnings

Coercion, manipulation, mild gaslighting, incest, M/s dynamics, forced cooperation, bruising and beatings, nanites, medical implants, mentions of rape.

Mild spoilers; Alex and Victoria consider themselves to be fundamentally good people, however they engage in flagrant manipulative and controlling behaviour. While Nora does eventually enjoy the situation, they should absolutely not be taken as role models and much of what they do in this story is abhorrently morally corrupt. This is not a story about good boundaries or consent, no matter how Alex or Victoria might try to frame it to themselves.

Authors note:

This is my first time publishing. I started this about a year ago and it has been a learning journey; I have no doubt that the writing improves later on, but I have done my best to edit the earlier chapters with my later knowledge. If you spot any continuity errors or formatting / grammar mistakes please let me know!

## Chapter Two

Nora crawled out of bed with a splitting headache. She'd apparently forgotten to have any water before bed, based on just how hard today's hangover was hitting.

She headed for the kitchen, snagging a dressing gown off the back of her bedroom door to cover her nudity. It didn't seem to matter how drunk she got, she somehow always remembered to undress and brush her teeth before stumbling into bed, though she had woken up covered in toothpaste more than once.

The house was quieter than it had been since Alex and his busy girlfriend had arrived. That suggested she was alone for once. So much for getting away from all the adults for a while. Alex was fine, she supposed. Victoria gave her a lot of side eye though. She clearly disapproved of the drinking. Nora made it to the medicine cupboard and started rooting around fruitlessly for a hypo, eventually climbing slightly onto the counter for a better look. She must have used the last one the other evening. Grumpy and with her head thumping she made her usual morning smoothie; fruits, yogurt, and some water to thin it down. Once it was poured into a glass and the blender bowl was in the sink she headed back to her room. It had not taken long to realise Victoria liked to clean, actually like it. Weirdo. Still with no sign of either of them, she assumed they were out and wondered about texting them to pick up some more pain killers.

At the top of the stairs, she was walking past the room Alex had annexed for his studies and saw some hypos on his desk. Score! She'd still text them to buy more, after all the least they could do was get her some meds given their intrusion into her life. But one of these would tide her over until they got back. Pressing it to her arm and clicking the top she felt the familiar pressure of the drugs being forced out of the little canister. She tossed the empty into the bin on her way out and headed back to her room to drink her other hangover cure and maybe get some more sleep. On the way she texted Alex.

An hour later sitting on her bed leaning against the headboard with her drink finished, Nora was sure her feet were going to sleep, but her head was still absolutely pounding, and she couldn't be sure what she really felt. Her gut rot had mostly been abated by the smoothie, either from the sugars or the hydration, but the hypo had done nothing for her head. She must have drunk much more than usual last night. The sound of a car pulling into the driveway a few minutes ago had signalled the return of her cousin and his plaything. They thought they were being subtle but there was no mistaking the smell of sex several times around the house. She'd also overheard her calling him master more than once. She wondered if either of them had ever actually worn a VR helmet. They seemed to think the thing was soundproof.

She laid down to try and let her head settle some more but though she tried to doze, twenty minutes later with the dehydration headache still going strong, it was clear more water was in order. She tried to sit up and found she had almost no strength in her arms. After struggling for a few moments, rising halfway and having her arms slip feebly out from under her she called out. "Alex! Victoria! I feel really unwell. I can't sit up. Help! Please!" Her voice rang out surprisingly strongly given the apparent state of her other muscles. The clear note of worry in her voice sent Alex rushing up the stairs from the kitchen where he and Victoria were putting away their most recent food shop. He opened the door to her bedroom to see his cousin on her bed laying on her side. Her long shapely legs were on full display, the dressing gown having ridden up to practically to her hip. Her hair was in disarray, long blonde strands everywhere. She was trying to push herself upright. The key word being trying. It was like she had no strength in her arms at all. Victoria came up at a more sedate pace, having filled a glass with water and grabbed the new painkiller hypos Nora had texted and asked for. Though she had already put some in the trolley before the message arrived. She'd noticed they had run out when she was doing a shopping list last night.

"I feel really weak." Nora said as he came into the room. Alex came over and gently took Nora's hands to stop her from flailing. He shushed her, and calmly said "Stop. Try to relax. It will be ok. You're not alone. We can get help. Are you struggling to breathe at all? Light headed? Dizzy?" He said all this while straightening her minimal clothes as best he could and helping her into a sitting position. When Nora shook her head to all of these and said "I just have a splitting headache, this morning's hypo didn't touch it, and I feel like I can barely move.   Everything feels really weird, like my whole body's gone to the dentist. It came on really fast. I was fine an hour ago." he was checking her pulse with his fingers on her wrist and looking hard at her eyes. "Ok, you don't seem to be in any immediate danger, but this is really worrying if you can't move. I'm going to call you an ambulance, ok?" He stood up and was pulling out his phone when Victoria came in and said, "Did you say you took a hypo this morning?" "Yea. Thought we were out but I saw some on Alex's desk."

Alex froze. "You used one of the hypoinjectors on my desk?"

"Yea, there weren't any in the kitchen."

"Oh crap."

"What? What's the matter?" Suddenly there was a measure of panic in her voice.

"Nora those weren't painkillers!"

"What. What were they? Why would you have hypos with weird shit in them?! Oh god what have you put in me?" Her voice was deteriorating, and she seemed to have lost even more movement.

"I haven't put anything in you. You used an unmarked hypo!"

"Alex! What did you do to me?"

"Nothing! You did this to yourself!"

At this point, with both Nora and Alex panic yelling at each other and Nora's voice clearly getting weaker by the second, Victoria interjected sharply. "Alex! Is she safe? Should you be calling that ambulance?"

"Yes, call the ambulance!" Was Nora's immediate response.

"Alex?" Victoria said again.

Alex stood practically frozen for a moment then rushed out of the room. He ran full tilt down the corridor and back again, returning with a small silver and black case.

"You don't need an ambulance." Alex said as he started wiping his hands down with a sterile wipe and opening the case. "You're going to be fine. You've injected yourself with medical nanites from my PhD work. There're intended to control muscles and nerves, but they are supposed to have a controller. I'm going to clip one of these to your lower spine. The controller will give you back full motor control. You're going to be fine. I promise, you'll be fine."

Nora, voice weakening now said "Hospital."

"The hospital can't help. Medical nanites aren't like those toys. These ones are designed to fuse to your nerves. You get me? They bond themselves to you, permanently. If they have a controller in place you can guide them to the nerves that need them. You took a shot of them blind and now they are bonding to everything. They won't touch your vital organs, but this controller is the only way you're moving now. I have to do this."

A tear leaked down Nora's face and she tried to nod. It was the barest motion. She was still able to breathe fine, but now she couldn't speak either. Panic was flooding her, and she was starting to hyperventilate. She couldn't feel much anymore. The numbness was equally terrifying. Alex was working just out of her view.

"Help me roll her." he said as he grabbed one of her arms and tried to get an arm under her waist. Victoria put down the glass of water and hypos that had been forgotten in her hands since she came in and joined Alex in carefully rolling Nora onto her front. Alex lifted her dressing gown up over her butt and exposed the small of her back.

She knew her dressing gown was being hiked but couldn't do anything to help, or even adjust her modesty. She just lay there, abjectly horrified, and terrified she was going to die. It took Alex seconds, he cleaned down the area with another sterile wipe, then his hands again. Picked out a controller from the case and pressed it needles first into the small of her back. It was a blessing that they were so easy to install. Alex sending silent thanks to the designers who had spent decades improving medical fusing technology.

"Ok, it's fitted. It will take a while, maybe an hour, to start forming connections to the nanites. It also has to bond into your nerves." He looked at Victoria again. "Help me get her laid out comfortably? The recovery position would be best."

"Of course."

They spent several minutes carefully rolling her and laying her in the recovery position. The bed was a king with a side table on either side so it took a bit of work to get her rolled, along with some clambering on the soft mattress. Both of them talking to her softly until she got her breathing under control. When she was calmer (they checked with 'blink once for no, twice for yes'), Alex sat down in front of her.

"You'll be ok. We've done numerous trials of the technology, including with someone who had no movement below the neck. You're going to find it hard to swallow until the nanite link forms. You're in the recovery position, but you're going to drool a lot. You don't have use of a lot of the muscles in your throat and mouth. But none of your vital organs will be affected, the nanite base code avoids things like the heart, lungs, eyes, intestines, stuff like that." He waited for that to sink in. "I need to talk to Victoria for a moment. We will be out of your eyeline but you're going to be in sight of one of us at all times. You're safe." With that he beckoned Victoria into the corridor. They left the door open and stayed where they could see her. She was laying on the far side of the bed facing the window. Alex moved far enough away that they could whisper without being heard.

"What the fuck do we do?" Alex asked in a terse whisper.

"What do you mean? Is she in danger Master? We should take her to the hospital." Victoria whispered back.

"No, no she's in no danger. She's perfectly safe, this is something we planned for when we designed the nanites. Technicians make mistakes; if they could cause injury during unplanned installation we'd never have gotten through to trial stage. But I have no idea what to do now."

"About what?" Victoria said more forcefully.

"About... what if she tells someone what's happened? This could ruin me. Stealing some parts was a slap on the wrist. Unauthorised human testing is jail time!"

"Oh. I see. Wait, but she's not the first human trial. Surely this doesn't count as human testing? This was an accident Master."

"I'm not a medical doctor, I'm a researcher. I can't prescribe medications. And this is a prototype, it's not passed regulatory. This definitely still counts as human testing."

"Then... we'll have to make sure she doesn't tell anyone Master."

"I mean, if she wants to, there's nothing we can do to stop her."

"We could stop her..." She paused. "Talk to her. She might be willing to keep quiet." at that he nodded and they headed back into the room.

Alex sat down in front of Nora again and leaned back against the wall under the window. "We need to talk about what happens next. You're safe, this will not affect you in the long run. But... the nanites and controller are permanent now. The nanites have already fused themselves to your nerves, and the controller is doing the same. In about an hour you'll start getting mobility back. By then hopefully you'll be calmer, and we can have a conversation about what you want to do next. In the meantime, I just need you to know that you will be fine. You may never even notice that this has happened to you, physically speaking."

Alex's words had started to send Nora back into a state. Something they could only really tell by her increased breathing. But in the end, she clearly calmed back down.

Victoria sat on the edge of the bed just inside Nora's eyeline. She could still rotate her eyes and blink at least. "How are you doing?" she asked, "Are you calm enough for us to keep talking to you, or do you need some space? Blink once for talking, twice for space." Nora spent a moment trying to think, then blinked hard. Then went back to normal. "Ok, good. That's good. We have to talk to you about what you're thinking at the moment. Alex is worried about what might happen to him if what's happened were to get out."

Internally Nora was thinking that right now she didn't care what happened to Alex after this. She just wanted to be able to move again.

"If you could have a think about what you might want to do when you're up and about again that would be really good." Alex added. "In the meantime, we're right here."

It went faster than expected, just 45 minutes before Alex got a ping on his phone to say that the wetware had finished its bio-integration. Once the controller was attached he was able to pull up the progress. He had to go into the console and start the network mapping phase from command line. There wasn't a GUI for a lot of this, but he got a progress bar in the form of a slowly expanding line of dashes with a percentage on the end. He showed it to Nora who blinked a few times but that was all she could really do. "The controller is programmed to give you control slowly as it builds its map. We found that it was important for people to have time to get used to the new sensations. Or in your case, having them come back too suddenly."

Nora's panic had been able to subside dramatically over the last 45 minutes. She wasn't in any discomfort, she seemed to be stable, she was breathing fine, and the throbbing of her hangover had been muted with the numbing of everything else. She'd had time to think about what she wanted to say when she got her voice back, little of it was pleasant. Alex could get stuffed if he thought she wasn't going straight to a hospital and then calling the police as soon as she could. This was assault, at the least. She felt so violated.

She got feeling back in her right foot first, the sole tingled for a moment and then she could wiggle her toes. Alex was absorbed in watching some kind of readout on his phone. She assumed something to do with her. As a result, Victoria noticed the foot wiggle first and called Alex's attention to it. The next thing she got back was a random portion of her back. Then almost her whole left arm. Ten minutes of this went by and though she was still not really able to move about she felt like the whole world had returned. Including her voice, though it was warbly and weak.

"You asshole! You total fucking asshole. How could you do this to me? What the fuck! I am going straight to the hospital to get this shit taken out of me. You fucking prick. And you're driving me!" Nora's first words in over an hour were much less well thought out than she had hoped.

"They can't take it out of you. I've told you that."

"They damn well better be able to! I am not living with that thing in my back."

"You injected a random hypo. This is the fucking consequence. Did you not notice the complete lack of labels on it?"

"You shouldn't have left stuff like that laying around!"

At this point Victoria interrupted to try to bring down the tension. "Please can we stop. It doesn't matter who's at fault here. The important thing is that you're safe, and you are safe." She gave Alex a look as she said that; he was the one who was sure of that, "There is no reason for a hospital trip. Hopefully in a few days we can all put this behind us."

Alex took a deep breath and tried to continue more calmly but Nora got their first "Fuck. OFF. This is not getting swept under the rug! You violated me!"

Internally Alex was seriously beginning to panic about the state Nora was in. She seemed hell bent on tearing out of the place as soon as she could. She wasn't listening to a word he was saying about what had happened and he'd decided over the last forty-five minutes that he damn well wasn't going to jail for someone else's mistake. Nora still couldn't do much more than feebly flop about. She seemed to be able to move all of her limbs again, but the system only read just over 50% complete. He once again admonished her to keep mostly still lest she hurt herself. There was a way to go before she'd be able to walk, or even hold a glass to her lips.

"I'm going to get you a straw. You've not drunk anything in hours." Alex said and stomped out of the room. He paused in the hallway to calm his heartbeat a little, leaning back against the wall for a moment. Then set off to the kitchen at a slow walk. He needed time to think. Opening his phone he typed in the pause command. His finger hovering over the send button. Momentarily he hesitated, then with a deep breath he sent it, stopping Nora's recovery and parking her in indefinite limbo. His heart thundered as he grabbed the straw and walked back up. When he got back to the room Nora and Victoria were silently watching each other, Victoria had wiped Nora's drool up while he was out of the room. He put the straw into the glass and held it to her lips. Despite her rage at what had happened she sucked down the liquid greedily. Once the glass was back on the side he held up a hypo, "Paracetamol? For real this time?" She knew the water would help but a hypo right now would really take the edge off the rest of her hangover now that it was coming back in force. Compared to an hour of near total numbness it was like a hammer on her skull, so after a moment she nodded and closed her eyes while Alex pressed it to her upper leg, just below her gown.

Looking at Victoria he said, "Can I talk to you again?" and nodded at the corridor.

This time he walked down the hallway almost to the stairs, Victoria a few paces behind. He pulled out his phone and silently showed her his screen. Her eyes went wide. "You paused it?!" she said in a shocked whisper. Alex nodded. He had been panicked, but having heard Nora talking he was now mostly angry. "I needed more time to think. I can't let her just run off to the police. Hearing the way she's talking... This is all her fault! She did this to herself, and she seems determined to make it my problem." Alex paused for a moment, "You said we could make her keep quiet. Pet... did you mean, is your slave program... How functional is it? Like, is it in a state we could use it?"

"We'd have to be really careful, just the core and obedience code. But it all works." Victoria's eyes glittered slightly. This was an awful use of her work, but it might save them some serious heartache.

"Not for anything nefarious. We just need to stop her talking about what's happened."

"We're talking about directly controlling someone. That's nefarious on its own Master."

"I don't see what choice she's leaving us. I've tried to talk to her. She's angry, she's scared. It's probably the best way to give us more time to talk her down. It's just to give us time to talk to her without her destroying our lives."

"Could we just, leave her on pause? She's helpless like this."

"If we want to be wiping her, carrying her to the toilet, feeding her... She'll never trust that she's safe and well if she never gets better."

Victoria stared at Alex's pleading face for a moment before looking at the floor. They couldn't do this. Could they? Nora already felt violated. This would make that feeling much worse. Make her harder to talk to. But then, did that matter if they suddenly had weeks to convince her? Their lives would probably be destroyed if she went to the police. This would, at worst, just be delaying it.

"It compiles. The core functions all work. Master, are you sure about this?"

"Hell no. This is so messed up. Is your latest version on our shared drive?"

"Yes Master."

He headed into the lab, beckoning her to follow, and sat down at the computer with Victoria leaning over his shoulder.

He logged into his machine and pulled up the code his slave had been working on for years. It was a work of art. It had been built and rebuilt, refactored again and again. He knew most of it. Having consulted over the content for many hours. Often while holding a vibrator to her clit while they talked. Sometimes even leaning over her shoulder with it while she typed. Pressing it against her and edging her again and again while she created new and ever more devious measures of control. All intended to turn herself into the most obedient slave they could imagine. He was about to sully all that work in one swoop.

Under her direction he compiled the code directly to his phone, and when it was done and the compile had been verified, sent it to Nora's chip. They argued several times back and forth over whether this was the best course of action, but they couldn't see a better way to keep this under wraps. By the time they were done Alex's heart was pounding out of his chest. He restarted the network mapping, locked his machine again, and they headed back down the corridor to Nora.

"Where did you go?" Nora was on him the moment he came back. "I'm not getting any stronger. I'm still all floppy. You said I would go back to normal."

"You will. Just give it time. I've just updated the code on the controller."

"Why?"

"Do you never update your phone?"

She narrowed her eyes at that. Fairly convinced there was more to it.

Alex sat down on the edge of the bed, just out of reach. "Please. Please just stay here. There's nothing the hospital can do to change what's happened." He pleaded.

Nora glared, "You. Are. Taking. Me. To. The. Hospital." biting off each word.

"If you go to the hospital, if I take you, they will have to report what's happened. I could go to jail."

"And if you did it would serve you right!"

"I didn't do this to you! You took the nanites yourself!"

"I'm going to the hospital and if this gets you in trouble then you'll deserve it." She looked at Victoria pleadingly, "Please. If he won't take me, I'll call an ambulance."

Victoria looked uncomfortable as she said, "It's not my decision."

They lapsed into silence for the next 10 minutes until Alex's phone beeped and he told Nora that she should slowly try to walk about. She shuffled to the edge of the bed and swung her legs over the side. With a glare at Alex, she placed her feet down onto the floor and lifted herself upright. Alex stood with her ready to catch her if she fell. Everything seemed normal to her. She felt relief flood through her so hard her scalp tingled. Taking a few tentative steps, nothing felt amiss. She was... fine?

"Right, take me to the hospital." she said.

"First we need to test your balance and such. I want to do the standard post implant tests. Put some clothes on." Alex said, and then beckoned Victoria out of the room as he started to walk out.

Nora was getting used to glaring today but she went to the wardrobe immediately and started to pull out her underwear. Then heard the door close behind her.

A minute or two later she came out of the bedroom fully dressed in grey sweatpants that hung just below her hips and hugged her in all the important areas, and another of her tight stretch tops. This one bared her midriff and was dark red with long sleeves.

"Go and get your balance plate and come to my lab room."

"When these tests are done we are heading right to the hospital! I'm only humouring this because you're the supposed 'expert' on this stupid technology." but she was already moving down the corridor to go get the balance plate.

Alex and Victoria followed and diverted into the lab while Nora headed down the stairs. Victoria was quiet for a minute before she said in a whisper "I'm going to have to work out a totally new addon for this. We can't leave her unable to refuse requests. With just core and obedience installed she'll have to obey any instruction given to her. Anyone could have her do anything."

"I'm not planning to leave..." Alex cut off as they heard Nora coming back up the stairs.

A moment later she came in carrying a stability training plate from her yoga equipment. "Wait there while I boot up and get the diagnostics open." He told Nora.

"Could you not have been doing that while I was getting this thing?" she replied, indicating the balance plate in her hands.

Alex ignored her and started up his diagnostics tools. He'd coded most of it himself, but he was no hot shot in the software department. Not like Victoria. She had several patents against her name and a couple of bits of niche scientific software that she wrote and maintained for a living.

With the 'lab' being a bedroom most of the time, there was a single bed that they had pushed against one wall, and the side table had been hefted on top of it. Victoria had quietly perched herself on the available part of the mattress to watch. All the rooms in the house were generously sized but every inch you could get was useful when you had several machines to set up. However, after some deliberating he'd not bothered with a table for those. Instead stacking them on top of each other on the floor. Which meant that now there was actually a nice patch of floor. He'd had Victoria kneeling there a few times since they arrived, and she had also spent a fair amount of time sitting there with her laptop between her knees.

"Ok put the balance plate on the floor and step onto it." He was recording everything coming from Nora's control chip. "Bend at the knees, low as you can." He wasn't looking at Nora, just at his screen, so he didn't see that she basically put her arse on the floor. Nor did he see that she was once again glaring angrily at him.

"This had better not take too long." She said, "I want to be at the hospital asap."

Alex ignored her. "Stand back up." She did.

"Stand on one leg." Again, she did.

"Swap legs." She put one foot down and lifted the other.

"Raise it higher." Alex turned around to see Nora on one leg, almost perfectly still, with her right knee about level with her hip.

"Straighten your right leg out to the side. Point your toes." Nora gave him a look that said she didn't like him very much right now, but her leg did as asked.

"This does not seem necessary." She said.

"It's important we know that everything works at it did before. Up on your toes." Nora raised up onto the ball of her left foot. "It's insane that you can do that, you know that?"

"Fuck you."

Alex managed to ignore the vitriol "Come down off the balance plate, do some stretching exercises." Alex turned back to the screens and checked the data logging. All working fine.

Nora, for her part, was beginning to feel odd. She wasn't entirely sure she could have gotten down off the balance board, and when Alex said she should, she had wanted to move it out of the way to do the stretching but had not done so, instead stretching in front of it. She was moving through forms slowly. She figured the point here wasn't to stretch so much as to use her existing range of motion so the computer could capture data.

"Ok stop. I have all the data I need. How are you feeling, any motions feeling odd? Numbness anywhere? Anything you thought you should or shouldn't be able to do?"

"I feel fine. Everything feels normal." The emphasis on 'feels' did not go unnoticed.

"What's the matter?"

"I'm not sure. I wasn't sure I could have gotten down from balancing. I want to go to the hospital now."

Alex looked at her for a long moment. "I was really hoping by the time we were done with the tests you'd understand that you are fine. That you didn't need to go."

"Of course I still need to go Alex!"

Alex looked at Victoria for moment. Then back at Nora. "Please don't do this." he pleaded.

"If you're not going to take me, I will phone for an ambulance."

Alex sighed. Victoria looked pensive. He took a deep breath and sealed their fates. "You will not call an ambulance. You may not leave the house or communicate with anyone outside the house for any reason, in any way."

"What?! You don't honestly think you can keep me here?!" Instantly Nora was on her feet. "You fucking arrogant prick!" she stormed out of the room and down the corridor to her bedroom, snatched up her phone from the bedside table before storming back the other way. She unlocked it with her finger as she walked and opened the dialling app, but she couldn't make her fingers dial any numbers. She didn't understand what was happening. She thought maybe the phone was playing up, she closed the app and opened it again, but it really seemed to be her fingers.

She got back to the top of the stairs and Alex shouted, "Come back in here and sit on the floor."

She turned, swore at him full volume "FUCK OFF." but found herself walking back into his lab and sitting down. She tried to get up again but couldn't. She seemed to be able to move just fine, but could do nothing that involved getting back up off the floor.

"What the fuck have you done you asshole?" She screamed at him.

"Be quiet." he said in a panicked response. They may be in the middle of nowhere but that didn't stop someone being close enough to hear a woman screaming.

It was in that moment that she really realised how much trouble she might be in. She didn't know what was happening, but she was stuck. Her mouth flopped open and closed several times. No sound coming out. She tried to scream but created not a whisper. For the third time that day she found herself hyperventilating with panic.

Victoria was knelt next to her, "Nora, you're not in any danger. No one's going to hurt you. Alex just doesn't want to go to prison for your mistake." Nora sat hyperventilating, staring wide eyed. "Nora. Nora!" She couldn't look at either of them. Her eyes were blurring over with tears. Her head started to swim from the overdose of oxygen. She had no idea that she'd just collapsed sideways.