Brought to Heel Ch. 02

Conall was filled with equal parts anticipation and anxiety as he clicked the link to the DropOff folder Eon had sent him. He was at home in his apartment, on his own personal laptop, but it still felt like he should look over his shoulder.

Even though he was doing it for a good reason, it all felt somehow illicit. It was either because he was going behind the backs of the other site directors to get the information and communicating with a metahuman to do so, or because he had a fair idea of what some of the content in the tapes would be, or both. It wasn't as if he was going to be watching for prurient reasons, but it had been some time since he was at researcher level and dealt with metahumans regularly. He wasn't as desensitised to their activities as he used to be, and that had him feeling awkward and anxious as the page loaded on his screen.

There wasn't anything explicit on the first page, anyway. A bunch of folders, named according to which area of the site the videos stemmed from. He clicked into one called "containment area Alpha" and found more sub-folders for the hallways and rooms. This was going to take a lot of time to sort through. At least several evenings, if not longer. He would have to thank Eon for organising everything thoroughly. They really hadn't been kidding when they recommended taking a systematic approach. He stopped to retrieve a pen and writing pad before he went any further.

Once he felt prepared, Conall chose to look at the surveillance footage for one of the hallways in Area Alpha first, and clicked into the video.

It wasn't what he was expecting. In fact, it was... A lot of nothing, really. Employees walking up and down at random intervals, researchers coming out of containment rooms when it was time to hand over to the next shift, all the normal comings and goings of a site. Conall clicked forward to a random timestamp later. Still nothing. He clicked a timestamp two-thirds of the way through the whole video.

That was a metahuman orgy in the middle of the hallway. Fucking hell. Conall paused it, face hot, wrote down the time as being confirmed as after the containment breach was well underway, and started choosing earlier timestamps. The ones where everything was normal were too early, and the ones where subjects and transformed employees alike were well into, well, fucking, those were too late. He needed to find when the metahumans in containment began to escape.

Conall decided to work his way back from the timestamp when the orgy had already begun, while doing his best to ignore the imagery on screen. Those metahumans in the recording wouldn't care if footage of them was watched, all things considered. It was more that Conall wanted to avoid feeling like he was doing any of this out of self-interest. He worked back through the footage while letting his eyes unfocus a bit so the figures on screen were more like blobs.

Finally, an hour after he began, he found what he thought was the time when metahuman containment had failed; several metahumans in Area Alpha had emerged from their containment rooms at that time along with former research staff following behind, if the remnants of lab coats clinging to them were any indication... Everything must have snowballed from there. It didn't look like they were released one after the other but rather at the same time, so either this was coordinated by a group of staff who had been compromised, or it was an issue with the remote locking system.

He checked the videos for a few other areas of containment cells around the same time, to make sure. It happened more or less simultaneously. That meant either the site had been deeply compromised by an organised group of staff under metahuman influence, or it had to be the locking system. It seemed unlikely that it was the former - surely someone would have noticed - so for now he would work from the assumption it was the latter.

Well then, he had a time when it had happened, now to figure out why it had happened. Conall chewed on the top of his pencil as he thought about it. It was a simultaneous failure of the containment cells, so maybe something in the electronics, or the security room? The security staff on surveillance duty would have the ability to override the remote locks on the doors. He didn't really know how the technology worked, but he knew Epsilon-1 had a modern remote lock system similar to Phi-2. He remembered the discussion amongst the site directors when a number of sites had installed them at the same time a few years back. If the remote locking system was as much of a security risk as the videos seemed to suggest, replacing the locks again would be a pain, but doable.

After a short break for some chamomile tea, he opened the video from the security room itself. He had always thought having a camera installed there was a bit redundant, but now that he needed to piece together what had happened, he was after changing his mind.

Conall chose a timestamp a few minutes before the remote locks seemed to have failed. Everything looked normal for the first minute or two - the three guards on duty watching the surveillance cameras were chatting and working, with no indication that anything was about to happen. Next thing one of them stood and pointed at a few of the screens, asking the other two if they were seeing the same thing.

The locks on the containment cells had disengaged all at once, the doors to some literally swinging open as it happened. Conall wrote down the time. Now he knew exactly when it happened. He was glued to his laptop as he watched the scene in the security room unfold. The other two guards confirmed that the first one wasn't seeing things. One of them tried to sound an alarm, to use the intercom, to do something to alert the researchers and agents around the site.

Apparently those were all gone dead. As far as Conall could make out from the stream of loud curses the camera audio had caught. The blackout on all site communications was simultaneous, too. That was even more suspicious.

Even knowing everything in the footage had already happened, Conall still felt bad watching the security guards try desperately to get any of their communications to work, before they resorted to pulling out their mobile phones. God, they had to mass-text everyone. Knowing that a lot of the staff weren't supposed to be using their personal phones outside of breaktimes, as well. After the initial cursing, they'd switched into professional mode, though. One called the department heads and the director, while another was sitting and sending out text messages. The third... What was she doing, actually?

It looked like she was watching the other two in between using her mobile. It felt a little strange somehow. Conall frowned. The frown deepened when the first guard got off the phone and went to open the door out of the room. It was locked. He called the others over to help try the door. The one who had been watching the other two shrugged and didn't bother trying to help.

Instead she turned back to the bank of screens and sat down, her hands spread out on the controls. The other two asked her what the fuck she was doing. They were trying to break the door open. Another remote lock...

Conall paused and wrote that down. The first thing to replace in Phi-2 would have to be the door to the security room. What an absolute nightmare scenario. A whole containment breach, and the security team were locked in a room during it. There were other guards on patrol as well and probably some in the nearest break room, but they would have been overwhelmed by trying to respond.

Conall pressed play again, keeping his eyes on the guard who was doing absolutely sweet nothing to help open the door. The others decided to look in the room for something to use as a lever, or to bash the hinges, and that's when it happened. The seated guard's hands melted into the control panel. It looked like black ooze, seeping into the gaps in the electronics. Then the various wires and cables piled in the corners of the room started to writhe like snakes, flowing forward to tangle around the ankles of the two other guards.

Well, shit. The guard had been a metahuman all along.

An eldritch, technologically-inclined one. Who was fairly powerful, it looked like. No wonder the locks and communications had gone down - a metahuman like that could interface with the systems themselves and play them like a piano virtuoso.

He watched with wide eyes as the two guards were dragged across the room by a writhing wave of wires, which tugged them into place on their desk chairs and tied across their arms and ankles and wrists and chests. Both of them were cursing at the guard-turned-metahuman, who simply laughed.

"What are you going to do with us, you freak?"

"Wow, there's no need to be like that. I'm not gonna do anything except sit back, relax, and enjoy the show. And so are you - you can either sit and watch, or sit and close your eyes and pretend none of this is happening. Buuuut -," and here she laughed again, "I know you like to watch, so."

"Yeah right. I'm not a weirdo like you."

"You say that, but you've been switching the monitor back to cell A-27 every time you thought nobody would notice. Like a total pervert. You like seeing the catgirl 'enrichment', don't you?"

"Fuck you."

"I hope so."

The other guard was silent as this exchange happened, seemingly watching as the metahuman in front of them stripped her guard uniform off and sat back on the control panel, a mass of wires and suspicious dark goo creeping up her body to create a fetish outfit that was somehow more sexualised than her naked body had been. Most of her was covered in it - all the way up to her neck - except - her whole pussy was out.

Watching her recline on the control panel and taunt the two guards, Conall felt his cheeks grow hot. Before whatever had tempted her into becoming a lust-addled metahuman, she had been a dedicated guard like the two others. For a moment, he wondered how it had happened, what had finally enticed her into abandoning her humanity and Orpheus' mission, but then he shook his head and snapped out of it. It didn't matter now - what mattered was Conall learning from Epsilon-1's mistakes.

There was some more back and forth between the guards and the metahuman, but it wasn't particularly important. Conall's ears perked up when one asked why she was doing this, but all she replied was "wouldn't you like to know". She ignored the further curses slung at her, her head turned to watch the monitors.

Gradually the guard who had been cursing her out quieted down as well, eyes seemingly fixed on one screen in particular most of the time. It was a strange scene to watch - Conall watching them watch the screens, waiting for what was going to happen. He fast-forwarded a little until there was a change in the scene. It was hard to see exactly from the angle the camera was at, but it looked like some of the wires had uncoiled from the lower arms of the guard who had been cursing earlier. Conall frowned, wondering what that was about.

"I've gone ahead and freed your arms, since you want to touch yourself so badly," the metahuman smugly said.

Oh. That was what it was about.

"Fuck you," was the faint reply.

"Oh, but you're not denying it, are you?" The screens behind her flickered, each one now displaying part of a larger image, of a researcher being held and kissed by two catgirls, the catgirls rubbing against the researcher and each other as slick tentacles fucked all three of them. The image was clear enough for Conall to discern from the security video, and his cheeks burned at the whole tableau.

The screens flickered through more images being relayed from across the site, each as debauched as the first. It had taken such a short time for the situation to progress to that, which had Conall again wondering if the metahumans contained in Epsilon-1 had somehow been communicating and planning it.

As for the guards... One of them had cracked under the onslaught of imagery. From the angle of the camera, Conall couldn't make out exactly what his hands were doing, but from the sounds he was making, Conall could guess. The wires holding him fell away, apparently not needed anymore, except for a few which were caressing him. The metahuman sitting in front was touching herself openly now as well, getting off on watching her former colleague succumb. The images on the monitors changed again and again. The guard touching himself stumbled out of the chair and forward to get closer to the monitors.

There were already visible signs of change on him, even through the somewhat grainy security video. It looked like parts of him were something like wires, or black tendrils, and eyes had opened on random spots on his body. It was frightening how quickly it happened. Given a push in exactly the right direction, the guard let desire win over reason. Then he was suddenly past the point of no return, past the point of retaining his humanity.

All the more reason for Conall to study the security videos carefully - so that his staff wouldn't suffer the same fate, so they would get to keep their human minds and bodies.

Thankfully, seeing the guard's metamorphosis into a many-eyed wire beast had chilled Conall enough that the uncomfortable heat brought by watching so much sexual activity on screen had started to fade. He shuddered at the thought of becoming something like that. But he still watched to see what happened to the last guard.

The first metahuman was looking at her now. She made a show of touching herself, and spreading her legs so her pussy was on full display. Asking the guard if she wanted it. Conall couldn't hear the reply, but he could infer it from how the metahuman stepped down from the control panel, strutting over to stand in front of the guard's chair. The wires binding her onto the chair moved and twisted, letting the guard stand - then pulling in tight again, tying the guard's legs together, her arms to her sides, and criss-crossing in patterns over her body. She fell against the metahuman, who caught her and then pushed her to her knees, hand curling in her hair.

"Lick."

"Yes, Mistress."

Okay. That was definitely enough. Conall turned off the video.

He massaged his temples, thinking about what he had seen. There were a few things he could conclude from the video - the time all the remote locks had disengaged, and how it happened. Next day he would have to put in a request for funding to Orpheus' accounting department to change all the locks in Phi-2. Plus, there needed to be an eye kept on Phi-2's security team until the locks could be changed. Then there would be the question of where to keep the keys, where the spares would be kept - his office, maybe - and who should have access to them. At least it would take a lot longer to go around and manually unlock the containment cells, even if an unauthorised person did manage to steal some.

There should have been fail-safes, surely, for a power failure or something of that kind. Before he turned off his laptop, Conall checked the security videos for the server rooms and backup generator. In both, everything was overgrown with black tendrils that looked far more like tentacles than like any wires he had ever seen. He watched for a few minutes and saw someone come running into the server room to see what was going on, accidentally make contact with the tendril things, and end up covered in shiny black goop, falling to their knees in a wriggling pile. They pulled the next person who entered the room into it with them.

Well, that answered that.

Conall shivered again at the thought of the one guard's transformation, using it to help chase away any lingering physical reactions to the sounds and sights in the video. He really didn't like eldritch metahumans, even when he was still at researcher level. They were just so uncanny. Of course, since he was anything but attracted to them, he had been assigned to the containment of several over his time as a researcher. Eugh. At least he didn't have to do that anymore.

If he was going to sleep properly, he'd need to wind down and relax somewhat, and put what he'd seen out of his mind if possible. Conall walked over to his CD shelves and went through them until he found a particularly calming classical orchestral CD to put on. He made some more tea, and picked up a book he'd been meaning to read, and did his best to relax and not think about anything.