Absolute Yes Ch. 07 - 08

Chapter 7 - Next

24 September 2025

At the end of the regular working day, the two women were enmeshed in a new phase of their work, with now-cool cups of canteen coffee abandoned on a lab bench. The hours of conditioning had taken hold, and Rebecca was fully committed to the same mission as Jenny. Once she stopped fighting, some of Rebecca's personality started to resurface as well.

Jenny had set Rebecca -- Subject 04 -- in front of a series of monitors arrayed to fill Rebecca's range of vision. She remained terrifyingly still, her blonde hair pulled back, her gaze darting from monitor to monitor to follow shifting images of women being selected by an AI filter from various internet newsfeeds from the London area.

"I feel like we're hunting in the dark," Rebecca mused. "You haven't established a template. All you know is the end result that you are seeking."

Jenny pondered her colleague's comment. I know that it wouldn't be wise to keep poaching from the women in this building, but that idea keeps rolling through my mind. I tasked Rebecca with searching outside because she won't hold back out of fear or caution.

"I trust you to pick up on the things which Master will desire in our future subjects," Jenny said out loud. "Tell me about the women you are spotting, and who seems promising to you."

Rebecca's head tilted at an unnatural angle. In less than a day, Jenny already associated that gesture with the movie depiction of Voldemort. That association was both disturbing and deeply arousing.

A series of women flashed onto the monitors, the latest batch of many theoretical options. Rebecca leaned forward slightly, the light reflecting in her dilated pupils. She leaned towards the first woman, a local political administrator.

"Too much friction," Rebecca said matter-of-factly. "This one spends her life saying 'no.' She has built a fortress around her ego. To break her would be a delight, but if the Master wants rapid assimilation, she would be too risky. The people around her would notice far too quickly."

Jenny nodded. "Agreed. And the second one?"

Rebecca's eyes scanned silently over a nursery school teacher featured for work with special needs children. "Too much of a bleeding heart," Subject 04 said, her voice devoid of pity. "She would hurt inside each time another woman was welcomed into Master's care. The virus would twist her into something undesirable."

"Well put," Jenny said. "Trading her children for Master might trigger a psychotic break. We need someone with a strong 'container' for the Master to fill."

Jenny pointed to a story in a local newspaper about a muralist who had just completed a commission in Shoreditch. Sarah Jenkins. Twenty-four years old. A junior project manager for a logistics firm, but with greater passion for painting and supporting her community.

"This one could be interesting," Jenny said excitedly. "Tell me what you see."

Rebecca read the article and scanned the photos, barely blinking until she finished. Then she blinked repeatedly, as if she were switching between mental cycles.

"She is remarkably unremarkable." Rebecca spoke the words without intending them to be derisive. She just had a way of cutting to the chase, and even more so now. "She is likely the backbone of her firm, a daughter who never complains, and a girlfriend who always agrees on the restaurant. But... she is also deeply passionate. It's obvious from her art that she feels and that she is capable of committing wholeheartedly to something important to her."

Jenny continued the analytical dissection. "Her life is nothing but noise, except when she is painting. I bet she uses a meditation app four times a day, and owns a weighted blanket to feel held.. She is starving for a Master to give her direction, but she just thinks she's stressed."

Rebecca leaned closer to Sarah's image, her fingers reaching out to touch the cheek on the screen. "She's a vacuum. She's spent her whole life trying to be 'perfect' for everyone else. She has no core of her own. She's just a collection of echoes, which she projects through her artwork."

"I think you may be right," Jenny said. "Since we don't know the Master's aesthetic, Sarah can be our canvas."

Jenny zoomed in on one of the photos - a candid shot of Sarah talking with some local councilor. Her face was classically symmetrical, her hair a lively shade of auburn, her expression one of polite enthusiasm. Jenny cocked her head to get a different perspective.

"Yes, she is a good choice."

***

The decision made, the reality of the passing hours finally caught up with them. Her energy had not flagged since Jenny kissed her, but Rebecca's hunger had become unavoidable. She prevailed on Jenny to take a break, and they walked from the campus to a local curry house.

Rebecca took a heaping bite from her naga. The spicy mixture made Rebecca's eyes water. Just right, she thought to herself. Then, to cool the burn, she took a swig of her IPA, and couldn't fight down a soft belch.

"Classy, bitch," Jenny teased.

"What are you talking about, skank?" Rebecca slashed back.

"What man is gonna want a nasty cow like you?"

The two women broke down together into fits of laughter. The tension of so many hours washed away as they ate, drank, and talked.

But their new reality never quite left their minds.

"Jenny, how do we prepare someone for a man she hasn't met? How do we ensure she is ready to be his, completely, before he even sees her?"

Jenny leaned back in her chair and thoughtfully sipped her beer. "That's what we have to experiment with. We can't just erase her, nor would we want to. The goal is to develop a state of high-arousal need for her. She needs to be taught to crave closeness, and encouraged to give her obedience. I am an architect for him, you are an advocate, and she will be a vessel. By the time we present her to him, she will be like a tuning fork, vibrating at a frequency only he can calm."

Rebecca smiled. "That sounds so hot. Almost like a London geisha."

Jenny raised her bottle, which Rebecca cooperatively clinked. "Cheers."

After the two women finished their meals, they made their way back to the lab, enjoying the cooling evening and watching the people strolling down Shaftesbury Avenue. They agreed to put in a little more work tonight, after Rebecca extracted a promise from Jenny that she would actually go home tonight and get some rest.

Back at Jenny's workstation, she and Rebecca were checking Sarah's social media feeds, and pondering the woman's future. "Perhaps he will want her as a domestic," Jenny pondered. "Or as a public trophy, who he can then use in private to satisfy his most intense whims. That is the beauty of this girl. By the time we are done with her, she will be sufficiently hollow that she can fill any role for him. We will give him a blank cheque, so he can write any desire he wants onto her soul."

The two women spent the next hour refining the acquisition plan. They planned to effectively erase this version of Sarah. They would use Sarah's own phone to send a series of erratic emails to her boss and family, to simulate a sudden, dramatic departure to a retreat in another country to "recharge her batteries." The cover story would buy two weeks of uninterrupted opportunity to observe and deeply condition the newest subject.

While trying to mimic what she anticipated Sarah's written voice to be like, Rebecca paused, and her head canted to the right.

"Jenny, is there any part of you left that remembers being like her?" Rebecca asked, watching for any reaction. "Before you got yourself... like this?"

Jenny didn't blink. "I remember the weight. The weight of having to choose what to wear, what to say, who to be. I remember the constant, nagging fear of doing it wrong. I remember the doubt of whether I belonged. Whether I was good enough. Whether I would ever succeed in this cut-throat business. Fuck, I was driven by all of those doubts. That's why I published in the forum. It's why I kept doing this research - the fear that I had sunk years of my life into a dead end and had nothing to show for it."

She paused for a moment, before she busied herself briefly with some journal notes. Then, abruptly, she continued her monologue. "I remember that it was especially hard being a woman. And especially a pretty woman. Did anyone actually take me seriously for my intellect, rather than thinking I got this slot because my tits are nice, or because I've got pretty eyes, or because I'm 'fuckable' enough."

A serene smile spread across her lips. "Now, there is far less doubt. I cannot do anything wrong, because I am committed to this path for the Master. I pray to God that I find him, and soon. Because thanks to this virus, he is all I have."

Rebecca nodded and smiled, because she understood that reverie also. "Sarah will love the silence, Jenny. She will love it more than she ever loved her own life. And she will thank you for it."

Jenny turned back to her note taking, a sense of warm triumph settling in her chest. The Master would be pleased. They were no longer just selecting subjects; they were engineering a new species of devotion.

"Tomorrow, you'll start your surveillance," Jenny instructed. "I want you to know her routine. You'll be the one to meet her. To take her."

Jenny closed out her records, and powered down the electronics. She pulled the memory stick from the office computer so there would be no trace of the secret aspects of her project lying around.

She watched as Rebecca busied herself with her own shutdown procedures. She thought about the two of them: the architect and the advocate, already at work on their next masterpiece of erasure.

"Rebecca, tell me something," Jenny said. Her voice was softer, lacking her usual clinical edge. She turned, leaning against the cold glass of the exterior window. "What do you think about me? If you were analysing me as a potential subject... what would you recommend for me?"

The air in the room seemed to thicken. Rebecca didn't move her head, but her eyes tracked across Jenny with slow precision. For a moment, Rebecca drifted into a strangely doll-like vacancy, as if the lights had turned off inside her. Then the emerald glow flashed for a moment, and her expression returned to something resembling Rebecca.

"You have too many anchors, Jenny," Rebecca said softly, her voice like silk. "You are still tethered to the why. Your work has always been your life. You used to watch everyone in the building from behind the glass of your office, because you were uncomfortable to mingle with everyone else. Even after I finally pried you away for pub crawls, the rest of them are still strangers to you."

Rebecca packed up her papers and her tablet, no longer facing Jenny, while she continued to address the question. "Now, you feel the weight of the hand that will someday hold your leash, and that scares you. I think you are enjoying the power of being the architect of this discovery, but the power you think you have is just another form of noise. It means that you are still Jenny."

Rebecca stepped forward, entering Jenny's personal space. Jenny didn't flinch, though her pulse quickened.

"If I were planning your assimilation," Rebecca continued, her gaze dropping to Jenny's throat, "this subject would recommend an extended, methodical breaking. No VR goggles. No voices. No flashing lights. Just the sensation of your own breath until you realise it doesn't belong to you. I would recommend removing your intent. You spend all your days deciding things. It must be so... exhausting."

Rebecca reached out, her fingers hovering just millimetres from Jenny's cheek, mimicking the way Jenny once handled her.

"There is a version of you that can be quiet," Rebecca murmured. "A version where you don't have to be the one who knows the answers for yourself. You are too highly strung. Your nervous system is a wire pulled too tight. So if I were to prepare you for him, I would start by breaking your clock. I would take away your sense of time until a minute and a month felt the same. You would wait in your place until the concept of I simply evaporates."

A small, twisted smile touched Rebecca's lips. "You've built a beautiful cage, Jenny. But I think, deep down, you're jealous that you're still outside of it."

Jenny felt a cold shiver trace the length of her spine -- not of fear, but of a dark, resonant recognition. She looked into Rebecca's bright green eyes and saw the terrifying peace she had spent these months and years chasing.

"An insightful diagnosis," Jenny said, her voice steadying as she regained her professional mask. She stepped back, breaking the spell. "Perhaps one day, when we find our Master, I'll take your recommendation under advisement."

"You won't have to," Rebecca said, shouldering her courier bag and heading out to the dark corridor. "Eventually, everyone wants to stop screaming. Even the one who holds the wheel."

Chapter 8: Introspection

25 September 2025

The drive home was a blur of sodium lights and the occasional metronomic clicking of the indicator. Jenny usually found comfort in the quiet calm of her Nissan Leaf. But tonight - or was it morning, since the digital clock read 00:15 - the car felt like a pressurised chamber. Rebecca's silken whisper of a voice reverberated in Jenny's mind, louder than the hum of the tyres on the road surface.

"This subject would recommend an extended, methodical breaking. No VR goggles. No voices. No flashing lights. Just the sensation of your own breath until you realise it doesn't belong to you."

Jenny pulled into a parking spot not far from her flat and powered down the car, but she didn't get out. She sat in the dark, her hands still gripped at ten and two. Even miles away from the lab, she could feel a phantom thrum in her blood -- perhaps some sensing mechanic of the virus -- tethering her to Rebecca. She looked at her knuckles, pale and sharp under the dim overhead light. She had always been a creature of intent. From the moment she entered her doctoral programme, Jenny had been a scalpel: focused, cold, and designed to cut through the messy noise of human biology to find the underlying signals.

She had been a passionate scientist for nearly a decade. Passion, however, was a misunderstood word in her lexicon. To others, it meant heat, fervour, and perhaps a touch of madness. To Jenny, passion was a sustained, icy pressure. It was the thrill of the sequence, the elegance of a neural map being deciphered. She loved the work. She loved cracking the code. Finding the answer. She loved the way human beings could be reduced to a series of chemical levers and electrical gates.

But as she sat in the silence of the garage, she realised she had never applied any clinical rigour to her own soul.

She thought of her acquaintances ... she couldn't really call them friends. There was Marcus, a venture capitalist who she once convinced to pay her expenses as an investment, because for a short time he could dream of the value her hypothetical future patents could hold. There was Adrianna, a fellow researcher in... whatever discipline she was in, who shared her struggles with the roadblocks of ethics committees, before she gave up and accepted a low-pressure teaching post in Germany. The others who came to mind were really just people she crossed paths with at gallery openings she didn't really want to attend, or high-end bistros with food she didn't really like. They were accessories to a successful life. They provided the necessary social faff to keep her from appearing like a ghost. But when they spoke of their lives, their children, or their anxieties, Jenny listened with the detached interest of a biologist observing a complex but ultimately predictable pheromone trail.

She had had lovers, too. Men who were physically striking, intellectually competent, and conveniently transient. In the heat of the act, she had often found herself analysing the physiological response -- the dilation of pupils, the spike in cortisol, the rhythmic contraction of muscle. She noticed when her nipples would harden or she would get damp between her thighs, which led her to think about what chemical reaction in her nervous system was triggering it. She was insightful enough to provide them with what they needed, and sometimes they did the same for her. She performed the role of a considerable partner with the same technical proficiency she brought to a laboratory titration. But she had never felt the why.

Jenny had never felt that terrifying, ego-dissolving pull that people called love. Her relationships had been posh and empty. To her, love was a physiological reaction, or more likely a malfunction -- a localised breakdown of the self-preservation instinct.

The closest she had come to a friend was Rebecca, the woman she turned into an enslaved test subject with hardly any hesitation.

"You've built a beautiful cage for us, Jenny. But I think, deep down, you're jealous that you're still outside of it."

The words stung because they were true.

Jenny stepped out of the car and made her way to the converted warehouse where she lived. There was something appropriate about Greenwich Creekside, in the way that the old and the new were merged into something unique. Jenny was forging her own hybrid existence, using the ancient arts of medicine and chemistry to meld with the bleeding edge science of the virus.

Inside the building, Jenny waited for the lift. As she looked at her warped reflection on the reflective doors, she saw a knackered, albeit beautiful, woman in her late twenties, dressed in a tailored button-through blouse and charcoal trousers, her dark brown hair still pulled back into a knot so tight it looked painful. Aside from the glow in her eyes, she could hear Rebecca describing her as a pretty, high-quality nobody.

And beneath her poise, she was feeling a hollow ache. Her mind flickered to the lab coat back at the facility -- the one with "Jenny" embroidered above the pocket. That was the version of her the virus had claimed; this "Dr. Thorne" in the mirror was just a shell.

In her loft, the windows carved into the masonry walls looked out over a city that felt like a circuit board. She poured herself a glass of neat Scotch and didn't turn on the lights.

"Was I supposed to become an obedient slave?" she asked the empty room. Her voice sounded small against the glass.

Instead of talking out loud to herself, she continued with her inner monologue. I could have kept limping along with my research, so why did I violate logic and infect myself?

Jenny already knew the answer. The pat answer was that failure wasn't an option. She had to make this work. Her single-minded drive insisted on it, and she would work herself into exhaustion to ensure it. She could have explained that to anyone who would ask. But she wouldn't buy it. It was too simple.

The real reason was far more personal. It was about power. On the one hand, she loved being in control. She always had. So anything that she could do to move her project along, she would do it. It's not a short cut if it gets you to the right place at the right time, she used to tell herself.

But she had that other part of her too. The one that got off on fantasies of total surrender. Of course she wouldn't have injected cancer or influenza samples into her bloodstream. That would have been mad. But a slave virus, which she had theorised would give her more arousal in a day than she had experienced in her adult life?

Fuck. Of course you would.

The Master -- the singular biological authority her virus demanded, the man whose face she had never seen but whose presence felt like an atmospheric pressure -- demanded total submission. He wouldn't allow me to have the fruits if I wasn't prepared to make the sacrifice.

Jenny paced the length of her living room. She had placed herself on this path, and now she had laid it out for others. But if she never found him, would she lose herself? Would this all have been for nothing but the science?

That dark thought led her to conceptualising the void. Now that she was corrupted, and was corrupting others, and breaking them down, what did she need to do next? Was it right to lead herself and them towards an unknown? What would happen to them if she never found the true answer?

For her entire life, Jenny had been the one making the decisions. And now, with this project, she was the architect. But so far, she was simply designing other people's voids. And it was, as Rebecca put it, exhausting. The constant weight of the I. The relentless need to be the observer, the judge, the one who knows.

What would it feel like to stop?

She closed her eyes and tried to imagine it. No more schedules. No more grant proposals. No more fake friends to perform for. No more meaningless lovers to satisfy with technical precision. She could just be.

Is that what the Master wanted? Not just a gallery of dolls, but an interconnected and purposeful hive to influence the world itself? Was she being called to a higher purpose -- not as the scientist, but as the ultimate test subject?

The future was an unknown, a black box into which she would push them all. Or would she? For years, she had believed she was the one who was responsible. But looking out at the city, she felt the subtle shift in the floor beneath her. What if she was never the hand on the leash? Maybe she was just the lead bitch in the kennel, and her Master was finally calling her name.

She thought of Sarah, the girl they were about to take. Sarah was vibrant, messy, and full of the chaos of life. Jenny felt a pang of something that might have been pity, but it was quickly eclipsed by a dark, hungry envy. Sarah would be the next to enter the new process. She would get to experience the cleansing that Jenny had crafted.

"A higher calling," Jenny whispered.

It wouldn't be the mindless obedience of a drone. It would be the ecstatic surrender of a saint. The absolute yes which the virus was designed to instill.

Jenny walked to her bedroom, her movements slower now, more deliberate. She didn't undress. She sat on the edge of her perfectly made bed and stared at the wall. She began to time her breaths, slowing them down and focusing on the mechanical rise and fall of her chest.

One. Two. Three.

Rebecca was right. The architect was tired. Tired of being pulled between being the leader and the slave. Jenny wanted to enter the cage and lock the door. She had spent her life studying the vessel; perhaps it was time to become the wine.

@@@

Jenny Thorne sat in the dark for another three hours, motionless, waiting for her will to collapse. But it didn't happen.

Perhaps she was too well-constructed, too reinforced by years of ego and intellect. But a crack had definitely formed. She could see inside to the soul in which she had never believed. And she was burning to be empty.

Jenny swore she would facilitate Sarah's acquisition with a new kind of fervour. Not because it was her job. Not even because she was a scientist. She would give her all because every step she took towards Sarah's erasure was a step closer to her own.

Rather than sleeping, Jenny spent the rest of the night meditating on her deeper commitment to her task. And as the sun began to bleed over the horizon, painting the city in shades of bruised purple and grey, Jenny stood up. She didn't feel tired at all. Rather, she felt focused, energised and irredeemably changed.

She had work to do. She had another girl to break. And then, if she was very, very lucky, she would eventually be allowed to break herself.