Nano (3 page)

I awoke to sunlight streaming through the windows.  I lifted my head and looked around, discovered that I was still Anne-Marie, and that I was in my apartment, and that it was morning.  I also found myself still dressed, though my dress was hiked up around my waist, the strap over my right shoulder had worked its way down, exposing my breast, and I was only wearing one heel.  Not a decorous start to my new life, I thought wryly.

I sat up, again feeling the strange sensation of flesh swaying on my chest, spun my legs off the bed and stood up.

I felt much better.  The way I had felt yesterday was like an extreme case of jet-lag, and I was glad to wake up clear-headed.

I showered and dressed in some of the more up-to-date items I'd picked out before the transformation: jeans (cut with a narrow enough waist for me), a bright orange sleeveless tee with blue and white racing stripes down the flanks, a silver chain bracelet for my right wrist and a matching silver choker.  I'd probably look out of place with no jewelry at all, and besides I liked the way they looked.  Nikes too - I hadn't worn sneakers in some time, but I'd bought more fashionable wear to complement the more feminine clothing I preferred on a girl like me, and needed footgear to match.  I figured I'd have to blend in with the college crowd.  Besides, silk and chiffon doesn't last long, and as of now I didn't have the money to replace the things I'd bought.

The sneakers were impossibly tiny, only about seven inches long, but my little feet slipped in like a hand in a glove.  I laced them up.

I stood and surveyed the results in the mirror.  My hair had grown out overnight, down to below my shoulder blades, and I hadn't figured out what to do with it - there was so much.  Otherwise the overall effect looked okay.  By now I'd resigned myself to the fact that no matter how I dressed I'd look like a kid trying to be a grownup, so dressing like a kid at least seemed to fit.

I sat back down on the bed and opened my purse.  I counted out my cash - a little over seventy dollars to last me five days until the start of class, when I could pick up my scholarship check.  I used to spend that much in a day.

I headed out the door, onto the street, feeling very small and vulnerable as I made my way west through the normal crush of morning people.  They were all so big, so wide, and so damned slow, I thought to myself.

Though the ones who annoyed me the most were the men, because they dwarfed me, I found myself noticing things about them I'd never really noticed before, which, after some thought, I had to recognize as features I now found sexually attractive.

Their muscles, for instance.  Not the overdeveloped muscles of the occasional obvious bodybuilder, but the thick, well-toned muscles of a man who kept fit.  The way even the muscles of their forearms were defined, easily identified as separate tissues, built to do heavy lifting.  I found myself, as I walked west on East 5th street, following a man in black slacks and a tanktop, noting the differences between his broad shoulders and my tiny ones, his wrists, thicker than my forearms, his muscle definition creating a pattern of ripples and bulges, where the only bulges I sported gave me no physical advantage.  I looked at my arms, thin, smooth; whatever muscles lying underneath could never be trained into the shapes I saw on this man's form, and all my strength could never withstand his slightest effort against me.

And yet I knew this physical disadvantage served to make me attractive in turn; thinking about the contrast aroused me.

I'd never been attracted to men, and hadn't built any nano-conditioning in to force me to feel this way - only to make me submit, to defer to men.  I surmised that some of this was attributable to the inborn tendencies of the DNA I'd been fashioned from.

At the corner of East 5th and Bowery, the man turned a corner, looking back at me, and smiled.  He went on.

I blushed furiously.  Of course he knew I'd been following him, and I knew what kind of signals that sent in a city where women learned to never make eye contact with strangers.  I rushed across the Bowery and made my down to the NYU campus.

I learned quickly to keep my eyes to myself if I wanted to stay out of trouble.  Fraternizing was safe for the other girls my age, but for me, and my inordinately keyed-up libido, it was practically begging for a fuck.  After several hours of waiting in lines to register for classes, I concluded that my wandering eye was being interpreted by the young men around me as an invitation to flirt, and while I was pleased that their interest was piqued, I really didn't have any idea how to keep flirtation safe, never mind how to progress after that, or even if I wanted to.  Mostly it bugged me that I couldn't help myself.  I found myself sucked into conversations, and because my nano-conditioning made me so agreeable, my natural deference was interpreted as sexual interest.

Well, it was sexual interest - I was getting pretty horny - but I wasn't ready to find out how my submissive tendencies would manifest themselves in a bedroom with a young, inexperienced boy.  I wasn't ready to be called the class slut yet either.

So I took my lunch in a cafe up in Chelsea, where I could be assured that most of the men around me weren't interested in women, and I could admire them without fear.  I tried to smoke, but it made me nauseous, and I decided now was as good a time as any to give that up.  I settled for coffee and a salad, which filled me much faster than I thought it would.  I pushed the plate away half-eaten.  Maybe I could get away with ten bucks a day after all.

I asked the waiter to bag the rest of the salad, which earned me a dirty look.  But I got the bag.  Screw you, wait-boy - I'm on a budget here.

By late afternoon, I'd walked back to my new neighborhood, returned to my little room, and was sitting on my bed, feeling tired and a little lonely.  One immediate consequence of my one-year experiment was that I was now friendless.  I knew lots of people in the city, but none now knew me, and I couldn't approach them.  I felt lonely, which was strange, because though I'd had many friends, I spent most of my time alone, and never tired of solitude.  Now that solitude left me feeling cut off.

I couldn't yet imagine making friends with people my own age.  I had the brain and life experience of a forty year old, while my peers were now teenagers.

Almost out of instinct, I picked up my cellphone - I didn't have a landline in the apartment - and dialed the Maynard's number.  It wasn't something I thought about or planned, but now I felt an urge to talk to Natalie.

To my surprise, I heard John's voice answer.

"Hello?" he asked over the line.  I hung up and tossed the phone on the bed.

I let my heart slow from a pounding to something approximating normal, and wondered why the sound of his voice made me feel afraid.

Suddenly my cellphone rang.  I picked it up; no one had my number.  I looked at the Caller ID - restricted.  I pressed the button and put the phone to my ear.

"Hello, Anne-Marie," John's voice answered.

"Who - who is this?" I said, stammering, pretending not to recognize him.

"Don't be a fool, Anne-Marie.  Your name is writ large on my Caller ID."

"Oh.  I must have dialed a wrong number," I said, relieved.

"I'm glad you called, Anne-Marie," he continued, "I know generally where you live, but couldn't pinpoint it exactly."  I sucked in my breath.  "I keep close tabs on anyone I do business with.  One of my associates started making arrangements for a long vacation recently.  At the same time he made lots of arrangements for a young girl named Anne-Marie.  This intrigued me, for reasons you can imagine.  A little detective work turned up enough evidence to determine that Anne-Marie
was
my associate's vacation.  More digging produced the fact that you live on East 6th street, along with some other interesting facts."  He paused.

"I - yes, John," I answered, not knowing what else to say.  "It's me."  I blushed.

"So, Anne-Marie, why did you call me?" he asked.

"I - I didn't - I mean - I wanted to talk to Natalie," I sputtered.

"You may not speak to her."  It wasn't so much a statement as a command, and sudddenly I felt my heart flutter and pound.  "However," he continued, "I wish to speak to you - in person."  Oh God.  "I understand you have a few days before class begins.  Meet me tomorrow evening at the Mercer Hotel, in the bar, at 8:00 PM.  Wear something nice.  And remember I know exactly what kind of nano-mods you've inflicted on yourself."

"And what will we talk about?" I asked.

"Your future, of course."

"What if I don't want to?" I said, knowing it sounded lame, and feeling afraid.

"Don't make me remind you not to act like a fool.  You will be there."  The line went dead.  I put the phone down on the pillow and fell back on the bed, feeling weak and loose.

That night I masturbated for the first time as a woman.  The fantasies that drove me to climax were unlike any I'd dreamed up before - lurid, abject, painful and absolute slavery - and the foriegnness and instinctive naturalness of the imagery and narrative terrified me.  But the orgasm was undeniable.  I fell asleep drained and scared of what I'd done to myself.

The next day went by in a blur.  Part of me felt terrified, I felt like I was running out of time and needed to run; another part of me wanted the hours to rush forward.

The car parked outside my door had two men as its occupants.  They never left, and when I looked out at it from my fifth story window, I could see one of them looking back at me, smiling.

When I left to buy groceries at the corner store, one of them got out and followed me from a discreet distance.

When I came back out, he was leaning against a lamp post, still grinning.

I confronted him.  I realized quickly that that was something I simply wasn't any good at any more.

"What do you want?" I demanded.

His grin grew wider.  "You have an appointment to keep.  I'm here to make sure you keep it."

Something in the tone of his voice drained the fight out of me.  An irrational train of thought ensued - What right do I have to question him? He knows what's best - for me - he's a man - just do as he says - if I'm going to be a girl for the next year, I should at least be a good girl - "H-how do you propose to do that?" I stammered, fighting my nano-conditioning in a futile effort to assert myself.  The question came out in a half-whisper.

"We already know you're a slut.  Don't prove yourself a stupid one as well.  I have orders to abduct you if you don't meet my employer at the appointed hour.  I have keys to your apartment.  We will come up, strip you, hogtie and gag you, and stuff you into a suitcase.  You're small; you'll fit pretty easily, though it won't be terribly comfortable for you.  Better to just be a good girl and show up."

I backed away from him, towards my building.  A good girl.  The words cut like a knife.  For most girls, the words probably brought forth visions of sugar plums or some such crap.  For me, they conjured images of a man hovering over my naked, kneeling body and -

I ran back to my building, up the steps and into the door.  I shut it behind me, hearing the lock catch.  I caught my breath, then worked my way up the steps.  I'd dropped one of my bags, but didn't care.

Once home, I propped my only chair under the doorknob, something I'd seen in movies - but I doubted it would help any.

In the end I chose not to be stuffed into a suitcase.

For the date I chose a simple crimson silk spaghetti strap dress, with a scooped neck and a high hemline.  I wore matching thong panties and no bra.  Red flats and a matching handbag.  Red lipstick.  I told myself that I was dressing up to show John I wasn't afraid of him; but on some level I think it was a form of provocation - I might as well have worn a sign around my neck with the words "break me".

The Mercer Hotel Bar was crowded and smoky and smelled of money.  The Mercer was not cheap.  A Maitre'd appeared among the throng.

"You are Miss LaFontaine?" he asked, his eyes taking in what my dress revealed.

"Yes," I replied.

"Follow me, please," he said, and led me through the crowd by the bar into a back room.

"Please wait here," he said, gesturing into the small room, and closed the door behind me once I'd passed him through the door.  I heard the lock turn and whirled around.

Testing the door proved it was indeed locked.  I turned back around.  The room was a foyer, really, small and lined with green felt and oak trim.  It was about five feet square, and there were no seats.  Another door stood in the wall opposite the one I'd come in.  It was locked also.

I waited in the little foyer perhaps a half hour, my fear and anxiety building, before the second door opened.

John stood smiling, holding the door open.  "Come in, Anne-Marie," he said.  I screwed up my courage and walked past him into what turned out be a small private dining room for one.

"Stand over here," he commanded, gesturing to his side as he sat down.  I obeyed nervously, butterflies in my stomach.

A waiter appeared, and John ordered dinner for himself.  The waiter didn't seem to think the spectacle of a seated man, middle aged and impeccably dressed, with a small, frail looking young girl in a red dress, standing attention at his side, trembling noticeably, merited comment - as a matter of fact, he ignored me.  I felt like a wayward schoolgirl, awaiting the judgement of a schoolmaster.  The waiter dissappeared after taking the order.

He looked up sideways at me.  "Kneel," he ordered.  Fear spiked somewhere in my mind.  In all my life I'd never had to obey an order like that.  I stood motionless, unable to move.

"Kneel!" he hissed, and reached up and grabbed a fistful of my hair.  He pulled me flailing to my knees.  He held on tight, batting away my hands easily with his free hand.  He pushed my head down until my forehead was pressed against the floor, and held me there.  I fought to control myself - I was hyperventilating, and struggling, I realized, was getting me nowhere.  I opened my eyes, focused on the carpeting my nose was pressed into.

God, he was strong.  Not having a cock, and the physiology that comes with it, had its disadvantages.  Suddenly I had an inkling of what kind of peril I'd exposed myself to in becoming female.

I was of the weaker sex.  When someone can overpower you with one hand, while keeping a wineglass steady in the other, you know you've become something very, very vulnerable.

After a few minutes, he relented, and pulled me to an upright kneeling position and let my hair go.

"Are you going to obey?" he demanded.

I nodded, tears welling in my eyes.

"Good.  But I want you to say it.  Say, 'I will obey, John.'"

"I-I will obey, John," I stuttered, appalled at the words - part of me wanted to reach up and strangle the bastard, but some deeper part of me felt excitement at the abandonment the words represented, and that was what appalled me.

"Good.  You're beginning to understand the true nature of the creature you've transformed yourself into.  Full understanding will take some time, I think - but I've got plenty of that.  Do you know why you chose to do this to yourself?" he asked.

"I-I'm not really sure," I answered honestly.  "I - I wanted, for once, to feel emotions that I couldn't control with more nano.  This - this I think was just the first example I had to work with."

"Well, there's lots of other kinds of lives to lead.  I'll tell you why you did it.  I made you do it."

"I don't understand."

"I nano-conditioned you - a minor tweak - to predispose you to taking this kind of action.  If I had tried something more abrupt you would have recognized and fought it - you're too experienced with behavior modification.  You had to choose freely to become a submissive female."

Hot flashes of anger welled up in me.  "I don't believe it.  Why the hell would you want to do that?  What purpose would it serve?"

He smiled.  "To neutralize you - and the threat you posed - of course.  You're the only one who knows who I once was.  I could have killed you, but that's not my style.  I only wanted control over you, so you wouldn't go blabbing secrets.  Another man would have just brain-wiped you, maybe, but I'm the kind of man who sees this kind of punishment as more just and more useful.

He paused to light a cigarette as the waiter came in and refilled his wineglass.  The waiter left.

"I have the penthouse of this hotel permanently rented out for those nights I spend in town.  You're going to go up there now, take off your clothes, put them in the box beside the front door and shut it.  Then you're going to walk to the coffee table in the living room, climb onto it and wait for me on all fours like a good little slut.  A concierge will assist you in these tasks.  I'll be up when I'm done with my meal."

I bowed my head.  "What if - what if I don't want to?"

He laughed.  "Of course you want to.  I can tell.  But it doesn't matter.  There's only one way out of this room now, and that's through the door behind me." The door opened as if on cue, and a hotel concierge stepped in.  He smiled at my surprise.  "This gentleman will show you the way - and coerce you, if necessary.  If you're wise, you won't make it necessary.  Do you understand me, slut?" he hissed.  I nodded.  I noted with dull anger that my panties were wet. "Now go."

The concierge wrapped his hand around my bare arm and led me to an elevator at the end of a short hall.  He turned a key in a lock beside the call button and the doors opened.

"If you please, miss," he gestured.  I got in, and he stepped in behind me.

The doors shut, and the elevator ascended.  There were no buttons to any floors; this one went directly to the penthouse.  The concierge was a big man, tall and heavily muscled, and the elevator was barely built for two, so I was sandwiched between his bulk and the wainscoting, terrified and feeling very small.  I had a sinking feeling this guy was not on the hotel payroll; he had a feral, predatory aura about him that thoroughly cowed me.

Predators.  That's what these people were.  And I was prey.  Pretty and harmless as a fawn, and as easy to take down.

A minute later the doors opened.  Timidly following the concierge in my heels, I stepped into the foyer of the apartment, and the doors shut behind me.

"Take off her clothes," John's voice commanded.  I jumped.  "I can see you over a closed-circuit cam, so don't be stupid."

The concierge undressed me.  There wasn't much to take off anyway.  He pulled the dress over my head, and dumped it in the open iron box. He helped me shimmy out of my panties.  I saw his slow smile when he saw the dark stain of my wetness in the fabric.  I felt like dying right there and then.

He laid the thong panties over the dress, then removed my shoes.  These he laid to one side inside the box.  I covered my breasts and pubic mound with my hands.  He saw this and gently, firmly took hold of my hands and brought them behind my back.  I took the implicit order to heart, though I was blushing furiously and felt as naked and exposed as never before.  There's nude, you know, and then there's naked.  Nudity is a natural state, freeing and healthful.  Naked is when you're the only one in the room without clothing, and that nakedness implies powerlessness.  I certainly felt like I had no control over the situation.

"Mr. Brown, please close the box."

The concierge closed the lid, and I heard the faint click of a lock mechanism.

"Bring her to the table."

The concierge led me, naked, into the living room.  Arms behind me, walking naked. Barefoot.  Exposed.  In the clutches of cruel men.  Goosebumps rose on my bare skin.  Any word of protest died a quiet death; fear lodged in my throat, rendering speech impossible.  I swallowed hard.

The short walk to the table was one of the longest of my life.  Sam would have never done this, would never have permitted his dignity to be so compromised.  Fear would have turned into violent anger.  For Anne-Marie, fear was fuel for intense sexual arousal.

Who the hell was I becoming?

The room was a sumptuous assortment of rare woods and inlays, and rows upon rows of books.  I saw the table in front of the leather sofa; the concierge led me onto all fours on top of it.  The table surface was covered with hardwood diamond inlays mixed with ivory details.  Steel rings set flush with the wooden surface lined the rim of the table.

"Keep your head down and don't get curious."  The concierge buckled leather restraints around my wrists and padlocked them to a steel ring set in the center of one end.  Leather cuffs around my wrists.  My wrists were bound.  Never in my life had I been restrained like this.

He walked around behind me and wrapped my ankles with identical restraints.  These he padlocked to rings on each corner of the far end of the table, splaying my knees apart.

He cupped my pubic mound with the palm of his big hand.  I gasped; a moan escaped me in spite of myself.  He patted my ass.

"There's a good girl," he said.

He put the key to the padlocks on a little endtable a few feet from my head, close but utterly beyond my reach.  He left the way we had come, by the elevator.  I stared after him.

"I said, don't get curious, Anne-Marie.  Keep your eyes focused on that little white ivory inlay between your hands.  See it?  Good.  Stay like that until I come."

My heart was racing, thumping against the inside of my ribcage like a trapped bird. I thought with sinking dismay that, given the nano-conditioning I'd given my captor, and the stories I'd heard since, I was hardly likely to have been the first girl strapped to this table.  A man with a taste for conquest wouldn't be satisfied with having only Natalie to torment.

The bastard had made me do it!  I fumed, even as my cunt burned with the implications of my situation.  And now I had no access to my own labs, my DNA was encrypted, and I was stuck in this fucking slave girl persona that, given enough time, would probably reshape my natural brainwave patterns permanently.  Slowly, inexorably, anger fed by my betrayal would ebb, replaced, presumably, with a natural slave girl's gratitude for denying her a life and gender she had had no right to pretend to.

And just like that, because of a little tweak in my brain chemistry, he'd made me transform myself into a submissive, eager, easily controlled little slut.  Now that I was in this female form, with this...abject outlook on life, I was helpless to stop him.

Or was I?  I struggled for composure.  Just because I was aching for his cock inside me, didn't mean I shouldn't try to reason out my situation, try to figure a way out of this mess.

I wondered about his long term plans.  What did he want from me?  My lurid imagination conjured up fantasies of total, complete slavery, chained in a dungeon for months on end.  I stopped that train of thought when I realized I was getting even more aroused by it.

He could make Anne-Marie disappear, but it would be expensive.  Not so expensive he couldn't pay for it, but I surmised the risk wouldn't be worth it.  He wouldn't want charges of kidnapping on his hands.

More likely, he would take advantage of me only to the extent that I was willing to permit - or at least not run to the authorities.  He would push me to my limits, but not far beyond.  The important thing for him would probably be the appearance of legality, so he would have to be immune from rape or kidnapping charges.

For someone like Natalie, that meant little, since she was nano-modified to believe abject slavery to be just.  She wouldn't complain to the police.  She would likely even protest if she were dragged from under John's thumb.  Under his thumb was exactly where she liked to be.

For me - well, that was harder to guess.  The nano-mods were nowhere as extreme as the one I'd used for Natalie, though they were modeled exactly like hers - just less deep compulsory urges.  But even now part of me felt grateful to John for doing this to me, and was eagerly running through the painful possibilities of the night.  Reluctantly I acknowledged that I didn't really know what my limits would be, how hard I could be pushed before I pushed back - if I ever did.

With resignation I concluded that controlling me would be rather easy for him.  If, as he said, he knew exactly what my nano-mod specs were, he would be able to pinpoint to a very narrow margin a training program that would balance the two goals of keeping me harmless and getting the most use out of me.  I had no doubt he'd already outlined such a plan.  And I knew enough about manipulating nano-modified subjects to know I had no effective way of resisting him.

His worldview, as I'd modified it, was clearcut and absolute.  Women were for a man's pleasure.  They were very intelligent animals, but animals nonetheless, and to a man like him that innate intelligence was given them solely so that they could be trained more easily.  I thought about it.  A man coerced into femininity might appeal to him even more, given that I'd designed his psyche to deeply desire Natalie's feminized state.  I'd had to make him believe, in a general sense, that men who were a threat to him were dealt with best by feminization.  I hadn't expected that impulse to apply to me.

Any goals or dreams I may have had for the life ahead of me would be irrelevant to him - to John, my value was in direct proportion to the degree to which he derived pleasure, satisfaction, and entertainment from me.  In large part, I surmised, that pleasure and satisfaction came from the fact that I was once a man, and the he had reduced me to this.