Sorry, folks, I was ill yesterday, and spent a lot of time sleeping.
Our story so far: Francoise and Amelie, having been picked up by the trillionaire Tolliver, have been taken from North Africa to France. There, Francsoise is genetically modifed, and given AR (augmented reality) implants in her. Once she has them, she begins actually working for Tolliver. The last episode is at https://mrw.5-cent.us/?p=410 . This series of excerpts begins at https://mrw.5-cent.us/?p=379
And now, Becoming Terran, excerpt #5
Three weeks later, she spent another week in the hospital for the second round of genengineering, which included metal and biosilicon nodes in her head, similar to those used by the military. This round of changes left her with much more severe pain, and she went deep into AR, to the point where she found herself unsure what was AR and what real world, in the effort to escape the pain that came through in spite of the drugs. Deep down, she found that there were paths to invoke physical effects in her body. More than once, she knew that she had just run a mile. Once she came up from an orgasm with someone she remembered from school, only to find the agony of her real body, and skipped away. The accelerated education was another escape, and she went through nearly three weeks of studies in days.
Finally, the pain was down to something manageable by drugs and a
cranial headset that sent electrical signals to the brain to block it. She was
back in the apartment that she and Amelie had been given, but the first
evening, after Amelie was supposed to be in bed, she had gone through
half a bottle of vodka with orange juice, that she heard was called a
screwdriver, before the pain let her fall asleep. It did not help that she
knew Amelie was sneaking looks from her bedroom, worried about her.
Slowly, as the days crept by, she managed to get to sleep with less and
less alcohol, or perhaps the alcohol did not work as well for the pain as
time went on.
Late that week, she was in AR, lying in bed in the apartment, almost ready to stop and sleep, when she felt Tolliver coming into her AR presence. Somehow, she wasn’t sure what he did, but they were there, back on that first day, and he was watching as she pulled up her skirt, but she was wearing the finer clothes she had now, rather than the hotel uniform,and her skin and hair were the way they looked when she looked in the
mirror earlier that day. She felt herself peeing, and then the other people
faded away, and he was in front of her, and she fell to her knees, in the wet
dirt, and he used her over and over. It went on and on, until from somewhere, she pulled the memory of the orgasm with the oilfield worker
who had courted, then dumped her, fed that to him, and he finally
climaxed, then let her go. She woke to the real world, the urine-soaked
bed, and the sweat on her skin.
Free for the moment, she yanked off the headset and buried her face in the pillow. After a while, she got up and rinsed herself off, changed the sheets. Then she got the vodka she now kept in her things, and some orange juice from the refrigerator, having found that alcohol, unlike other drugs, also distorted the input from the AR, to where she could shut down. Since before she was in double digits, she had edited her own memories far more than she had ever told her sister, first to assure herself that maman and papa loved her, then to assure her sister of the same. After they left Niger, she did it even more, remembering what had happened, and then deciding what she should have done, to be ready for the next time. Once she had done that, whenever the memory came up, so did the second version. The morning after the mental rape, she used the AR to put herself into the state where she was not merely separate from her body, but was someone else, watching, and coldly following what he had done. It took hours, but she finally found how he had come through her security. Then she started researching how to redirect intrusions, and over the study course hours of the next several days, she set up canned memories and paths such that he would be redirected to, and would take his suggestions and play it out however he wanted, all without her being present…if that had any meaning in AR, other than to know it was happening.
Then she packed up the memories of the mental rape and put it into the
storage for the system, closed it off, inaccessible unless she called it upconsciously, as she had been doing without the AR for so many other
memories for the last years, and washed it all down with vodka and orange
juice.