“Sorry, sorry–”
Ai had grown used to moving around the room, but sudden disorientation still hits her this time–she’s not in the room anymore. She’s somewhere else entirely, and she has no time to appear disoriented. It’s pure luck that her endorphins didn’t carry over from the last moment she could remember, or her panicked state would have triggered an anxiety attack almost immediately.
Aya is in front of her, moving forward with urgency, reaching out with a couple napkins wadded in her hand. Quickly, Ai shakes her head, scooting back. “Erm–”
She tries to take in everything all at once. They’re in a break room, the kind that’s common across pretty much the whole world: there’s a fridge, a sink, a microwave. A few other people are eating lunch, workers in lab coats that she doesn’t recognize and doesn’t care to meet, because Aya has all her attention.
Ai can remember Aya holding her down, pinning her in place, bringing down powerful blows on Ai’s thighs and diapered bottom. Then, she’d seemed so powerful, so immovable, but now she looks almost…subservient. The woman’s face is so full of urgent concern and a need to help that Ai’s initial impulse, to panic, quickly consumes itself. She is confused, but not afraid.
It might be another trap, but if it is, Ai doesn’t understand it, and she doesn’t let herself work up any anxiety over nothing.
Her lap is hot and wet, but that, too, is different from how she remembers. She’s not wearing a diaper, and the warmth has spread past her crotch, down her legs. It’s too warm, almost scalding. Looking down, she sees soup, bits of processed chicken and rubbery noodles spilled all over her lap, her pants soaked with hot broth all the way through and into her panties.
The heat is enough to make her wince, but she ignores the pain and shakes her head, taking the napkins from Aya. “Eh–thank you.”
“Sorry, just–” Aya starts, looking away. “Clumsy. And I feel bad.”
“Why?” Ai asks. (Because you spanked me?)
“Because–look, I know I was just playing a role, but it felt mean. And then…finding out it got shuttered the next day, how am I supposed to take it, except to think it’s my fault?”
Ai doesn’t have time to think of a clever response, not as new information pounds into her brain, insisting she try and keep track of it all. The best she can manage is a noncommittal shrug.
Aya looks away, exhaling through her nose, and she doesn’t look back for several seconds. “I’ll stop apologizing, just…sorry. No, sorry, I…this whole situation has me feeling so...I don’t know. She still looks like you the whole time, y’know? But I’m not supposed to treat you like you, and…it’s just a weird headspace to occupy.”
Trying to keep her act going a little longer, Ai avoids a response, but it’s clear Aya wants to hear…something. Reassurance, maybe. Ai has an inkling of what’s going on, but she lacks certainty, and the wrong word could be disastrous.
“If I may…” Ai starts, speaking slowly to buy time to think. Ultimately, she goes with her gut: If her hunch about the situation has any merit to it, she shouldn’t be kind. “It’s not my job to make you feel better. If your performance were a problem, I’d have said so, but you can work out your feelings in your own time. I need to go clean myself off.”
Getting to her feet, she whirls, half to stride out of the break room, half to hide the uncertainty that’s painted onto her face. The move is vindicated a moment later, when Aya calls after her, “Hold on–Bala, wait.”
Ai keeps walking, because now, the uncertainty has been promoted to panic.
She doesn’t know the name, but she knows that it’s not her.
Taking deep breaths, Ai walks out into the hallway, looking both ways. It’s painfully generic, as though whoever made this space never intended it to be seen, except by people who wouldn’t be impressed or even care about the surroundings. Without any indication of where she might need to go, she picks a direction at random, trying to look confident as she strolls down the hall.
She knows a few things, by Sherlock-esque deduction.
She knows that whenever she’s found herself in this…place, she’s been in a diaper, but more importantly, it’s always been a wet diaper. She can remember the sensation of just having wet herself, but not of being dry. Apparently, the rules that governed her counted any undergarments, not just diapers, and it didn’t care whether she’d soaked her panties with piss or chicken broth–wet was wet.
She’d escaped from the curated experiences that had been made for her by sheer luck, but she won’t have much opportunity to use that freedom. The soup is drying quickly, already cool on her thighs, but she’s got a more urgent fear than that.
Lab technicians–
(Researchers? Scientists?)
People in lab coats pass her in either direction, all giving nods of deference. She seems to be in charge, or at least in a position of authority. Too many people are paying attention to her, and Ai scrambles to think of a way to extend her brief bout of freedom.
She needs to deal with the stain on her pants first, and ensure her mind will stay intact once the soup dries. Ai somehow doubts that she could excuse it if she pissed herself for all to see, so she needs protection, a way to be wet without being obvious. So, looking out for the nearest restroom with a dress-wearing stick figure on the door, she ducks inside.
For once, she has a stroke of luck. Wherever she is, they don’t care for decor, but they care for hygiene. A dispenser on the wall holds pads and tampons, and she takes one of the former out before detouring to the nearest stall.
Moving past the mirror, she makes a point not to look at it. She doesn’t want to deal with that yet.
In the stall, she slips down her soup-covered pants, but takes care to keep her wet panties in place. If she screws this up, she won’t get another try. Fingers shaking, she removes the pad from its packaging and fumbles it into her panties, adding enough absorbent material that–she hoped–it would count.
Now she just has to wet herself. Sitting on the toilet, it’s harder than she expects–she’d already been in a wet diaper, she’d even pooped in one, but convincing her body that she really, truly needs to wet her panties is another matter.
She gets another stroke of luck. Someone comes in to wash their hands, and the sound of flowing water is enough to trick her brain into action. She floods the pad, and as it swells with pee, the excess trickling down into the toilet, she sighs in relief.
Waiting until the dripping is done, until she’s sure nothing will leak into the pants, she gets up and flushes. There’s no putting it off now, she has to confront the truth.
Ai steps out of the stall and faces her reflection.
She isn’t wearing her own face, the face she knows. She’s not her.
Ai stares at the face–the face she’d seen in the TV twice. First in the video, she’d seen the probably-Indian woman with the black hair stare at her with malice and condescension. Then, when the video had ended, she’d seen the same face stare back in her reflection, full of confusion and horror.
She is her own tormenter, and staring into the bathroom mirror, she can’t escape that truth.
It’s just what she saw before, when she looked at the TV screen, the image that’d driven her into a panic. She is not Ai. Her features are southeast asian, she has flowing black hair, and from her point of view, she’d seen the face curl up in a smug smile on a VHS tape not ten minutes prior.
Ai isn’t here, not really.
Bala stands in the bathroom, gazing at her own reflection, with Ai’s mind temporarily holding the steering wheel. She is, somehow, inside Bala, borrowing her body, living in it like a parasite. Only…parasites don’t get plucked from their own lives and forced into a host. She is something else.
(A passenger.)
That feels better, except passengers still chose to come on a voyage.
(A prisoner.)
Better.
She inspects herself more thoroughly. Her clothes are pared down and professional, with a slightly scientific angle. She isn’t wearing scrubs exactly, but the style seems scrubs-adjacent. If she worked in STEM, Ai might know what to call it, but she has to go with her loose, half-accurate descriptions for now.
No nametag, but she doesn’t need that. She knows whose face she wears. More interesting is the elastic, retractable lanyard on her waist, attached to a magnetic keycard.
She has no way of telling which doors it can open, but surely it will open something.
With a pee-soaked pad keeping her mind in place, she wipes her pants off to get rid of soup crud, washes her hands, and steels herself. If she gives herself away, she will probably wake up back in some room, some new chamber, being tortured for an unseen audience’s pleasure.
Ai refuses to go back to that, not if she can help it. She needs information–she needs to know what’s going on, and how she can escape it. She has an idea for how to get that information, too, but it will require her to embody the woman who taunted her on the TV; a woman who seemed to be embody spite and cruelty, wanting nothing more than to torture Ai for reasons impossible to fathom.
Ai can do that. After all her torture, she’s got some malice built up that she needs to vent.
Stepping out into the hall, she spins on the first person she sees, some researcher or worker or it doesn’t matter. “You,” she snaps, pointing at them.
They freeze, and whether it’s her posture or tone or purely from Bala’s reputation, Ai gets the ‘deer-in-headlights’ look she wanted. “Yes, ma’am!” they reply quickly, almost dropping the clipboard they’re holding.
“Give me a status update,” she says, staying as vague as possible. “I know there’s a lot up in the air right now–I need to know the most up-to-date information.”
Their eyebrows raise, fear driving their response. “I–I don’t know that, ma’am. I’m just getting off lunch, and–”
“And, what?” She demands. “You think I want to hear excuses?”
“No, but–”
“But, but, but,” Ai interrupts. “If you can’t be prepared and ready to give an effective answer, I’m not going to wait on your timetable, no sir. Since you can’t answer my question right now, we will go to my office and you’ll stay there until you find out.” Bala’s office has to have the details she needs, Ai just needs access–and this poor figure in front of her can give her that access.
Their eyes widen even further, the fear of being fired–or possibly worse. Ai doesn’t know how they treat bad employees here. They might put insubordinate workers through the same torture Ai had experienced, for all she knew.
Nodding quickly, the employee stammers, “I–yes ma’am!”
Ai waits a moment longer, raising one eyebrow and channeling impatience. “Well? After you.”
The worker squeaks and turns without another word, and their effort to scamper forward and get this awkward situation over with pushes them to lead without question. Ai follows, hiding her satisfaction, as she gets directed straight to Bala’s office.
The decor is as sparse as she’d come to expect, but it’s well stocked. A computer is on her desk–an iMac, the kind where the screen is about the size of a beach ball because it has all the computer parts built into it, and a phone sits next to it with all sorts of extra buttons for intercom and Ai-doesn’t-really-know. There’s even a rolodex–Bala is an organized administrator, it seems.
“I…” the lab assistant stammers.
Gesturing to the computer, Ai snaps, “Get to work. Use my phone, hell, drink my coffee while you’re at it, since I’m apparently waiting on you. Trust me: Waste enough of my time, and this will get personal.”
She doesn’t have to say another word. The terrified figure gets onto her computer, logs in with an admin password, and quickly pulls up status reports from a lengthy chain of emails.
“Okay–okay,” they say, their breathing coming fast. “I–Ma’am, I’m sorry.”
“I won’t shoot the messenger,” she says, moving in to look.
“The project’s been fully canned, they’re pulling funding and looking into other things,” they explain. “After your Alter Identity saw her reflection and had that panic attack, management decided that this wouldn’t be an effective route to regression after all. They already had doubts after seeing that the regression reverted between sessions, which–I mean–I’m sorry–they decided that it was taking the subject’s mental state in the wrong direction. Please don’t be mad at me. They–it’s just one failed experiment, you’ve still got authorization to pursue your other plans once this AI is erased.
Ai tries not to sound too eager, too excited. “What happens to her after that?”
“Oh.” They pause, uncertain. “I…that’s more your department, you’re the one who built it, but…doesn’t the AI kind of just stop?”
Frowning, Ai makes a gesture with her hand for them to continue. “Stop?”
“Well, she’s a constructed identity. She doesn’t really exist. Once you undo the conditioning, so that she can’t manifest, I kinda just assumed that the AI would…‘die’ isn’t the right word, but you get my meaning. Why are you asking me this?”
“I meant, ‘What happens to the research we’ve conducted on her’,” Ai lies, screaming within her thoughts. “But, never mind. You’ve done what I asked. Get back to work and we won’t have to talk about this again.”
“Yes ma’am,” they say, looking almost like they’re going to salute before simply getting up out of Bala’s office chair and hurrying out of the office.
Ai stands there, stunned.
If she gets caught, she won’t have to worry about being being tortured or humiliated. That would be bad, but being sent through humiliations, having her ass beaten bloody, being edged and tormented in diapers, it still seemed preferable to her new crisis.
At least, if she was being forced to fill diapers and solve impossible puzzles, she’d get to exist.
Facing the weight of this realization, Ai allows herself a brief moment to slip into a dissociative meltdown. There just doesn’t seem to be another reasonable course of action.
She only exists in wet underwear, and if she cleans herself, if she takes off the piss-soaked pad in her panties, she’ll cease to exist forever. Nothing she can think of softens that blow–she’ll be caught, or she’ll have to change eventually, and when that happens, she will just be…
Gone.
For a moment, she sees herself there, just standing in the office, paralyzed by inaction. In the context of her circumstances, knowing how small and weak she is against the prospect of nonexistence, what else can she do?
But the disassociation makes things worse. Seeing herself, thinking of herself as nothing but a body, it only reminds her that this isn’t even her body. Even the simple numbing remedy that comes from an out-of-body experience is denied to her, because she has no body to be out of, just a temporary residence.
So, though she wants to break down and sob, there’s simply no opportunity. She bottles up her fear, her anxiety, her existential dread, and pushes it down into herself. Maybe, maybe, there’s a solution buried in Bala’s computer.
Without any other plan, she sits down at the keyboard and begins pouring through the files.
Bala is, to her relief, a meticulous woman, with all her files carefully labeled. Less helpfully, the projects all seem to have code names.
She reads all the folders twice, trying to find the one relating to herself. Star Gazers. Cookie Clicker. Quiet Time. Coral Island. V's Guest. Jacqueline Hyde. Hello Nurse. There’s a few others, too, more blatant than the rest. Zoo. Language. Vulcan.
On the second pass, Ai finally gets it.
‘Jacqueline Hyde.’
Jekyll and Hyde.
Dual identities.
“Right,” she whispers. “Duh. So much for a secret name.”
Clicking on it, she starts to read. It doesn’t take long before she’s drowning in jargon, technical terms and descriptions of machinery she cannot understand.
She’s not helpless, though. Ai is no scientist, but she’s not clueless. When she comes across a series of recordings, video logs labeled with dates and particular keywords, she feels a surge of hope.
She clicks on the first one, and flinches involuntarily when she sees her borrowed face appear on the screen in compressed, low-quality video.
The woman on screen, Bala, lacks the condescension she wore the last time Ai saw her. She’s standing tall, professional, a bit cold.
“I’m recording this for posterity. Since I imagine anyone watching this won’t be interested or able to understand the technical elements, I’ll keep this simple. If you want to understand how the machine works, check the documentation.” Bala smiles, but Ai notices a touch of bitterness behind the expression. “As if they’re anything but babble. Glass tubes and sprockets and nonsense–the why doesn’t matter, it could have been magic or alchemy or nanotech. Aya makes it work. The important thing is the research, not the methods.”
Backing up, she reveals a projection screen behind her and raises a clicker, though the slide she pulls up is so compressed by the video display as to be almost illegible. All Ai can make out is a vaguely human shape and skin-tone colors.
“How can you tell which elements of regression therapy are most effective, and which are wasted time? If you’re successful, you can’t, because the only person who can tell you what worked on them is now incapable of expressing that information in any scientifically useful way.” Raising both hands to frame her face, she says in a mock tone, “‘Yes, and how did you respond to the spanking?’ ‘Goo gah guhh goo’. It’s not exactly rigorous.”
Clicking the slide forward, a machine of some kind–steel and wires–pops up on the display. “That’s where the Versable comes in. I’ve had Aya create a universe in which we have access to the infinite span of worlds, and where we can tap into minds from alternate universes–those parallel to our own. We make copies of their minds. We could bring along their bodies, but that wouldn’t help–we may as well clone Ai, if we did that. To ensure we’re working with a clean slate, we strip the context of the identity, so that they have a form of amnesia–they’ll remember who they are, but not any specific events. We get the personality, but not the person, copied into a compliant host. We’re calling them ‘Artificial Identities’, and I so wish that there was someone in this universe who would get the joke.”
Waving a hand, she moves things along. “With the right triggers implanted in the transverse personality requisition, we can make the identity come out in response to stimuli, and revert when that stimuli is gone. The host mind remembers everything, and can record the experiences after the fact. Now, all we have to do is find a compatible mind, bring it over, and see how it responds when we administer our regression experiments. So that’s the plan–find a compatible mind, bring it, break it.”
A smile creeps over her face, spreading like a virus, and she adds quietly, “And I know exactly what mind we’ll be breaking.”
The video comes to an end, and Ai sees Bala’s face reflected in the black screen for a moment before the video player minimizes and an image of a green field replaces it.
Swallowing, she scrolls forward, skipping videos, looking for useful keywords. ‘Attempted implantation - 1’ through ‘Attempted implantation - 7’ are all skipped. After all the attempts, however, she finds what she’s looking for.
‘Successful implantation of Artificial Identity - 1.’
Holding her breath, Ai pulls it up.
Bala is standing by a machine, the one from the slide in the previous video, though the new video shows it in crisper detail now that it’s not a photo on a projector being captured by yet another camera. It looks rather like an MRI, and Bala is operating one set of controls, naked save for a diaper.
Pulling a lever on the opposite set of controls, Aya starts the machine, and after Bala enters a few instructions, she gets onto the mat and it slides her in. The device spins. Light flashes out, so brilliant it overwhelms the camera for a moment, and when the picture returns, Bala sits upright.
“Did it work?” Aya asks. “Did I–did I do it right?”
Bala shrugs. “Only one way to find out.”
Closing her eyes, she focuses for a moment, and though the camera is too grainy to show much, a slight pixelation of compressed yellow stains her diaper.
A moment later, she bolts upright, eyes wide. “What–where the hell am I?”
“Take a breath,” Aya says, holding out a hand. “You’re in a medical facility. Do you remember how you got here?”
Bala thinks for a moment, then shakes her head. “No.”
“Do you remember your name?”
That takes a little effort. “Mary. Mary Bambine, but…I don’t remember anyone ever calling me that. What happened?”
In front of the computer, watching the video, Ai frowns. This wasn’t her. It isn’t her. They brought over two people?
“The amnesia will wear off in a little while,” Aya lies. “Can you tell me what year it is?”
Again, Mary focuses. “I feel like…it’s got to be…I don’t know. I don’t know. Where am I?”
“Just take a breath,” Aya assures her, moving closer. “I just need to adjust something, okay?”
She watches Mary, who watches her in turn, cautious but not resisting. Reaching forward, Aya suddenly grabs and jerks on the front of the diaper, ripping it free.
Bala sits upright and takes a breath, smiling, satisfied. “It worked. It worked. Make a note of that mind–we’ll clear this one, then copy it in fresh so that she doesn’t remember waking up in the machine. I was right–we just needed your special touch. You operate the machine better than anyone.”
Ai closes the video, her breath coming in quick bursts. The next video is labeled as the same day, then ‘2 - Failure’.
Bala sits in front of her desk, nursing a mug. She looks tired, even through pixelation.
“Status report,” she says, speaking slowly. “I thought, once we got the copies working, it would be smooth sailing, but… We aren’t copying minds. We’re taking them. I think we have a way to put them back safely, but I don’t know what the consequences of that would be. If the subject retains memories of being tested, we could corrupt the whole multiverse.”
She sips from the mug and inhales sharply, like the drink is bracing her willpower. “We brought ‘Mary’ over. She wasn’t my first pick, but I need methods that work on more than one girl–I had planned to start light and only focus on my main goals once the methods were perfected. From everything we could determine, this ‘Mary’ was a perfect subject for regression testing, for experimentation with diapers–her mind matched what we were looking for, almost to a T, but after the first pull, we didn’t put her back. We deleted her. And when we went to make another copy…”
Frowning, she shakes her head. “I’m making this video for the logs, but we’re not reporting this, it’ll only be in my personal file. They can find out once we have our data. It’s too important to give up. I’m not giving this up, but…I know there’s an infinite amount of people out there, and an infinite number of minds to borrow, but I don’t want to hurt people to accomplish my goals.”
Pursing her lips, she still seems bitter and sad as she adds, “Well…most people. If I have to pick one person to destroy, over and over, it may as well be her.”
Ai’s fingers are numb as she looks at the final video.
‘Successful implantation of Artificial Identity - Two.’
She barely breathes as the video plays, as Bala enters a code, lies down, and goes into the machine. She and Aya are wordless as a new identity is copied, and when Bala comes out, they don’t immediately tape her into a diaper.
“We got her,” Bala says, breathing quickly. She seems excited, like a child at the peak of a rollercoaster, waiting for the drop and the gut-twisting, thrilling weightlessness to follow. Fear and anticipation in tandem. “Fetch the straightjacket–I want to get to work right away. I want to learn how to break this mind within the week.”
“That’s ambitious,” Aya cautions, though she’s already obeying, leaving the room. “Do you want to start slow?”
“I want her thoughts gone,” Bala replies harshly. “I want her head empty. I want to feel her thoughts slip and slip until they’re goo, until she’s a drooling mess and she can’t fuck things up ag–”
Jaw setting, she catches herself, aware of Aya’s uncertain stare.
“We aren’t going to take things slow,” Bala finishes. “We’re going to move fast and break things.”
They exit the frame, and the clip continues for thirty more seconds on an empty room before the video player closes out of itself.
There are no videos more recent than that. Checking the timestamp against the computer’s calendar, Ai sees it’s about a week old.
They brought her over, with plans to destroy her and discard the remains, but…there’s a way back. She just needs help to do it.
It takes flipping through Bala’s rolodex to find the right phone number. It takes another moment of uncertainty, fingers hovering over the phone, before she works up the courage to call Aya.
Ai’s too timid for a full phone call, she only manages one sentence. “Come to my office immediately.” She slams the phone down before Aya can reply, hoping that her fear will be read instead as confidence.
Aya is prompt–a good sign. She’s either obedient or afraid. Entering Ai’s office, Aya closes the door behind her. “What do you need, ma’am?”
“You heard the project is being shut down, I presume?” Ai asks. “All our work is being tossed down the drain.”
Glancing to the side, Aya nods. “I–of course I heard.”
“Do you know why Ai is scheduled to be destroyed instead of sent home?” she asks.
“No,” Aya says quickly. Speaking louder, speaking more slowly, she says, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Ai frowns. “We can send the minds back, but–”
“Bala!” Aya blurts, looking over her shoulder quickly. The door’s closed, but she’s still alarmed, as though they might be overheard. “You–you can’t say that. You’re the one who told me to keep that element a secret.”
Blinking, Ai tries to maintain composure. “Of course I am, but it’s just us here. There’s nobody listening.”
But there are other people listening, or at least following along. Ai still has her audience, paying attention to every word she says.
Striding to the desk to sit across from Ai, Aya leans forward, speaking in hushed tones. “You ordered me to keep it a secret–to make sure nobody finds out we’re pulling real minds, not making copies. If the higher ups found out, it would…”
She can’t finish the sentence. If she could speak the truth, she would have said, ‘It would make things too real, it would change the balance and spoil the mood. You can’t enjoy the scene and fear for her life at the same time.’
“My point is,” Ai says. “To hell with the risk. If our research is being canned, we need to get Ai home, immediately. At least we can mitigate the harm, even if we won’t be able to get the results we want.”
Sitting up straight, Aya nods, breathing out a sigh of relief. “Yes, ma’am.”
If only this were the end of the story, it might get a happy ending.
Alas, there’s still a full chapter yet to come.