Kayley Goes Shopping Ch. 02

She was on the other side of her now. "And that brings us to the second reason you're here: you need a lesson in humility, Constance."

"You're not wrong that humans are divided into predators and prey. The problem is that there are too many people like you that have convinced themselves that they're the elite, even when they're nothing of the kind. You're intelligent, but you don't cultivate it., you're fit, but you don't test yourself. You have money, but you don't stand on your own. You don't offer everything you own to get out of this. The first thing you do is tell me to call Daddy."

She spit the words out of her mouth because the thought behind them was foul. "So you and people like you have all these gifts bestowed upon you by fate, but they wither and die so you can spend your life relishing the fact that the only thing you ever really did was win the womb lottery. I have intellect and I have skills you could only dream of dear, but I don't take them and sit on my ass."

She spread her arms outward to encompass everything around her. "You're surrounded by the efforts of the elite because true elitism is earned. We take our gifts and we hone them and build upon them. No one is born the best painter, writer, or athlete. The elite reach the apex through our own work and our own will, not just based on the luck of the draw."

"Here's the part, Constance, where I show you how predators behave."

Her eyes darted about, trying to catch a glimpse of her after Kayley wandered from her. There was milling around and the moving about of equipment, all of the sounds just ramping up her anxiety. "Look, I'll apologize to her, okay? I'll apologize and I'll mean it and I'll be nice to her from now on."

More movement before the steel table on which she was placed angled downward to be closer to flat once again. Then Kayley appeared over her head, seemingly upside down and the redhead was on her left side, fitting a cold steel brace over her neck to hold her in place. "We won't want your head moving around a lot for this, honey."

She watched Kayley bring another arm of the metal beast down towards her, placing the tablet just so, apparently to allow Constance to watch what would happen to her. "I'll make her my best friend, I swear." She began to tear up contemplating what was coming, each idea more horrible than the last one, "I'll never make her sad again, I promise."

Constance then felt a headpiece being placed firmly around her skull. It was so tight that the sides were pressing into her temples, threatening to give her a headache by itself, and it had weight. As soon as Kayley let go of it, it pulled her head down with it. "I'll be nice to everyone. I'll study. I'll do anything you want. I'll do anything you fucking want."

"The cry of the false elite," Kayley groaned, sounding equal parts bored and tired. "Me, me, me. You know, all this time and you haven't asked about a single one of your friends. You haven't asked about Brandi. You haven't bartered for Ginnifer. They're just gone from your mind because Constance's world begins and ends with Constance; everyone else is just kind of there to feed your ego."

Kayley began entering commands on the terminal that took her voice, waiting for prompts before entering more. "Even though you don't care about your friends, I'm going to tell you about them anyway."

"But I..."

Kayley cut her off, "Too late. Where was I? Ah. Anyway, Trina is right behind you, by the way and doing well. I'm actually not going to change her much either. She's still going to be throwing outstanding parties, she'll just be throwing them for us. Trina's really going to get off on sizing up product, and, once she's fully conditioned, is going to get off even more on melting and molding brains for us. But she still gets to be mostly who she was before the party started.

A few more taps and the helmet pressed even more tightly, as though it were melting into a part of her body.

"Brandi is something else. She's never impressed me as the sharpest scalpel on the table, so she'll probably be fine with letting some IQ points go. Even if she isn't now, she will be. That's the point of this, after all. She's perfect for a rich, dirty old man I know, but he wants dumb, pouty, and perpetually wet like Marilyn Monroe if she was always the breathy tramp that sang 'Happy Birthday.' I couldn't stand that for more than twenty minutes myself, but it's not my money, so, whatever."

A few more taps and tears came again as Constance felt dozens of tiny metal rods moving through her hair feeling like bugs in her scalp before pressing against her skull. Kayley seemed to know what the expression was about. "There are thousands of those things in there. This is just the first stage. Don't worry about the rods. If I put those in your brain, that'd kill you. The rods are just guide housings for the nano-filaments burrowing in as we speak. A little current here and a little current there and we move the lattice of neurons around and change some colors and, before you know it, there's a whole new you." She paused. "Maybe. I'm not leaving that up to me though. You'll find out."

"Please don't do this." She was close to blubbering now. "I'll do anything you want. I promise. I swear. Please, please, please."

"As for Ginnifer? I'm honestly not sure yet where she'll go. She certainly should go to a woman, don't you think? That's the least I can do for a closet case like that. Kayley's dark eyes found a sparkle at her puzzled expression. "You didn't even suspect that your bestie ached to suck on girls? I'm not surprised she wouldn't tell you." She seemed to make up her mind in that moment. "Yeah, I'll give her to a girl. I can be nice."

"Time we get to work, don't you think?"

The redhead appeared again, pulling another terminal down and she spoke in a way profoundly incongruous to the fact that she looked she was dressed to party and get fucked. "First wave of filaments are embedded in clusters one through forty-five. Feedback from each cluster in the green zone. No physiological anomalies detected."

"Interrogative pulses?"

Constance saw a river of rainbow color before her eyes.

A pause. "No anomalous feedback. Looks like they're ready ready to move. Flatten her out to baseline?"

Kayley looked at the readings, satisfied. "Yeah. This is going to take a while."

"I figured as much."

And, in much the same way, Constance was simply unable to speak, she simply stopped crying. She could think about where she was and what was happening to her, and when she did she knew she should still be terrified, but she wasn't. Indeed, now that she thought about it she wasn't feeling anything at all. She listened to them talk about her and talk about changing her and she could reason terror without feeling it. She felt divorced from her own body.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

Lyssa didn't take her eyes from her work, "Nothing at all. I know you enough to know that it's beyond you to wipe her and be done with it."

"What fun would that be? Where's the skill and challenge in programming her to do nothing but eat, sleep, and fuck. Where's the artistry?"

"I know my lady," Lyssa began, now looking at the woman who took her breath away just being. "If you just smooth her over there's no her remembering you're the one who fucked her. There's no her remembering in any way at all what she is in the grand scheme."

She took the comment in stride, her voice mirroring the good-natured humor that she'd heard in Lyssa's tone. "That's such a tiny part of this. If you had seen Amanda today and heard the pain, your soft little heart would have broken. I'm the not mushy one of this pair and even I felt for the girl. How about you just help me do something nice for someone?"

"Sure," she replied. "And help you teach someone a lesson. And give you a chance to prove how good at this you are."

"Once again."

"Yes, dear."

The banter and scientific back and forth continued as Constance stared without emotion at the screen as the pieces of her mind that all looked like bare, gnarled tree limbs tangled hopelessly together began to move one or a few at a time.

As a curiosity, she wondered if she would even know when she started to think differently.

To Be Continued...