“Nooooo! Plleeeeeeease give it back! I have to have it back! I can’t live like this!”
He stood, heart in his shoes, watching her thrash against the ropes that held her. He twisted the metal tiara in his hands, pacing, fidgeting… He couldn’t bear to watch her, and he fought his better nature to keep from placing it on her head and unlocking her cuffs. He wanted to free her and walk beside her and love and be loved.
“Please oh please oh please you don’t know how this feeeeels!” Her voice dropped an octave and her head hung limp. Her fists relaxed in a mockery of the gesture, drooping from arms bound at either side of her to the iron bars of the bed.
He took a breath and tried to find his voice, “Oh baby, I know it’s hard, but we can make it through this. I just need to find you again, baby. I need to speak to the woman I married!”
Her voice rasped as though a dog growled behind the wall of hair that covered her face. “She’s dead. She died the moment she tried the chip.”
Her head lolled to one side, and her golden curls bounced after it to cover one breast and expose the other. The nipple was pierced with a ring and banded by a stretcher, and the skin was covered in the myriad tattoos she had received while under the chip’s influence. Nearly all the images drawn into her were of a cartoon representation of herself, subjected to extreme bondage and erotic torments. Some of the scenes were inked in commemoration of successful completion of the act depicted, and some were revealed as requests for future games; but he never dared put the most shocking ones into practice, no matter how vehemently his cock thought they were a good idea.
“Please, honey. Look at me. Just… just look at me!” He was pleading now, feeling helpless and responsible for what had happened to her. He realised he was begging just to cover the sound of her sobs. He took a deep sigh and sat down on the bed, his back to her, and began to cry himself.
The two wept, each unable to look at the other, for some time. Finally, she spoke.
“I can’t look at you, darling.” she whimpered, “Not without the chip…”
He took the tiara in his hands and found the neural contact probes and the slot that held the Torean mindwave resonance chip in place. They had purchased it on the black market with the understanding that it would help her focus on her studies and complete her research. It had done all that, and more.
The human-led states on Torei have a mistrust of artificial intelligence that borders on the religious. Their training regimens for female knowledge workers are legendary, and the device let her share the enhanced focus and recall once held by a Torean Logistigirl. But the more she used it, the hungrier a certain dark spot in her mind became.
“You’re just not you with the chip in, baby.” he moaned, trying to croon and be soothing, “I love you the way you are, and I just want us to remember the good times and build our old life together.”
“Oh babycakes,” she said, like a mother telling a child what death is for the first time, “You just can’t know…I close my eyes and all I can think of is what I did over the past year and all the shame and degradation…I can’t look you in the eyes anymore. You say you love me, but I just can’t feel that ever again. I’m so alone, and I made myself this way. I did…in public…oh god in front of my parents! Oh the whole world knows me like that! But for a whole year you…I begged you to and you….” she fell into wet sobs again, tossing her head back to wail as the tears streamed down her cheeks and onto her perfect breasts.
He felt the guilt come back to him, the shame for not seeing what was happening to his beloved in time. The guilt for being led into the role of the selfish abusive horny man, taking his pleasure from her and giving punishments in return. He began to wonder if he had somehow been chipped himself.
“So let’s put it all away, run to a new life! Let’s start over!” He turned back to her, pleading again.
“It can’t work.” She finally met his gaze, red eyes hollow with grief. “Don’t you see? I’m nothing but pain now. The only life for me is what the chip can give. Put it back on me and all this goes away. It will let me love the pain, and all my shame becomes pleasure. I feel your pleasure, baby. I feel it like waves of… Not love but….”
She gasped, trying to hold her focus and not fall into crying again, “Approval. It washes over me, over and over. Before you punish me, I feel needy. During, I feel aroused. After, I feel just…approved of. It’s just such a sense of contentment and peace and I’ll never find anything as good as that again. It’s stronger than my love for you ever was, and that’s just one more shame I have to bear until you put my head back on straight.”
“Oh baby don’t talk like this! Please, we can–”
“The collar.”
“What?”
“It’s under the sink. I bought it last week. Get it out now.”
He fetched the chunky steel band and played with the hinge and ring, seeing it for the first time ever. At her instruction, he found the slot in its interior and put the chip from the tiara into it. The whole ordeal was such a welcome break from all the sobbing and begging that he didn’t allow himself to understand what she was making him do.
“Now put it on me. It will lock from the inside once the neural connection is tight.”
“Darling I can’t–”
“If you loved me, you would do this for me! If you loved me, you would make the pain go away!”
He stopped arguing, still looking into her eyes, his heart pounding in his throat and his cock stiffer than recent memory could confirm. Not breaking her gaze, he brought the circlet around her neck and brought the ends together behind her head.
“No wait!” Click.
He jumped back, stunned. “W-What was that?”
Though her eyes were still red and wet with tears, they were now filled with lust and longing. She was staring at his erection and taking playful glances up at his eyes with a devious schoolgirl smile.
“Mmmmm,” she moaned, licking the tears off her lips, “Fuck me someplace new tonight. Fuck me in a new hole. God, fuck me in the nose! Run the electricity through my cunt and take my ear with that cock of yours! Ram my brains out and fill me with sex!”
Hands shaking, he had already pulled his trousers down. Without a word, he pulled a whip down off the wall.
“I still love you, baby.”
“Hurt me, Master!”