(So…I’ve started the Virt sequel…I think. Or this is a first draft of…something. We’ll just have to see.)

Prologue

I awoke to bright sunlight streaming through a floor to ceiling glass wall onto the king-size bed, slanting golden blades of light over the rumpled sheets and over John’s sleeping body. I blinked, rubbed my eyes, and sat up groggily.

The wall opposite me was mirrored, and Stephanie gazed back. Little eighteen year old Stephanie, five foot tall, barely a hundred pounds, black curly hair, short and curvy.

It was a familiar enough sight – I’d spent plenty of time as her in VR – but John had stripped me of any interior physical or proprioceptive female muscle memory, so I was still getting used to being trapped in this soft, malleable prison. The way my breasts hung from my ribcage disconcerted me, and I still felt an acute absence between my legs.

The Dominion had once stripped me of any physical sense of being male, in an earlier trial. For this, my third and last trial, all of that had been returned to me, so the sense of loss was fresh.

I swung my legs over the side of the bed and stifled a yawn. My feet dangled a foot from the carpeted floor. I was pretty sure that was deliberate – since my arrival the previous day, I’d noticed that all of the furniture in this house was custom-built to a man’s height. Table and chair legs were a little longer, shelves and counters higher. The only place in the house where this didn’t hold true was in the kitchen, where the dimensions were oriented around an average female height.

The Dominion was a Man’s world, and they took care that every detail reflected that fact. If females aren’t permitted to use furniture, why bother making it to accommodate their smaller physiques?

I glanced over at John to make sure he was still sleeping, then slipped quietly off the bed and padded to the bathroom.

I sat on the toilet for a long moment after peeing, thinking. Remembering yesterday.

I remembered John sitting me down after I came out of VR suspension, flipping through screens with me, showing me my new legal identity. This Stephanie, though identical in appearance to my VR avatar, had no paper trail connecting me to her, or my original life. I was now Stephanie Kinder, eighteen years old, a Dominion immigrant who had applied for and received permanent residency, voluntarily submitting to the strictures imposed on all women on this island. That included the stricture that women were not permitted to emigrate.

He’d shown me the elaborate fictional past that had been fabricated for me – my digital birth certificate, family photos with strangers around me that were meant to be my parents. Photos of me as a little girl, a pre-teen, a high school kid.

“It may seem overkill to set all of this up, Stephanie,” he’d said as he pulled up a video of me in a pink prom dress with a teenaged boy. “But it’s quite easy for AIs to fabricate this kind of information. It simplifies things if someone comes asking after you. All of the supporting evidence points to you being exactly who you appear to be, and by the time someone does come asking, you’ll be too conditioned to speak up and tell the truth anyway.”

He’d shown me the freshly made incision on the inside of my right thigh, in the little pad of flesh next to my pussy, where the Dominion had implanted the monitoring device.

I ran my fingers over the small strip of tape covering the wound. It still hurt.

“It does several things, Stephanie,” he’d said. “First, obviously, it reports your location to me and to the Dominion staff quite accurately. It also taps into your nervous system to trigger physiological responses if any of the Dominion monitoring systems detect unapproved behavior. I mentioned in my letter that you won’t be able to refer to your prior history as a male without repercussions; this is how that is enforced and how you will be conditioned to comply instinctively. Every room, every public space in the Dominion has cameras and microphones. They filter out Male conversation and location information – we value and respect each other’s privacy, of course. The monitoring devices are purely to just there to keep little cunts like you in line. If the microphone in this room were to pick up you saying, “I was a man,” for example, you would feel the effect of that immediately. Try it.”

I’d tried it. And winced as I felt pins and needles over every inch of my body, pressing in painfully. It was over quickly, before the whimper had escaped my lips.

“You’ll find the enforcement quite thorough,” he’d added. “The AI in charge of monitoring the girls doesn’t have the same interest that I do in living as a human, but it takes exquisite pleasure in administering discipline to human girls. It sees and hears everything, and you will never escape its scrutiny or punishment, so don’t try.”

I wiped, stood and flushed the toilet. My genitalia still felt oddly puffy and sensitive, and I ran my fingers lightly over the soft fatty lips. Stubble was starting to come up over my pubic mound.

“You’ll shave that now, cunt, as well as every other hair on your body below your neck.” I jumped, my heart stuttering. I hadn’t heard John get up. I turned toward the open doorway. He was leaning against the doorframe, gazing down at me intently. He was as naked as I was, his huge, thick cock jutting upward, hard with morning wood.

“I…I didn’t hear you get up. M-my Lord,” I replied, remembering at the last moment to use the honorific he’d instructed me to.

He frowned. “You’d best learn to listen, cunt. If you were paying any attention at all, you’d know I didn’t ask you to comment on what you heard or didn’t hear. I gave you an order. What did I tell you to do?” He stepped forward, and I took an involuntary step back. He advanced into the space I’d surrendered until I was backed up against the bathroom wall. He put his hand against my chest and pushed, pinning me.

I looked up, frightened. “You told me to shave my…my pussy, my Lord, and everything else below m-my neck.”

He gazed down at me for a long moment, expressionless. “There’s a fresh razor in the shower stall,” he said finally. His hand cupped my pubic mound roughly, his thumb sliding over the faint stubble. “Twice a day you will prepare yourself for me, Stephanie. If I find a trace of stubble or stray hair on your cunt, your pits, your arms or your legs, you will be beaten. If your hair is not perfectly groomed after your preparation, you will be beaten. If you are not properly perfumed and made up, you will be beaten. If your nails are not painted and trimmed to perfection, you will be beaten. I will find other reasons to discipline you, cunt, including the fact that I find it amusing to punish you for simply being female. But you will quickly learn that absolute obedience will not only help you avoid most punishments, it will also focus you on your purpose.”

He let me go, then pushed me toward the glass-walled shower stall. I glanced back over my shoulder. He stood with his arms folded across his chest. “Go on, Stephanie,” he said. “I’m going to watch this time, to make sure you don’t fuck around in there. Get to business.”

My hands shook as I turned on the shower. I couldn’t bring myself to look back in his direction as I washed my hair – there was so much of it! – and then soaped up my body. I felt like I was all softness, curves and fat, ridiculously feminine, and my every movement seemed to cause some part of me to jiggle, bounce or sway. I knew objectively that I was actually on the slender side but it’s hard to keep that in mind when you’ve got big teardrop-shaped bags of fat wobbling around on your ribcage. It didn’t help my acute embarrassment any that I knew John was watching me.

I began to shave, starting with my pussy. I didn’t remember having to do this in VR, but that didn’t mean anything. John had blocked much of that from conscious memory. Maybe I did this every day, maybe I proudly wore my natural bush. It was awkward having to bend to see what I was doing – my breasts were constantly a distraction, hanging in my field of view as I bent, brushing against the insides of my arms as I shaved.

The water sluiced away the pubic hair, and I ran my hand over the smooth mound and lips. The stubble was gone now, leaving smooth, warm, sensitive flesh.

“Don’t fuck around, Stephanie,” John said over the noise of the shower. “Your body isn’t yours to touch, except to keep it to my requirements. Hands off otherwise.”

I quickly took my hand away, trembling. I began to shave my arms, then my legs. It took awhile, but after about ten minutes of grooming I was pretty sure I’d gotten everything.

“Out,” he barked. I turned off the shower and stepped out, reaching for a towel. He slapped my hand down hard, and I yelped in pain.

“Ask for permission first.”

I looked up at him, hair dripping, water running in rivulets down my breasts, my belly and shorn legs. I could feel droplets of water bead up and let go from the underside of my breasts.

“May I please take a towel and dry off, my Lord?” I asked. He nodded.

I dried off as quickly as I could under his watchful gaze.

“You’ll dry your hair and prepare yourself momentarily,” he said. Stand feet shoulder-width apart, tits out, hands clasped at the back of your neck. Eyes closed.” I obeyed. I could feel his hands running over my bare, hairless flesh, inspecting closely.

He was very thorough. After a very long inspection, he said quietly, “You missed a spot on the inside of your ankle, cunt.”

Suddenly I was pressed up against the wall, my nose against the tile. His hand was around my neck, pinning me down, and a series of savage blows rained down on my ass, sharp, heavy slaps that I realized dimly through the pain must be a hairbrush.

There were…I don’t know. Maybe twenty, maybe thirty blows. I was sobbing despondently halfway through, but he didn’t slow or quicken his pace.

He let go finally, and I fell to my knees on the bathroom floor, crying feebly, my head bent. I felt my tits judder with each heaving sob, and my buttocks burned.

He spoke. “You consented to this last trial, Stephanie, because you crave control. Deeply. It’s driven you to put yourself in this position. I gave you informed choices, and each time you chose to give me power over you.” He paused.

“You are now going to find out what being completely controlled feels like. What it REALLY feels like.” I shuddered, still trying to deal with the adrenaline coursing through me.

“You wanted to feel weak, soft, trapped, in a permanent state of female inferiority. We both understand, I think, that ‘female inferiority’ is, outside of this place, a fiction, a fantasy that enables you to experience the things you desire guilt-free.”

His foot prodded the meat of my thigh. “Out there it’s a fiction. In the Dominion, it’s real. Here, you are truly inferior, lesser, not least because you chose this. You may think me cruel for saying this, but you know it to be true. What’s more, you need it to be true, or you wouldn’t be here, would you?”

I sniffled. “No, my Lord,” I whispered.

He dropped to one knee beside me. He held out the shaving razor. “Shave that last patch, Stephanie, then finish up in here. You’ll find the selection of cosmetics and perfumes to be comprehensive. You find looking young to be disempowering, don’t you?” he asked.

I nodded. “Yes, my Lord,” I breathed. My hand shook as I took the razor. “It’s…another kind of helplessness, I suppose.”

I felt his gaze on me, but couldn’t bring myself to look up at him.

“Right. I want pigtails, nice and tight, with robin-blue ribbons, and hot pink lipstick on those fuckable lips. For the perfume, something a kid would wear. You have fifteen minutes. If you’re not ready and kneeling in the bedroom by then, then you’ll be beaten again.” He rose and stepped into the shower. Steam began to waft through the open door.

I wiped my nose on my forearm and got up. I fumbled with the hairdryer, rushing so that I had time to braid my hair and do everything before my fifteen minutes was up.

What other choice did I have? The last meaningful decision I’d made was nearly a day ago. Once I decided to start following John’s instructions in the letter, it was too late…