[All characters in this work of fiction are 18 or older.]



*



She felt like a schoolgirl next to the tall, willowy Tomlin. He was blond, thin, pale and beautiful. A confidence man, con artist, seducer and all-around sexy bastard, and completely out of her league, he wore a red leather jacket, French cuffs and Italian boots. Edwina on the other hand was a short, bespectacled, bookish girl, nervously clutching her notebook bag to her chest, trying to hide how much she was blushing. Completely beneath his notice. He sweet, though, still smiling and showing her a good time up until then. They'd met the contact at the bar, and she'd done her job (look adorable, do the computer thing and show the money was real, say nothing) while he crooned and schmoozed the two men in suits. When the deal was made, he'd insisted she stay for a drink, and, her heart fluttering in her chest, she'd stayed for that and two more. Now they were walking down a street in Madrid after midnight, on their way back to the hotel. She knew better than to hope he'd take her to his room, but she could pretend.



"So," he said, startling her, "why do they call you Dongle?"



Oh, no, did he think her codename was stupid? "Well," she began, "a 'dongle' is a slang term for a hardware key...a small but critical piece that the program won't work without. I earned it when I stole one from a Franchise weapons lab and ruined their operation."



"I see."



"So why do they call you Heartbreak?"



"Oh, I dunno," he crooned, tossing his hair comically. "Hey. Thanks for comin' out tonight."



"I was so nervous," she said, "I mean, hey, free trip to Spain, but I'm not cut out for field work. I don't know how you guys do it."



He laughed. "Oh, come on. You did great, didn't I say?"



She reddened further. "God, I must have looked like a child."



"Yeah, well...damn, I think it's going to rain."



"Oh, no!"



He took her hand (wow!) and they ran as fast as her business heels would allow. They arrived at the hotel before they were drenched too badly. She was both disappointed and relieved when he dropped her off at her room with a sheepish smile before retiring to the one next to it, and after she closed the door, she allowed herself to do that thing they do in the movies, where she slumped her back to the door, sighed and slid to the floor, and then melted into a puddle.



Two hours later she was awakened by a knock at the door. She froze, and for just a moment, allowed herself to hope. Maybe he was back. She fished for her glasses, then slipped into a nightgown (just in case it wasn't) and, as she was trained to do, waved a hand in front of the peephole carefully before actually looking.



It *was* him. She nervously fiddled with her hair, tugged her nightgown into a better position, then tried not to sound desperate as she fumbled to unlock the door. Tomlin almost knocked her over as he darted inside and slammed the door shut. In his hand he was holding a gun. And not the kind she'd been hoping for, either. It was chrome, and it had a silencer.



"T-Tommy?" she managed.



"Get dressed," he interrupted. "Someone tried to kill me in the lobby."



She squeaked and rushed into the bathroom, catching the hangar with yesterday's suit on it as she disappeared.



She came out again, composed as she could be, to see him with his back to the wall beside the door, waiting. "We have to get you out of here."



"But--!"



"Sweetheart--" he said, taking her arm, "it's me they want. I'll get you to the stairwell. Leave your phone on."



He rushed her down the wall, half-hiding the gun, and shouldered open the door to the stairs, depositing her inside. She looked back at him, forlorn.



"I'll be fine," he said. "You have to go. Now."



The door closed. Carrying her shoes, she ran down the stairs, and out the door into the alley...



They were everywhere. Yet she never saw more than two at a time. Men in long jackets. Sunglasses. Hats. She watched them permeate the hotel and the street from behind an alley gate. She tried to hide her frightened breathing. She didn't sign up for this. She wasn't a mercenary. She wasn't an assassin or a femme fatale. She was a hacker. She just hoped Tommy was okay.



And just like that, they started disappearing. She heard a car speed off.



Her phone vibrated.



---



--DAY 1--



She was at the verge one finds themselves on just before consciousness, the part where the attempt is made to stay unconscious. This requires effort, and gives way to more and more unwelcome cognition. She felt like she weighed a ton and her head was packed with tissue paper. She couldn't bring herself to move. She was too comfortable anyway. It was warm, the mattress soft on her back where she was lavishly sprawled. Her skin was smooth and soft, freshly bathed and moisturized. She glowed. She was just having trouble yawning, and the blankets had fallen off or something. Her eyes drifted unwillingly open.



She was naked. Her blinking eyes adjusted to an array of amber heat lamps above her, giving her skin a healthy glow, which by the feel of it had indeed been washed, perhaps even treated with moisturizers or oils. Her smooth, brown hair was splayed out around around her arms and shoulders on the padded surface upon which she found herself. The heavy feeling was genuine, but it was compounded by restraints holding her wrists together above her head. Her knees were held bent open, her ankles also securely held apart, all by a stretchy material that gave a little, but did not release her. Another strap secured her neck. It seemed designed not to interrupt her nudity, which would look and feel almost luxurious if not for the obscene positioning. The wisp of thin material being held over her mouth made an enticing whimper of it, but she did at least try to ask out loud; "how did I get here?"



She remembered. They'd left. They were gone. Her phone. It made that "wzzzzz" noise when it vibrated. She'd reached for it. They weren't gone. Lifted roughly off her feet, she smelled chloroform on the square of fabric pressed over her mouth. Oh, god. She remembered. Being carried to the van. Her clothes being pulled off. Cut through. Taken. Sprayed all over her body with warm water like a cadaver on an examining table at a forensics office. Her hair being washed. Soap. Lotion. They'd shaved her. Completely. At some point, for whatever reason, they'd returned her glasses. Her toes twitched, and she noticed that for some reason she still had her shoes.



The struggling was a formality. The elastic bands stretched but stayed secure. She'd never hurt herself, but she'd never escape. It was when she heard the door open that she froze and tears started to well up. The anomalous gentleness with which she was handled had thus far left her eventual fate rather uncertain, but who she saw entering the room erased all doubt. She was going to be tortured, interrogated, probably sexually, and in all likelihood liquidated after she talked.



And talk, she surely would.



Scratch. That was what they called him. That and his real name, Scott Broley, were synonymous with all the terrible things that could happen to anyone caught on the wrong end of espionage for so much as a minute. He was tall and slender like Tommy, but with more muscle. Shoulder holsters on either side of his torso, black gloves, black pants and dress shoes, he was the utilitarian kind in appearance. It was his personality that did the talking.



"Wow," he said, as if observing on a mildly remarkable find on E-bay. "They really got her. Tommy thought it was him we were after, isn't that fucking hilarious?" He approached the table, gloved thumbs hooked in his belt. She started struggling again. "Aww. Geez, you poor thing. Dongle, right?" He tisked. "Shame. Step out of the lab for one second and you end up in this one. Oh well. That's the game, I guess. But," he said, his mockery of reassurance very chilling, "not to worry. It won't be me who does it to ya. See I find the guys get too zealous and don't focus on the job. Honestly I couldn't either. But the staff has it well in hand. I called them in specially from Hong Kong."



He nodded with pride around the room and Dongle realized she hadn't been alone. There were people in lab coats. Four, five maybe. Women.



"There was this documentary about bisexuality. It showed a study where women and men were shown video clips of men and women in various sexual and nonsexual situations while they measured their genital arousal," Scratch went on, naturally. Dongle started to notice the coats the 'staff' were wearing were a little tight. Almost provocative. "The straight guys responded to anything with tits. But the heterosexual women, see, didn't respond to nude men doing anything nonsexual any more than they did to panoramas of the Swiss Alps--the control, you know--but the clips of nude women dancing or doing calisthenics or planting azalea bushes caused a significant response." He watched them for a moment. They looked like they were preparing for...surgery. "Whaddya suppose it means? Hm?"



Dongle knew of Scratch, for all his evils, to be an honest man and believed him when he implied that he wouldn't be touching her. She also knew him to be a complete fiend, and so shrank from his gaze when it fell on her again. "This isn't bad as far as violations of the Geneva Convention go. This isn't some makeshift interrogation room in a rusty shack in Tikrit, I mean, this is the professional shit. Clean. Clinical. Befitting a lady, you know? I mean, after the first hour, we even let you answer questions."



She was shivering now. He stared down at her with those eyes, letting it sink in. Then he deftly whipped off a glove, produced a handkerchief, and rather courteously caught and wiped away a tear that had run its way down her temple toward her ear.



"Save those," he said.



He turned and left her there. Even strapped naked to a table in an unknown location, pending interrogation at the hands of professional...handlers, she actually felt safer with him having left the room.



That is until her gag was removed and a breathing mask pressed to her face. She started screaming into it. An IV was inserted in her wrist, through the bondage cuff, apparently a feature of the design. A monitor on a gimbal arm eclipsed her vision.



The screaming forced her to respirate whatever it was the mask was feeding into her system. Her eyes shot open when she registered: oxygen. She was going to be completely awake for this. As hope of fainting vanished, her wide eyes were just in time to see the monitor turned on. Among other things, mostly extraneous strings of "0000" and "10:00:00" and the chilling title "Case 771," the screen was dominated by images of her at different angles. In one window was a top-down view of her subdued, naked form, her face hidden by the monitor itself. She noticed her shoes then. They weren't the ones she'd been wearing. Another window was a closer angle of her torso and her heaving chest, the one next to that was her own masked, terrified face. The last, #4, was pointed squarely at her womanhood.



They were going to make her watch.



She hadn't been trained for any of this. She was a computer analyst. A hacker. A geek. Already she was a mixture of tearful whimpering and muffled promises to tell them whatever they wanted to know, and pleas not to inflict harm on her. But the black-haired specialists were preparing their tools. And they advanced one by one.



Totally awake from the oxygen being pumped into her brain, she couldn't look away as the monitor showed her very acutely what she was feeling. Latex gloves smeared a substance onto her nipples. On the close-up between her legs, she saw and felt herself opened by hand, and her hood pulled back. She squeaked and thrashed at being "handled," but froze as she watched warm drops of clear liquid dolluped onto her most sensitive spot, and then very clinically "applied" inside her by a latex-covered finger. The affected areas immediately started to tingle, turning pink and then red as they filled with blood. What were they doing to her? It wasn't long before there followed EKG leads...except not quite, they had wires attached to them, but were contoured to fit perfectly over engorged female nipples≠. Others with the appropriate shape were attached around her modest breasts, which were still heaving with her fearful gasps of eye-popping oxygen mixture.



She was watching Camera 4. She'd never seen it so clearly. And unable to look away at herself so obscenely displayed, her alarm grew as she was forced to watch herself getting wet. That is until her view was blocked.



She heard the hissing noise first. Then she saw the hose being brought over. It had a glass tube at the end about as wide as a small grape. They touched it to her clitoris and the suction immediately stuck the aperture to her, drawing her clitoris into the transparent bulb. She felt the sensation of blood rushing into it and, to her horror, nearly had an orgasm.



This couldn't be right. She was really lubricating now. It was starting to trickle down to other places. This was fortunate, as from nowhere a device, like a metal lollipop attached to a wire by the stick, was inserted into her other hole, eliciting a muffled protest.



The last thing put inside her looked like a metal egg, also on a cord. It was shaped in such a way that she felt it press against the most intimate surfaces inside the warm, wet folds of her exposed genitalia.



For what seemed like a day, she waited for something to happen. She was having trouble ignoring the nagging feeling of pleasure from her clitoris being firmly sucked on in the vacuum tube, probably because she was being forced to watch it, but other than that, she waited.



Then she heard one of the technicians mention a "test sequence." As much as she could, she braced herself.



She tried not to scream and failed when the lollipop gave her a sharp tingling sensation. A mild shock. They were going to use electricity on her. Simple and effective. What else would they need on someone like her? Every nerve tense, she felt the egg next, buzzing inside her, making her shake. Then the tube felt like it danced needles over the anatomy it was secured to. She felt like she knew what was next, but it was worse than that. Each of the contacts stuck to her breasts went off on sequence, until finally the shock hit her nipples, one at a time.



She was crying by then. Then a moment later, she forgot to as she felt another sensation. A different tingling. The nipple cups vibrated. At first it was just disturbing, the nerves still smarting from the correctional impulse, but before long she started to squirm a little. Just as she was beginning to wonder what they were up to, the nipple cups stopped that the lollipop jumped to life. She gasped in a lungful of oxygen. When the egg took a turn stimulating her she began to frantically wonder what was going on here.



Then she paralyzed. It was like her whole body lit up, frozen, eyes wide, mouth gaping and silent. The tube on her clitoris was humming uncut pleasure into her hips, thighs, belly, breasts, toes, fingertips, and her mind.



She was stunned and exhausted when it stopped, just a heartbeat away from an orgasm.



"What the fuck?" she breathed.



She wasn't given long for her mind to clear. But she could tell they were just getting started. She was starting to just wonder where they were going with this. The vibrating had involuntarily aligned her whole body. As scared as she still was, physically she was now completely focused on one thing.



"Start the clock," said a voice nearby.



01:00:00 became 00:59:59. Then they hit her with all of them. Her nipple cup, clitoral tube, G-spot egg and anal bead all suddenly force-fed her inorganic, unfaltering sex impulses at once. With no warning or preamble, she was taken from zero to orgasm in about a sixth of a second.. Her body arched as best it could, instinctively drawn toward the attachments, as she experienced the kind of climax that can only be produced in a laboratory. There were no fantasies, no intimacy, no fetishes or kinks; they'd hit a switch and literally turned her on.



She was shocked and exhausted when they let her down again. She felt like she'd been defibrillated. The effect had nearly blinded her, and might have made her pass out but for the mask. As it was, she hazily noticed they'd held her under for a whole minute. And now 0000 read 0001.



"Oh, god, no!"



Her suspicions, though correct, were washed away immediately. She was having another uncut cocaine orgasm. It was the most pleasure they could induce without attaching electrodes to her brain. Her conscious thought was already breaking down, but she'd gotten the sinister joke: they were going to force-orgasm her for the next hour.



And did they ever. When simply vibrating all her pleasure receptors at the highest possible frequency showed a hint of losing effectiveness, they started to incorporate some variety, which took a little longer, but was always different and therefore always worked. The instant vibrating changed, evolving into pulsing, oscillating, random interruptions, sometimes just a low, subtle intrusion on one particular area while the rest of the attachments raped her senses. It was the more complex stimulation that made her ejaculate, projecting drops of fluid across the table, or sometimes just gushing into a puddle around her, which mysteriously drained away directly through the material. And when that showed the most minute sign of faltering, the shocks started again. The leads to the flesh around her nipples all did one of two things, get warm or give an unpleasant-to-toe-curling tingle, which renewed the intensity of her climaxes in a way that surprised even her, and it spread eventually to include the other components. It dismayed her to see just how receptive she was to abuse as they incorporated electric shocks to her orgasm regimen.



When she was awake, she was having, or on her way to having an orgasm. When she did manage to pass out, they shocked her awake. When she was having an orgasm, she wasn't thinking. When she had time to think, usually no more than three seconds at the very most, she heard her mouth begging, and tried not to watch the mounting digits on the monitor in front of her or the fluids she was losing, replaced by the IV in her wrist.



It had stopped being curious or acceptable after 0003. She couldn't form words properly after 0009. Her vision actually started to suffer at 0021. When she came out of her stupor, the counter read 0042 and it was over.



She felt like she'd been hit by a train. The nature of the equipment didn't cause any real wear and tear on her anatomy, but her whole body felt like she'd been thrown down a flight of stairs. Her eyes couldn't focus at first, and when they did everything looked like it was moving. The heat lamps had kept her warm without blankets thus far, but now they kept her in a sheen of sweat. And she was joined.



Sitting on the edge of her table was a woman in a short lab coat. Her long legs were exposed except for her prim heels. She looked to be idly checking off things on a clipboard, probably just for show. She looked Chinese, but surprised Dongle with an American accent.



"Okay, genius," she said, "this is the part where you start talking."



Dongle whimpered. The woman popped the oxygen mask off and got her pen ready. Dongle tried. She was still having trouble articulating, or even staying focused, let alone recalling details. She stammered something about trading information with the Syndicate before the woman interjected.



"That's great," she said, "now tell us about the Godspike."



Dongle blinked. "...the...the what? I..." She arched her back and screamed. The components were just electrocuting her this time, the equipment emitting an rhythmic buzz.

