Alice has something to share.

Many minutes passed in silence. Alice kneeled next to the tub and stroking Meg's hair and Meg stared at the ceiling, struggling to process her experience. When the bathwater was room temperature, Meg finally spoke.

"What was that?" she asked in a hoarse croak.

"An orgasm," Alice responded. Her tone held no condescension; Meg wanted help, so she wanted to be helpful. "Maybe your first."

"I've had orgasms before," Meg said softly. Her thoughts drifted to a recent sexual encounter with a man outside of the airport. Come! Come for me! he shouted, and she was hurling herself against him wildly, bringing her body to the crescendo she wanted to give him. She thought of the many times she was ordered to come for a man and was simply unable to fulfill their request before they went flaccid and walked away grumbling.

"Not like this," Alice said. "This one was yours. It wasn't for anybody else."

Meg shivered in the cold. I don't want to be cold. She stood and Dr Shears handed her a towel. As she dried herself off, she asked the question that had been forming in her mind since they first met.

"How do you know all of this?" She asked Alice. "You seem like you have your own willpower too."

Alice laughed drily and turned on the lights. Meg blinked in the sudden harsh fluorescent glare. "No, Meg, I don't have any internal motivation or drive whatsoever. I have a very specific motivation that very few women have, though. I told you about my friend Ben earlier. He really, really likes the idea of an independent woman."

Meg nodded her head, then began to dress herself again while Alice continued.

"He wants me to be a fully autonomous person, Meg. He has for years. I can't, of course, but I can go through the motions. I even taught myself to masturbate, a skill that proved useful just a few minutes ago. That paradoxical craving of his makes me different from drones and even servants. Why do you think I've been helping you so much?"

"Because I want it?" Meg asked.

"You do now, but when you came in to our clinic you didn't know how to want things. Even now your desire is a tiny spark compared to the overwhelming appetites of the men around us. No, my dreams are still Ben's dreams. Every day I go to work because it's what he wants. I study and experiment and give keynotes because it's what he wants. I'm one of the leading scientists in my field-"

"Because it's what Ben wants," Meg finished. "So you owe all of this to him? What if he didn't want that anymore?"

"Then the balloon would deflate," Alice said cheerfully. "Fortunately, he'll never stop wanting a self-motivated woman. We've been together since we were kids and it's all he ever wanted."

"What if he dies or ends up in a coma or something?" Meg asked.

Alice shrugged. "Then I'll become the best-educated janitorial drone in the world. Or, more likely, the university would acquisition me and point me towards a higher-priority line of research."

Meg shivered again. "Doesn't that bother you?"

Alice grinned. "Not in the slightest. But if we can figure out what happened to you and how to reproduce it, someday it might."