Jack in Kat's body (Alternative story)

The neural interface casts blue-white light across features you've seen in mirrors for years but never from this angle. Your former face wears an expression you don't recognize—something predatory in the set of the jaw, a confidence in the way the shoulders square against the holographic display. Kat moves through your body like she's always owned it.

"Stop fidgeting," she says without looking at you, and the command slides through your nervous system like voltage. Your hands, which had been twisting together in your lap, go still. The compliance is instantaneous, reflexive, and some distant part of your engineering mind notes with clinical horror how efficiently the conditioning responds to even casual authority.

"The frigate's running standard approach vectors," Kat continues, manipulating the sensor display with your hands. Her hands now, you suppose. "We've got maybe twelve minutes before they dock. Their mental scanning suite will need another three to calibrate for civilian neural architectures." She turns, and seeing your own eyes assess you like meat is deeply unsettling. "Fifteen minutes total. That's how long you need to hold it together."

Your new body disagrees with the concept of holding anything together. The conditioning you designed years ago—optimized for responsiveness, for pleasure in submission—pulses through your neural pathways like background radiation. Every time Kat speaks, you feel warmth bloom in your chest. Every time she looks at you, there's a flutter of anticipation that your conscious mind finds nauseating but your hypothalamus interprets as desire.

"I need to know what you're planning," you manage, and your voice comes out softer than you intended. The vocal cords are configured differently, but that's not why you sound so uncertain. "The behavioral mods I installed in you were supposed to be temporary. Dominant traits decay after six hours, maybe eight at the outside."

Kat smiles with your mouth. It's not your smile. "I made some adjustments while you were **** during the transfer."

The words take a moment to process. Your engineering mind, still functional despite the chemical cascade of submission hormones flooding your system, begins running calculations. The mental exchange printer's modification protocols. The behavioral lock parameters. The permanence settings.

"You made them permanent," you say.

"I made them permanent," Kat confirms. She crosses the cabin toward you, and your body responds before your mind can object—pulse quickening, pupils dilating, a flush of heat spreading across your skin. "I've spent three years in this body, Jack. Three years of your modifications, your conditioning, your helpful little 'improvements.' Do you have any idea what it's like to feel this grateful every time someone tells you what to do?"

She's standing over you now. Your former body is taller than this one by fifteen centimeters. The height difference triggers something in your limbic system that makes you want to look down, to yield.

"I designed it to be pleasurable," you say, because that seemed important at the time. Ethically sound, even. Consent had been enthusiastic. The modifications were requested.

"It is pleasurable," Kat says. "That's the problem. You made submission feel so good that fighting it feels like self-harm." She reaches down and tilts your chin up with your own fingers, and the touch sends electricity down your spine. "Now you get to experience your own handiwork. The Miridians are coming, and you're going to do exactly what I tell you, when I tell you. Aren't you?"

The word rises unbidden: "Yes."

Somewhere in the distance, the docking alarm begins its countdown sequence.