Loophole

I entered the room close on Ashley's tail, closing the door behind me, she gave me an irritated look as she sat on my bed and took off her glasses, setting them on my bedside table, and then looking up at me with tired, reddish, eyes. The sight reminded me of Penny and mom the previous night.

“What?” She asked as I gently closed the door.

“I need to talk to you about the Blackout.” I said without preamble. One of her eyebrows rose in response.

“We already talked about it, Liam.” She replied in an annoyed voice, shooing me away with a hand as she climbed under the covers of my bed.

“I'm serious, Ashley. Something happened during it.”

At that, her expression changed minutely, she looked at me differently, her gaze becoming more calculating.

“What do you mean?” She asked with guarded curiosity.

“Well, for starters, the way you're all behaving!” I hissed out, looking at the door nervously, although I wasn't sure why. I wasn't sure why I was doing anything I was doing at the moment.

“What does that mean?”

“None of you seem to care about whatever might have been done to you while you were frozen.”

“What do you mean?” She asked once more, the irritation on her face at having to repeatedly ask for clarification was plain for me to see. “It's not important what men might have done to us while taking care of us.”

“There!” I interrupted loudly, pointing at her mouth, she glared at me. “Right there, ‘taking care of you’. None of you seem to realize that you're even saying it, it's like you're reading from a script or something! But you all just accept whatever was done to you while frozen as long as you were being ‘taken care of’."

“Well, yeah,” she said, her expression changing from a glare to a questioning look, as if I was asking why the sun was in the sky. “That's just unimportant details, duh.”

“So what, if I had fucked your mouth while you were frozen that would have been fine?”

“I mean, if you were taking care of me then I'd see no issue, obviously.” She confirmed, head tilted in a mixture of confusion and curiosity. “Obviously you didn't, since you weren't there. But, well, yeah.”

“And if I tried to do it now?”

“Don't be a creep Liam! Ugh. I'm your sister, for fuck's sake.” she finally pushed back with a slight look of disgust on her face. Whatever, I took this as progress. Still, I pressed on.

“I think that something else happened to women, beyond the Blackout, I mean.” I finally confessed my suspicions. Her brow furrowed at this, not in disgust or anything like that, but back to that calculating gaze from earlier. She quickly looked at the closed door and back to me again.

“Alright , fine, I'll indulge you, but you still haven't convinced me. And I'm not forgetting that comment, you little creep!”

“What if something was done to you while you were frozen, what if you were… programmed somehow?”

Her breath hitched as she considered it. She raised her hand to stop me.

“I… didn't want to say this earlier but… Matt and I were testing some equipment during the Blackout and we recorded… something during it.”

“Something what?”

She pursed her lips for a second.

“We're not really sure but…” her eyes went to the door once more, then focused back on me, licking her lips. “It looked like a transmission of some sort.”

My eyes widened at that. Ashley continued talking.

“Matt and I think we can probably decode it but it'll take a couple of days, at best.”

“And that doesn't seem suspicious to you!?” I finally asked in a strained voice as my fears were all but confirmed.

“I…” Ashley's brow furrowed. “Now that I think about it, yeah, it's pretty weird.”

Weird!? I wanted to scream but, clearly, there was something at hand. It was like some sort of passive effect was keeping her just a smidge away from fully realizing what I was saying. I wondered if I could break through. I looked at Ashley again, really looked at her, sitting on my bed, her face level with my crotch as she thought in silence.

I wondered what else I might be able to do as something stirred in me and the mounting frustration of the past few minutes mixed with something else.

“You know,” I began slowly, my voice felt slightly unsteady, “it's still pretty chaotic out there, Ash.”

I wasn't exactly sure where I was going with it but there was a thought, an idea, forming as I spoke.

“Uh, yeah.” She confirmed my statement as she looked at the window, the curtains were still drawn, only letting a little light through from the sides. “I'm not gonna lie, it was pretty bad out there on the way here.”

The unformed idea continued to swirl inside my head, finally taking shape.

“So,” I continued, a little more certain now as my hand gently moved towards her, “I guess I'm still taking care of you, and mom, and Penny,” my hand closed around her breast and she startled, her eyes widening for a fraction.

“Right, Ashley?”

“I, uh. Wh- Huh?” Her face was filled with a mixture of anger and confusion as she looked at my hand groping her breast. Whatever programming I suspected was inside of her mind tried to reconcile my words with the situation. “I, I mean, I'm, I'm not… but, it's pretty bad... out…?”

She looked at me and a small whine escaped her mouth as her pupils dilated and contracted a couple of times, eyes focusing and unfocusing as she grabbed at her temple with one hand. After another moment, she relaxed and smiled.

“Right... Right, yeah. You're still taking care of us.” she finally agreed with a relaxed voice. Whatever conflict was inside her mind was solved just like that after I used the magical words. As if she was, well,

Programmed.

And if she responded to this, then she might have other things hidden inside of her mind. I looked at the closed door of my room in the direction of the kitchen, where Penny and mom sat and talked. They all did. They're all programmed, somehow.

Computers with tits, the increasingly loud part of me that I had been trying not to listen to for the past several hours quipped as everything finally clicked into place in a mixture of arousal and mania from my sleep deprivation.

I had somehow stumbled into something huge, something truly enormous. I didn't know if anyone else might have, a jealous part of me hoped that nobody else had figured this out, but it didn't matter in the here and now as the heat inside of me grew.

With a smile I don't think I would recognize, I pushed Ashley's body down to the mattress as my lips found hers and my hands roamed her body.

I could think about this later, after I was done ‘taking care’ of my big sister.