Length: 916 words
Characters/Pairings: The Psiionic, Her Imperious Condescension
Warnings: Torture, implied noncon, the general shittiness of the Helmsman's situation. Although his situation isn't as bad in this one as it usually is. But the warning remains.
Your helmsman is completely in your power.
You are fully aware of that. You are always fully aware of your power, and all the endless things that fall under it; your ship, your fleet, your planets, your people, your empire.
Your helmsman is completely in your power.
But you can't reach him.
You can make him whimper and scream and sob in pain—and in pleasure, either one on your whim. For every second he enjoys his thousand digital eyes and the impossibly complicated entity of himself and your ship, soaring through space and stretching his limits, you can push him beyond those limits, till he's screaming and bleeding from the inside out. You can make him say whatever you want, even denounce his former friends and the foul hemo-equality bullshit from the little mutant freak they're calling the sufferer.
You can make him do whatever you want. He is your puppet.
…but you never reach him. Everything you wring out of him is an echo, a distant sub-program running on repeat, pacify the f115h611tch. His body reacts while his mind takes the power of your ship, the power you gave him, and soars out to the stars. You can tear his skin open and flay his muscles into strips before you heal him, gouge at his face with your nails, and he will scream so beautifully for a while you can convince yourself that it's real. But once you've healed him together again and he's sobbed himself silent he will tense in his wires, slump, raise his head. He will lick his blood off his lips and spit into the rippling water around his helmblock.
He will smile at you and his screens will hiss static and mutter d035 th3 3mpr355 r3qu11r3e 4ny7h11ng 3l53 of her _!hum6l3!_ h3lm5m4n? and no matter how many times you order him to speak plainly, to stop mutilating everything he says with ugly numbers, he smiles that blank little smile, eyes glowing in the dark, and repeats a sing-song whine of quivering, mechanical words, y35 y0ur 11mp3r110u5n355, wh473v3r y0u 54y.
w11ll w3 74k3 0ff 4g411n 500n? he drawls through the ship's bridge screens, and you amuse yourself in a fit of sudden anger by channeling electricity through him, making his muscles spasm and his voice on your monitors crack into screams of random numbers, a mechanical repetition, please_please_please_please_it hurts_hurts_hurts_hurts_
he's silent as you stop the electric surge, pleased to see his voice with no trace of those hideous numbers he purposefully mangles it with. Perhaps now he will—
..and then a flicker of static, and the screens light up again. His voice is computer-generated, blank.
…but you can't be imagining the hint of smugness there.
_50 w11ll w3 t4k3 0ff 500n 0r wh47_?_11m 69999999r4d_
(69, 69, 69, and every time he types it, you catch it flickering bright, mutant red before you turn your head and the color is gone.)
It has been more than a hundred sweeps since you had him installed, and since then you have not had a single day go completely smoothly. Wires burst in the bowels of your ship for no reason—unexplained power-surges. The heating and cooling systems read as your preferred cool temperature every time you check, but consistently feel either uncomfortably warm or finger-chillingly cold. Screens flash crude pictures at the corners of your vision. Once, you catch a few glimpses of what looks like porn on your ship's screens, with a pixelated screenshot of your face pasted onto one of the participants. But when you check the records there is no sign any video was ever played.
You go down and torture him in person for that, but he rides out your abuse with a distant look in his eyes as he screams, and eventually you have to piece him back together and exit the engine block to the sound of a soft crackle of static that sounds suspiciously like snickering.
You look for ways to trap him, of course; ways to force him to stay in his body and suffer his punishments, as he should. But your engineers very quickly find he has modified his own brain—that tied in with the psionics that make him indispensable as a helmsman, hidden among his basic brain functions—as though he did it on purpose to defend it from surgical removal—there is a transmitter for a human supercomputer. A wireless signal that can span galaxies. You could shut off every signal on the ship, go dead in space and cut your entire crew off from the information networks of the universe, and still he would hang in the bowels of your ship and hold the entire network in his brain, reaching through the stars to read, see, hear, be anywhere in the universe.
And worse, there are times when he even seems to love it where he is. And it isn't because of your healing or your touch or your kisses. Even when you don't feel like causing him pain, when it's your pleasure to make him struggle and whine and beg for you, you can only reduce him to a limp mess, full of choked whimpers and pathetic noises.
But when he consumes every pathway and connection of your ship and takes off into the stars, his body screams his exhilaration and ecstasy and freedom and you seethe.
He is a puppet, every inch of him inside and out fully subject to your whims.
But you can not reach him.
Why shouldn't the Psiioniic have any way of fighting back over all those hundreds of sweeps, even if it's small? Mituna was a sassy snarky little asshole, I see no reason this version of him shouldn't be as well. :)