Their Human Pet

Chapter 1

“You know you are owned, don’t you. There is no escape.”

I have the sense of being small. But not young. The figures surrounding me make me seem diminutive in comparison because they are impossibly large. I don’t know where I am. I don’t know who they are. But I know that they want me. Every bit of me. I can feel their possessive energy focused on me.

Someone grabs a thick handful of my hair and holds me in place. I feel a harsh slap across my ass.

“Naughty pet,” a deep voice intones. “Such a naughty little human mate. What are we going to do with you?”

This is a dream. I know it is because real life couldn’t possibly be this hot.

Real life is straws you have to drink from quickly before they go soggy in a soy protein shake, and letters from the building manager about the hours you’re keeping, and an itch on the bottom of your foot that never seems to have any reason to be there.

Real life is a series of tasks that stay the same day after day.

What’s happening to me now is un-fucking-real in every way.

A massive, scaled hand wraps lightly around my throat, and holds me firmly while another big red hand slides down my stomach, making for the apex of my thighs. My legs spread instinctively. In this dream, I know I am supposed to give myself to them.

“Filthy little animal…”

“Good girl…”

Two strange voices mesh with one another.

I catch little flashes of alien masters…

there are scales… a horn… a battleax. Nothing is entirely clear because my brain won’t render the whole scene at once.

It’s putting all its effort into the way my hips are grinding against the hand between my legs, the thick finger pushing into my molten interior.

“So wet for us,” the voice comes again. “Such a hungry, desperate little pet.”

I try to move, try to grind my hips down. I want satisfaction. I am so desperately aroused I know the only way out of this is to find release.

A face swims into view. The alien beast has the appearance and bearing of a wild god. Golden hair flows from his head in a brilliant mane. He has bright stellar blue eyes, and the hard, symmetrical features of a creature chiseled from stone. He is hard… in every way.

My eyes run down the length of his body.

“Down, girl,” he says, pressing me down on my knees.

The hands help him put me where he wants me.

I am not given a choice. Between the three big alien entities, I am as helpless as the animal they call me.

I am like a rabbit in a snare, caught so completely all I can do is stare wide-eyed as a collar is latched closed around my throat and the wildness is stolen from me in that universal act of domination and domestication.

“She’s waking up, I think. Her pulse just spiked.”

A voice that doesn’t belong to this place or these creatures breaks through the dream. A shaft of light pierces the sacred darkness we have been trysting in.

“No!” I whine, feeling as though I am about to lose something I will never be able to get back. The sexy fear of being kidnapped by aliens is replaced by a very raw fear of something much worse, of being cut off…

But the light is getting brighter, and the dream is fading, and no amount of holding onto it can stop the rising of my consciousness.

“We’re coming for you.”

That’s the last thing I hear before I wake up.

I open my eyes.

I have the warm, cozy feeling of emerging from a long sleep and a very satisfying dream. It is gone instantly, the way the best dreams are, but I feel the chemical remnants of it.

There’s a bird singing out the window. White curtains flutter in the wind.

A kindly man wearing a white coat and stethoscope is looking down at me with an air of gentle expectation.

He has wrinkles at the corners of his eyes and salt-and-pepper hair, and a vibe of being very dependable, reliable, and safe.

“You’re awake,” he says.

I forgive the obvious statement, because he seems nice, and because I feel so good.

Sometimes it feels like I can never get enough sleep, like the long, restorative rests of childhood were also some dream I’ll never get back.

But this feels amazing, like I’ve been asleep for a very long time.

Or like I’ve had the best nap ever and woken up without being groggy. I’m so rested.

This must be what people mean when they say women are supposed to get ten hours of sleep a night. I feel like I’ve slept a decade. Or a century. I feel like Sleeping Beauty. I want to burrow back into the pillow, close my eyes, and find the dream again. It was good, I think.

But the doctor won’t let me. He has more silly obvious things to say, and even sillier things to ask.

“What’s your name, darling?”

I look at the doctor. My lips part. It’s a simple question. I’ve been answering it for as long as I could speak. I don’t even think about it as I answer…

And then I… don’t?

To my surprise, there’s a blank where I used to be. My lips move, as if they’re going to form the word. But nothing comes out. I search my mind. It remains blank.

“I need your name,” he says. “You’re not in trouble.”

“Why would I be in trouble?”

“You’re not. You couldn’t be. Now tell me your name.”

I try again. I fail again. I feel my face crumple as the realization hits me.

“I don’t know.”

Three years later…

I never did remember what my name was. I got discharged from the hospital a few weeks later after they figured they’d done all they could for me.

I knew how to function, could talk, knew what year it was, which corporate states were in charge.

What I couldn’t tell them was who I was, why I was there, what had happened before I was found in the street.

Fortunately, I landed in New New York, which is Zeal territory, and Zeal is probably one of the better corporate states to wake up in as an amnesiac. I got a starter pack, a little money, referrals for a few jobs, things of that nature.

The people in the hospital looked at me with pity, because all I knew about myself is that I was somewhere in my early to mid-twenties, with brown hair, brown eyes, and according to the night charge nurse, a bad attitude.

But when you forget everything about yourself, you can be anything.

I choose to be a problem.

I’ve made a life for myself, or a living, anyway.

It’s early in the morning, probably two or maybe three a.m., and the bass in Club Eclipse is throbbing through me, making me tingle all the way to the parts of my body that I haven’t used in living memory.

I am wearing a cute little pink skirt made out of a rubbery material; it has pleats and swings out around my thighs.

My legs are clad in flat-soled boots that match the skirt, but lace up along the outsides.

I have a black tank top on, with my little pink bandoliers crisscrossed over it.

They look like they’re just for fashion, but they’re not.

And there’s a little body bag too, that’s black because I want it to be harder to see.

My hair is tied up in two high pigtails, and my makeup is on point.

I like to wear a lot because it makes me harder to recognize out of it.

My brows are drawn on pretty dramatically, and I have a lot of liner and a thick pink slash of shadow that flares out to a white smoke effect.

My lips are bubblegum pink and I have glitter everywhere you can put glitter and have it look good, all down my arms so I sparkle when I dance.

It looks like I’m here to have fun, but this is my work outfit, because my name is… who even knows, and I’m an amnesiac.

I like to think that at some stage I had skills I could use to be employed, but I don’t know what they were. The assistance from Zeal ran out pretty quick and I had to find ways to support myself.

This is how I do it. There’s a fun irony to it, too.

I need money, but I have no memory, so I sell people things that help them forget.

I’ve got several little doses of different pills on me in little clear plastic containers slipped into the bandoliers that I’m wearing across my chest. About half of them are already gone, but I’ve got plenty more to sell.

There’re a whole lot more in the cute bag I’m wearing around my waist.

This is Eclipse, one of the biggest clubs in New New York City, NNYC for short. It’s the best place to sell. Some of the girls are wearing cute little booty shorts with NNYC across the cheeks. They’re proud to be from this place, and if they’re not from here, they’re even more proud to be here.

The city orbits what’s left of Earth. It’s about the size of Old Manhattan, and it is falling, always falling toward the ground at exactly the same rate as the curvature of the Earth, so it never crashes.

Flying cities, they call them, though they’re more like massive satellites.

Cities used to be built down on the world below, but certain events made it more or less uninhabitable down there.

There are still millions of people down on Earth, but they don’t really count as actual humans, not to those of us who live in these floating cities, quite literally above all the drama of the ruined planet below.

Most of the clientele at Eclipse are men.

I’d say a good seventy percent. Most of the girls here are working in one capacity or other, either for the club itself, or as freelancers.

Women are in short supply in this corner of the world.

Many are kept at home by their families, and others are living their very best lives off-world.

We lost a lot of women when the aliens first came, so I’ve learned.

Overnight, millions of women were scooped up and taken away in what was called the first rapture.

We don’t know what happened to them. Maybe there’s a planet out there populated entirely with Earth women.

Maybe they got spread across the stars. Maybe they were served with nibbles and dips.

Everyone’s got an opinion, and nobody really knows for sure.