"We know that you like watching them."
This information was quite disturbing to Lena, as the latest image they had been showing her over and over again was a pair of violently jiggling bikini-clad breasts. At first she blushed with embarrassment. Then her pulse quickened. She dreaded the idea of the Team involving her in anything to do with sex. But then, after the thousandth or so replay, she realized that it was just another clip (or "picture" as they elegantly and archaically put it) like all the others before it, which had included a lamp turning on and off, bare feet stepping on and off a hard wood floor, and a kite flapping in the wind. Still, this new foray into a, um, more personal realm inspired in Lena a newfound rebelliousness. Sure, they were all-powerful and she was all-helpless, but someone had to draw a line somewhere. She thumbed the large red button on the end of her armrest.
"Permission to speak to Team."
"Permission granted."
"I would like to respond."
"G'head, sweetheart." She could hear the jubilant chortling of drunken laughter. This was their favorite time of the day and so, naturally, was the time she most dreaded. It was like being drunkdialed by your gynecologist.
"I would like to say that no, I do not like watching them. I do not like watching any of it, but especially not that. I find it offensive. If you don't mind, I think I've done enough for you and I'd like to go home."
A long pause. Then, a chorus of snickers. Then, an answer (or something like it):
"A whole year of whoring might not have managed to fuck the Catholic out of you, but we certainly will if you ever take it upon yourself to again interrupt our work with your insolent bleating."
Three weeks ago she would have been shaking in her hand-cuffed boots; now she felt a mere dull disappointment. It was their special little way of saying, "Not now, dear"; an only hapazardly malicious maneuver--kind of like the way some of her clients would warn that they were about to come only to plop out of her mouth and squirt her right in the eye. It was just their nature, really.
Lena liked to imagine that they were a secret species of articulate chimpanzee--the proverbial kind that should have been locked away in a closet somewhere, their masters hoping to obtain a spontaneous copy of Hamlet as a return on their investment. Instead (because this is reality, after all), they were working in a Team on an Experiment of which Lena was a Very Important Component. Said project specifically meant immobile Lena was fed a daily diet of 12 hours of a single image that replayed itself continuously. During this time she had the ability to communicate with the Team via an old-school monitor system, expressing her thoughts, concerns and deep perplexion at what the fuck was going on here. Her communiques were roundly mocked and usually followed by bald threats of torture, gangrape, and/or death that gradually began to lose their intended effect by the end of the first week.
Why did she take these fools so lightly? It didn't matter how stupid they seemed, they had her in their sights and under their powers. I should be afraid, she thought. But something about them makes it hard to take them seriously. Perhaps it was the frenzied hooting and passionate arguing ("No, you idiot, not the red button, the blue, THE BLUE!!") that suggested an information system structured more along the lines of Fisher Price than IBM. Or maybe it was the fact that at least half of the voices coming through the monitors sounded intoxicated on any given day. Whatever it was, Lena found that as she approached the anniversary of her first month in captivity, she was no safer but somewhat wiser for recognizing the nature of her captors. They were powerful but imbecilic, made threats without seeming to understand their meaning, and committed violence without recognizing it as such. They denied her the presence of any kind of true sadism that might have given a semblance of meaning to her days, laughing at her bleeding eyes the way a frat boy laughs as he places his sleeping roommate's hand in a bucket of warm water, as though she were somehow in on the joke, too.
