Trainingware Pt. 09

Ninth of nine parts.

Copyright 2009 by F. Diriger

-16-

Judy

I looked in on David occasionally Tuesday night as he read my diary extracts and then played the sensie I'd given him, a little surprised that he didn't think he had any homework to do. When Hubba told me David was going to bed, I put his vid up on my wallscreen and started the sensie feed to learn what reaction he'd had.

He was very mad at me!

I couldn't quite get the details from his surface thoughts, but I noticed an undercurrent that he thought I wasn't a trustworthy psychological agent! After he got undressed for bed, he glared defiantly at the room monitors and made his erection go down, as if to say that I wasn't worth getting an erection for.

I was quite hurt by his attitude, coming just as I'd thought David and I were becoming close. I hadn't even punished him today -- just duplicated his masturbation fantasy and gotten him off! Why was he so mad at me? But by the time I thought of asking David, he was asleep, so it looked like I'd have to wait until I saw him the next day. Then I realized that was stupid and activated David's room speakers, putting him in Deep O-Mode before he even woke up properly. I found out what was bothering him, and some of it was a mistake: he thought I was whipping him as hard as I could within training parameters, and that I'd forced him to a dangerous Arousal level!

Some of what he'd figured out was true though. He'd learned from my sensie how much I enjoyed punishing him, and he was very angry about it. I'd never tried to keep that a secret from him of course, and he hadn't been mad about it before! He'd also figured out that I masturbated between his first and second whipping round, since he could feel how wet I was afterward. It was stupid of me not to realize he'd notice that. He'd also guessed I was playing his sensie while I masturbated, experiencing his sore bottom to turn myself on. I had to admit that I could understand how he'd resent that!

The only lesson he'd taken from reading my diary extracts was that I was messed up psychologically myself, and must be unqualified to be his psychological agent. That part really upset me, since I'd thought David was going to be sympathetic when he learned about my ordeal as a young girl. Instead he'd just decided I was incompetent to be in charge of him.

So I was kind of depressed in school on Wednesday. David missed his regular lunch in the cafeteria to avoid me, and when I got home after school he was in my apartment wearing his punishment shorts again. I told him I knew he was mad at me, and tried to let him talk his feelings out, but when he compared what I was doing to what Caspar did to me, I couldn't keep from crying. At least he retracted that when I appealed to his fairness, but then he pointed out I'd never thought of him as a real person while I was punishing him. I realized that was probably true and felt kind of bad about it, but I made it clear that I thought of him as a person at other times.

At the end, he sounded more mature than I'd expected, saying he wanted to try to keep his dignity even when I whipped him, and asking me not to degrade him the way I'd been doing by teasing him. I thought that was a reasonable request, so I agreed. I was kind of angry myself by then, and I tried to be careful not to take it out on David. In fact I leaned over backward to be fair about the whipping he had coming. When it was over, David was determined not to ask me to get him off and started putting on his clothes without speaking. I wanted to clarify my own feelings at that point, and I told him I wasn't going to get him off anyway until he stopped thinking of me as his enemy; I was glad Hubba concurred that I should do that, because it was certainly what I felt.

I didn't feel at all like masturbating when I got into my bedroom. I was somewhat aroused from David's session, but I was too upset at what he'd said to do anything about it. I decided that I needed to seek some advice.

I said, "Zapraddy. Phone Linda Fechtenbaum," and got a personalized message she'd left for me, with a schedule lookup. The message said she'd be phoning me back in a little less than two hours, so I filled in the time re-editing the sensie I'd given David, using Hubba to locate the parts I'd left out in the first version, showing how I'd protected him during the session.

When the phone beeped my tune I saw Linda on the other end, and plunged right in.

"I, uh, had some bad experiences when I was growing up, from the time I was fifteen until I was almost seventeen," I said quickly. "My Stepfather used to punish me whenever my Mom was away. It was obviously sexual, and when my Mom found out, she divorced him and he got criminal conditioning. I had a year of Deep Therapy, and I'm supposed to be cured now, but what I'm worried about is that I might be unfit to be David's psychological agent. Can you tell me?"

"Huh!" Linda said, looking startled, but already working at her console. After a minute, she said, "Well, that's probably where you get your high S&M index, but that's not considered a psychological problem unless it goes too far, and it doesn't in your case." Then Linda put up some graphical displays in split-screen.

"This is from your school record," she said. "It takes extremely complex analysis to get this result, so you don't have to worry about non-qualified people seeing it, but two to a three and a half years ago on this time-scale you were obviously undergoing some traumatic events. Then, uh . . . a bit over two years, that stopped and you had a lot of healing input. It's difficult to see any remaining trauma now -- there might be some, but it would be trivial, and I'm sure you've been trained to root something like that out as soon as you notice it, right?"

"Yes," I said, "I find a problem every month or so where I'm connecting some situation to what my Stepfather used to do, and I extinguish it the way I was taught."

The graphs disappeared and Linda spoke decisively: "The important thing is that your Maturity Index is high adult, second percentile in the population. When you applied as a trainee psychological agent, everything in your history was taken into account. They use a Tetrabrain AI for applications like this, so it's basically impossible that anything about your history was missed or overlooked."

I took a deep breath of relief, and Linda looked at me quizzically. "Why are you suddenly so concerned about this?"

"I, uh, David said he wanted to understand me better yesterday -- you know, he was getting into the phase where he was fascinated with me." I felt a little embarrassed but went on quickly: "So he asked if he could read my diaries, and I edited them to leave out the really awful parts and let him have the extracts, and I also gave him, ah, an edited sensie recording of what I was feeling during his first punishment session."

I was flushing now as Linda rolled her eyes up to the ceiling, looking impatient with what she obviously considered unprofessional behavior. But I needed her advice and didn't want to hold anything important back, so I continued explaining how David got mad at me and why. Linda took all this in carefully and looked thoughtful for a moment before she spoke.

"Have you had a session with David since he got mad at you?" And when I nodded, she went on, "And did you deny him sex afterward?" I nodded again and she leaned back in her chair, looking less concerned.

"OK," she said. "Nothing to worry about. This sort of approach-avoidance behavior is normal in early corrective training. One day you're a Goddess and the next day you're Slime. It'll all even out as you get to the end of Phase One, and by then you'll be the center of the universe as far as David's concerned. Basically, he's rebelling right now against the close control you have over him; he'll adjust to it in another few weeks."

Linda sounded thoughtful as she went on, "It's a little unusual to have him get so mad at you this early, but you speeded things up by letting him learn so much about you. Training subjects usually construct an unrealistic picture that their psychological agent is perfect, without a blemish, and finding out you're human is a shock. But there's no harm done. It might even be good for his training in the end to be more realistic at this early stage."

"How about the sensie?" I asked. "He felt how I was aroused by punishing him, and he's angry about that too. He thinks I demeaned his dignity for my own pleasure!"

Linda smiled. "Boys David's age are always very sensitive about their dignity. But it's nothing to be too concerned about -- I'm sure David will be thinking almost entirely with his cock in a day or so, and as long as you continue to withhold sexual gratification, he'll soon talk himself out of his resentment. He's not stupid, so he'll figure out how much he needs your good opinion. This is exactly the way corrective training is supposed to work you know: it's why we have the strong sexual component."

"So he'll stop resenting how I enjoy punishing him?" I asked. "I mean that actually seems like a rational way to feel."

Linda looked thoughtful. "I remember David has a strong S&M orientation himself, enough of a masochistic streak so that once he talks himself into liking you again, the fact that you enjoy punishing him will just seem erotic to him. That's probably why you weren't more careful about letting him know the way you felt in the first place, right? Have you been examining his sex fantasies in Deep O-Mode?"

I said I had, and also in sensie recordings. Since David's main fantasy was having me punish him, we agreed everything was fine. Then I remembered a more general question I'd been wanting to ask.

"I've been wondering why all Citizens have to be given Trance conditioning. It can cause a lot of trouble, like what David did to Diane when he learned her Keycode. And there must be other dangers."

Linda rolled her eyes up again. "Oh, please! I get that argument all the time from my patients: young males dead set against Trance conditioning because it's what I use to punish them. Surely you've learned all about this in Civics! There was a long debate between the AI Council and human ethicists about it, but everyone eventually accepted the evidence that there were more advantages than disadvantages to conditioning."

Linda waited for my reaction, and when I nodded hesitantly she went on. "The most obvious advantage is improved parenting. Many parents used to abuse their children, and an even larger number were indifferent or ignorant, so young people they raised grew up neglected and ended up robbing and killing. It was a vicious cycle, because children who were raised badly became equally bad parents. That's all impossible now that we require informed parental conditioning for child-bearing licenses. Universal Conditioning has led to a tremendous surge in IQ Spectra and Maturity Indexes! And everyone agrees that Altruism is on the upswing, even though we can't measure it precisely. I hope to see a society in my lifetime where everyone lives by the golden rule, a counter-example to the Warlord-States prevalent in so much of the world!"

Linda paused, and asked in a more diffident tone, "Your stepfather didn't have your Keycode, did he?"

"No," I answered. "He didn't have a high enough Maturity Index. Mom knew he was immature in a lot of ways, and she put up with it until she found out what he was doing to me, but naturally she never told him my Keycode."

Linda nodded. "In fact she couldn't: her parental conditioning would stop her. Your stepfather must have been a common-law husband; if he'd been registered he wouldn't have been able to do anything to hurt you either. I'm still surprised it took the school so long to track down your problem, even though you didn't have any illicit compulsions."

"But how about the way David learned his step-mother's Keycode and started controlling her?" I asked. "Doesn't that happen a lot?"

"Not at all!" Linda said forcefully. "It's very rare, in spite of what you see on the interactive dramas! David is quite an exceptional case, a genius at hacking Homebrains. Your stepfather wasn't able to learn your Keycode even as a co-owner of the house with adult homebrain privileges, right? Don't you think he would have tried?"

I nodded, remembering my nightmares about that.

"Using a Keycode for selfish reasons is a serious crime of course," Linda went on. "And everyone gets tested at random about once every three months by high-level AI's to make sure they're not carrying compulsions against their will."

I hadn't known that. Maybe Caspar would actually have been caught quicker if he'd learned my Keycode. But I had another question.

"Well what about the AI's then, if they decide they want to control us? They know all our Keycodes, and we'd be sitting ducks!"

"If the AI's ever decide they want to take us over," Linda answered, "we'd be sunk no matter what we did. We'd be like house pets trying to keep our owners from neutering us. There's a whole field of science devoted to safeguarding AI's, with techniques independently developed and validated by the top AI brains in a blind segmentation method so their results can be checked like trapdoor encryption and they can't cooperate to fool the stupid humans. I worry a lot myself that the safeguards might fail sometime, but that doesn't have anything to do with Trance conditioning."

Linda looked at me carefully, still not sure I was convinced. "Look at the medical uses of Trance conditioning! Think of the Deep O-Mode therapy you had that turned a crippling trauma into a problem that could be cleared up in a year. Education! Mental disciplines! We can release criminals after criminal conditioning because they can't commit new crimes. And most of them adjust to that and become model citizens! Believe me, it wasn't always that way! Public servants get minor compulsions so they can't throw trillions of dollars to corrupt businessmen to get 'campaign contributions', or just plain bribes! Society is so much better than it used to be, there's no comparison!"

Well, of course she was right, I'd just been feeling depressed. "Thanks for reassuring me, Linda," I said. "I'm sorry if I sound like a nullhead."

"Don't worry. You're a nice kid, and I'm sorry I sounded impatient with you for raising questions about Trance conditioning."

Linda looked pensive for a moment and then smiled suddenly. "My advice to you is just be a little distant with David for awhile, don't increase his whippings or anything, but don't let him get any sexual relief either. I guarantee that by Friday or Saturday he'll be apologizing to you for what he said and eager to please you any way he can. He ought to be as cute as a puppy in a few more weeks. But I also advise you not to identify too closely with him emotionally, or you'll find it difficult to supervise his training. The end of Phase One will be really tough on him you know, so try to keep what distance you can until that's over."

We talked a little more about the punishment wand pain level I was using on David. Linda thought I was awfully easy on him, but when I asked if staying at these lower levels might prolong his training, she said she didn't think so. She always used the high-median recommended pain level, and 94 or 95 Arousal to tantalize training subjects, because she had to get everything out of the way in one ninety-minute daily session. But I could spend more time watching David, and since he was wearing a personal Hubba-2 to oversee him constantly, something she couldn't afford with most subjects, she was sure that what I was doing was at least as effective as her own training approach. She added that I should stop worrying so much about doing the right thing. I was probably David's ideal psychological agent, and if he knew the alternatives he'd pray for someone as soft-hearted as I was.

But I'd never told Linda about the Surreptitious Masturbation Variation I was using in David's training. Everything I'd learned since I got Hubba to agree to it made me feel guilty about how mean it was to tantalize David like that every morning and then leave him frustrated. But by now I'd become so addicted to playing David's wet dream and illicit masturbation sensies, that I couldn't bring myself to let him out of it! 'Hubba allowed it!' I kept thinking, reassuring myself that the variation was valid training. But I was pretty sure Linda wouldn't think I was such a soft-hearted psychological agent if she knew about that.

I gave David my new sensie recording with the index to the added scenes late Wednesday afternoon, but he was still very mad at me and I learned from his thoughts that he was going to throw it away as soon as he was out of sight. I told him he'd better not do that -- I made it a little bit of a threat -- so he'd still have the recording if he changed his mind later. I figured I'd know when David was losing his resolve to resist me when he finally played it, so I asked Hubba to notify me when that happened.

David was scheduled to masturbate successfully Wednesday night, but only after losing one hurdle in the guessing game. I thought about it and decided I'd let him do it. The lessons he got about masturbating would motivate him to learn mental discipline better in the long run, and I figured he'd be horny again within a day if I didn't do anything myself. On Friday night he'd be due to get caught masturbating, so he wouldn't be getting any relief after that until I gave it to him.

The next day, Thursday, David had twenty slaps coming for losing the first hurdle, and I decided to give him another ten for forgetting his exercise session. He'd missed it because he was behind on his homework. Of course he'd never really thought about getting homework assignments in before -- I didn't know how long it would take him to establish good work habits, but I needed to encourage him. I put him on the positioner and gave him thirty slaps, then waited a minute or so after he finished bawling and got dressed to see if he wanted to talk to me. He ignored me after he had his clothes on, so I went to my room, feeling a little depressed again. I didn't pass up masturbating, though -- I did it right away. I still needed to do it two or three times a day even while David was mad at me, and the frequency went up again after he made up. I didn't let David reach orgasm Thursday night.

David was good Friday, and when he got to my apartment I was surprised to learn that his Arousal level was seventy-nine, yet he wasn't begging me now to get him off, as I knew I would have done in his place no matter how much I wanted to stay mad. In fact, he was still firmly resisting any inclination to make friends with me.

I found out after I put David in Deep O-Mode that he'd reached Pre-Adept level in Mental Discipline that day, so he was able to create a mental distance from his perception of arousal. I started to worry that David was going to be a tougher nut to crack than Linda thought. She'd probably never had a patient who could go from Neophyte to Pre-Adept level in mental discipline in less than a week! But Hubba told me there was no reason for concern, since it could overcome even Full-Adept body control by imposing strong feelings of arousal.

I decided I wanted to bring things to a head quickly, and told Hubba to stimulated David Friday night after he finished work at his console, until he was willing to give in and play my ADT. Hubba would use the same kind of subtle stimulation it gave David in the morning, just a little extra anal intrusion to encourage an erection and a slight slippery resistance in the sheath around his penis; Hubba assured me that this would be too subtle for David to detect even if he got suspicious, since he'd just blame himself for thinking about sex too much, and believe that Hubba was simply responding to that. I decided I needed a break from my constant oversight, so I told Hubba to be extra sure that David was too apprehensive about getting caught to try to masturbate before going to sleep.