Full Immersion - part 1 (Patreon)

Warm up to my ribs. Steam in my nose, mineral bite at the back of my tongue. I open my eyes and the light's wrong - oil lamps somewhere above, their glow smeared across wet tile, doubled and tripled in the condensation. A ceiling I don't recognize, high and arched. The sound of water moving. Women's voices, low and echoing off stone.

A hand on my shoulder. Small fingers, warm even through the water.

"Domina." Close to my ear. "You drifted off."

I look down.

Breasts. The word lands flat and stupid, like walking into a door. Small breasts, rose-pink nipples, the water lapping just below them. My chest. I can feel the water on them, the slight buoyancy, the way the heat settles different than it should. I lift a hand out of the water and it's not my hand - longer fingers, nails shaped and clean. I flex it and the hand in front of me flexes too.

This isn't right. I paid for the charioteer. Male body, hypermasculine, the whole package. Bronze cuirass and a stallion and adoring crowds. I filled out the form. I checked the box. I remember the preview renders, the little dropdown menus, the confirmation email.

I try to say something. There's been a mistake.

What comes out is, "I'm fine, Delia."

The name surfaces before I reach for it. Delia. Bought from a trader in Carthage when she was twelve. Loyal. Warm in bed. I know the shape of her mouth and the sound she makes when she comes, and I know I shouldn't know any of this.

The orientation briefing. They'd mentioned the NPC programming, the behavioral scripts that kept the scenarios running smooth. I'd nodded along without really listening because what did I care about NPC programming? I was going to be a charioteer. A player character. I was going to do whatever I wanted.

I try again. The thought forms - this is wrong, I need to speak to someone, there's been a booking error - but before it even reaches my tongue, the programming intercepts it preverbally. Swallowed whole. My new voice speaks without my permission, higher and softer: "What if he doesn't win today?"

Delia laughs, a warm breath against my shoulder. "He always wins. And you always ask what if he doesn't."

That's not what I meant to say. I can feel my real thoughts sitting there in my head, my actual self, my actual name - I know my name, it's right there - but every time I reach for the words the programming hands me something else. Livia Drusilla. Daughter of a senator. Mother dead of fever. Brother in the legions. In love with a charioteer named Marcus. I know all of it and I know it's fake but I know it anyway, like a movie I've seen too many times.

Delia's other hand finds my other shoulder. She's behind me now, kneeling on the submerged bench, her knees bracketing my hips. Her thumbs dig into the muscle where my neck meets my shoulder and it feels so unexpectedly good that I make a sound I didn't decide to make. A small sigh, high in the throat.

"That's it," she murmurs.

I didn't choose that. The body just responded, the way bodies do when someone hits the right spot. Except it's not my right spot. My real body carries tension in the lower back from too many hours at a desk. This body apparently holds it in the neck, and Delia knows exactly how to work it out, and the body thanks her before I can stop it.

Her hands slide down my back, working along the spine. My skin warms under her fingers. The small hairs on my arms stand up. There's a slow heat building low in my belly that I recognize and I don't want to.

This isn't mine. I didn't ask for it. But the nerves are real and Delia's been doing this a long time - or was programmed to know how, same difference - and she knows exactly where to press, how much pressure, when to ease off.

"You've been tense," she says.

I want to tell her I'm a guest. I want to beg her to get someone. But the script forces my jaw open, hijacking the breath in my lungs to sigh, "I've been thinking about the race."

She laughs again, softer this time. Her lips brush my wet shoulder, not a kiss, just resting there. "You always think about the race. Or rather, you think about what comes after."

"You could do more." I hear myself say it. The voice has a lilt to it, an aristocratic drawl that shapes every vowel. I sound like someone who's never had to raise her voice to be heard.

I didn't choose those words either. The programming pushed them out and now Delia is leaning closer, her breath on my neck, and my hand is coming out of the water to reach back and touch her hip. My hand. My fingers curling around the curve of bone. I'm watching this happen from somewhere behind my own eyes.

I can feel myself. The real me. It's like a second skeleton underneath this skin, something I can almost flex if I concentrate hard enough. My name. My actual name. I know it's there. But every time I try to speak it the programming hands me Livia instead, and Livia's mouth says things Livia would say, and Livia's body does things Livia would do.

Delia's hand slides around my waist, her palm flat against my belly. Her fingers drift lower, not quite touching, just resting there above the waterline. A question.

And then the door opens.

Heavy wood scraping stone. The suck of air, steam swirling toward the corridor. I look up and the charioteer is standing there, tall and bronze from the sun, dust still on his shoulders from the track. Dark hair plastered to his forehead with sweat. The leather straps of his racing harness cross his chest and beneath them his muscles move with the rhythm of someone still catching his breath. He's holding a victor's palm in one hand, the fronds dripping.

Marcus. The name arrives the same way Delia's did, fully formed and false. I know he's the greatest racer in the city. I know he's Livia's lover. I know the weight of him and the low, rattling catch in his throat when he's about to finish. I know it the way you know a phone number you've dialed a hundred times, except I've never dialed it.

The programming shifts gears. I feel it as a physical thing, a lurch in my chest as the body's priorities rearrange themselves. Delia recedes into background noise - the handmaiden who warms the bed when the charioteer's away, useful but secondary. The charioteer is here now, and the charioteer is what Livia wants.

I try to stay still. My jaw clenches. My hands curl into fists beneath the water. The programming pushes and I push back and for a long moment nothing happens. I just sit there rigid while Delia's hand withdraws and she fades into the steam like she was never there.

Marcus stops at the edge of the bath. "Something wrong?"

Yes. Everything. I'm not her. I'm a guest. Look at my eyes.

Instead, a laugh bubbles up from my throat. Soft and coy. The laugh of a woman playing hard to get when they both know how the scene ends. "Come find out."

I don't want this. I don't. But the body is rising from the water anyway, my legs moving without me, and the water sheets off my new skin, over breasts and belly and the flat plane of my pubis, the dark hair below, the thighs that are too smooth. The air hits my wet skin and I shiver. My nipples tighten. Marcus watches the movement and his smile spreads slow.

I'm still in here. I'm still me. I still know my name, even if my mouth won't say it. But I'm also watching my hand lift to meet his, and I can't make it stop.

The second image from the sequence is available here.