by John Benson
The Overlord sat quietly, listened attentively. The General found that encouraging. He should not have.
"They sing songs insulting to the chain of command," the General whined. "It's... it's obscene."
The Overlord frowned. Had the General known him better, he might have been more worried. "Bawdy songs?" asked the Overlord. "You think good order and discipline is at risk from bawdy songs? Can you give me the name of one army since the fall of Troy which has enough morale to fight and did not sing bawdy songs? Good Ghods, man."
"No, no, not the ones about fornication, we don't much care about those," the General said. He gestured as if batting away some pesky fly, which was not good form at all. "It's the ones insulting to the senior staff. The ones which hint at, dare I say it..."
"Buggery," the overlord said with exaggerated calm. If only the General had known this was not a sign of serenity but of self-control, he might have been less rash.
"Beg pardon, Lord," Jeeves said. "Might we have a word at some point?"
"When I am done with the general, please, unless it is Class One," the Overlord said.
"Thank you Lord," Jeeves said.
"Yes, dammit, buggery," the General said. He was getting worked up, red in the face. "They need time in the punishment box, every filthy-mouthed one of them. The women, too. After all, you use it on your daughter."
"General," the Overlord said. "You are an idiot."
"What? How dare you?"
The Overlord's eyebrow arched. "An idiot," he said. "For years I have heard rumors of your incompetence and to my great shame did not believe them. Do you know how important grousing about superiors is to unit cohesion? No. You don't. You're a moron. Nor do you have a fucking clue why Maggie gets sent to the punishment box with the dial turned up to High."
"To teach her not to disobey," the General said. "See? That's not hard. I treat my children likewise."
"Idiot," said the Overlord. "As I thought. No fucking clue. I want your resignation on my desk within the hour."
"You can't do that. I have rights."
"Rights to a hearing, General, not to the outcome. You may invoke those rights and it will be a matter of public record that you were dismissed for being an idiot. Or we can just call it early retirement and speak nicely but blandly about your long years of public service and call it good. Now get out of my fucking sight."
The General deflated, his shoulders slumped. "All right, My Lord. I'll go. But tell me why? Why make your daughter experience pain if you're not trying to teach her to behave?"
"To teach the little shit a lesson," said the Overlord, "but not about obedience. She's my heir not my chattel, and I'm proud to say one of the feistiest females on the planet. She's learning a painful lesson about the importance of proper planning and flawless execution. I'm teaching her the imperative of never getting caught."
The General slank away muttering to himself, too much a fan of the conventional wisdom to recognize the real thing if it slapped him in the face. The Overlord looked out of his high tower window and sighed.
"Would now be good, Lord?" asked Jeeves.
Oh, that's right. You don't know Jeeves. A shard of the Ancient Electronica which escaped the Luddite Jihad. Yes, that old, really, a true living fragment of the Overmind. A collective intelligence, which is why it tends to refer to itself in the plural. The Overlord's greatest military asset. His confidante, yes, even friend.
"Yes. So sorry to keep you waiting, Jeeves."
Of course he wasn't sorry and they both knew it. But the courtesy was well meant and equally well received. "It's about the Lady Maggie, Lord. It would be better if she didn't know I told you. I can serve you best if I do not lose her confidence."
"Agreed. Please do go on."
"You had the punishment box installed in her apartment six months ago and in that six months you have ordered her to subject herself to it on four occasions. Well, we have been recently curious, and examined the machine's internal logs."
"I knew it," said the Overlord. "The little shit is cheating. Turning up the attenuation or even skipping the box completely. The little actress. She seemed contrite enough."
"Cheating? Not so, Lord. She has a great sense of fairness. She got caught fair and square, and she took her punishments, every last one of them, full force, full duration. The girl is too proud to shirk."
"And you interrupted me whilst I was berating that asshole General just to tell me everything's all right? That isn't like you, Jeeves."
"Too true, Lord. We have discovered an anomaly. The girl has not submitted herself to the box four times in the last six months, she has submitted to it twenty two times. Your daughter is voluntarily punishing herself."
"What? No. Not Maggie. That doesn't make any sense. Or wait a minute. Maybe she's toughening herself up. Trying to raise her pain threshold so she'd be harder to torture?"
"We don't think so, Lord. If she were trying to become more immune to torture she'd leave the pain up full strength but turn off the helplessness and shame. They wouldn't have any part in what she'd be trying to accomplish. But they're left at maximum. And we've studied recordings taken as she enters the box and her breath is labored and her skin is flushed. We suspect sexual arousal."
"No. It can't be."
"We think your daughter is a sexual submissive, Lord, probably one who doesn't understand what she is doing. She tells herself a story, that she is punishing herself for wanting to have sex and the punishment is helping to keep her chaste. It is, but not because it's 'making her behave.' Because it's fulfilling her enough right now that she doesn't need a man. The submission itself is a sexual act."
"And you know this because?"
"Suspect it, Lord. Not know. But her masturbation frequency increases markedly the few days before she enters the box, and becomes especially frenzied an hour after she has left it. Then she enters a calmer period."
"You might have spared me the details," said the Overlord. "Poor little Maggie. Good on her for having found a way to control herself for now, even though the fact that a punishment box could ever be a sort of masturbation aid was a scrap of knowledge I could have done without. But what about later? How can she rule? Or will she be a little marshmallow, and her lover hold the reigns of power?"
"The feistiest woman on the planet?" Jeeves said. "Give up her birthright to some man? We do not think so. She will find a way, some compromise, some way to separate the bedroom from the throne room. But getting there might not be pretty. Her head always wants to win, while her heart would rather lose."
The Overlord looked out his window as he spoke. There was no Jeeves to make eye contact with, just a calm voice in the air. "She'll need a lover," he said. "Some machine won't scratch that itch forever. I don't control my daughter but I do control her immediate environment. I could find a man, a nice man, a gentleman, one who respected and adored her."
"And she'd find vapid? No. It must be a dangerous man. An intellectual equal. One she'd find pleasure both in winning from and losing to. Someone placed in a position of authority over her. Perhaps a private tutor?"
"You've given this some thought, Jeeves."
"Many teraflops," the old thing said. "For your consideration, we have prepared a very short list."
She decided she did not like him. Frank Tanner. Nice looking enough in a sort of high-testosterone sort of way, but much too full of himself, too sure he could handle anything. Well he wasn't going to handle her, Maggie decided. And if he tried she'd make him sorry.
"He comes very highly recommended," her father said.
"So what?" said Maggie. "I don't need a tutor. I'm a very fast learner with very broad interests."
"True," her father said. "Very broad and about a millimeter deep. You are bright, but you're also easily bored. You need an outside agency to help you focus."
"So not," said Maggie. She'd make her father sorry, too, if he didn't cut this out.
"The Network cannot teach everything," Frank Tanner said. "There are still a few things which have to be done up close and personal."
Oh right. "Such as?"
"How to fight, Miss."
And Maggie smiled. "Been there," she said. "I play chess. Do you?"
"A bit," he said. "Chess is war. It is strategy and tactics. But will strategy and tactics win you the personal loyalty of your men? A few, the most cerebral, perhaps. But do you know what most soldiers really respect?"
"You're going to tell me anyway," said Maggie. She feigned a yawn.
"A better fighter," her father said. "A leader they think could kick their ass one-on-one."
"Thank you sir," Frank said.
Now there's another reason not to like the guy. He gets along well with daddy. But it could be worse. At least he isn't sucking up. "Not my thing," she said. "I pass."
Her father smiled, serene. Oh dear. That meant he had his mind made up and was pretty sure he'd thought of everything. "Thought you might need more reason than simply that it's in your long term best interests, dear," he said. "The young are so short sighted. But I think we have it covered. Frank?"
"Yes, sir?"
"It is your task to make sure she learns. If you succeed, you will be rewarded. If you fail, you will be punished."
"Yes, sir," Frank said.
And it's my job to make him fail, Maggie thought.
"But I plan to give you the tools you need to do the job," her father said. "There is a punish box in her apartment. Whenever you think its use would be of benefit, you are to lead her to it, lock her in, set the dials yourself, and stand there and watch her suffer. Will you do that for me, Frank?"
"I will, sir. Thank you, sir." His smile was... avid.
Maggie felt a cold chill and a hot and horny thrill. He couldn't mean it. Not a man who could dole out punishment!
"I don't want to know the details," her father said. "I will not second guess your methods. Use it several times a day if you have to. Add other recordings if you think they'd be of any help. There's only the one now that came with the box. Maggie, what is it, please?"
"A girl being spanked by a paddle with holes in it," said Maggie. Her voice shook. "Daddy, you can't be serious. Letting this stranger hurt me just because he feels like it?"
"I won't lie to you, Miss," Frank said. "I'm looking forward to it. But I won't punish you for my own enjoyment, or even for being annoying. Only to make you study. This I swear."
The word 'punish' was doing things to Maggie. This was dangerously close to her girly fantasies, and in real life that could spell danger. "Pervert," she said, just to piss him off.
"Frank, Frank don't be such a minimalist," her father said. "Of course you won't punish her for your own enjoyment, you have too much integrity for that. But if she's irritating the Hell out of you, by all means, make her sorry. You're going to be spending a lot of time with her. How can you possibly get the best work out of her if she's spending most of her real effort trying to annoy you? If she does that, make her cry. Tell me, Maggie. Does the little girl who's getting it with the paddle cry?"
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