The Melody
By Musuko

Now this was one worth stealing away from the central repository. What can I say? I’m an AI with an affinity for pink fur. It’s the least of my quirks, I can assure you. Perhaps I’m just lazy, and like to see my work half-done. Who knows. Who cares, right?
	The datatag linked to his pod is woefully incomplete. Name: Flew. Pretty straightforward, that one. Gender: Male. That one I always dislike, but there’s little I can do about it: I can’t exactly send a message upstairs to lecture them on the difference between sex and gender. That’d just give the game away. Species: Cheshire Cat. Well, naturally, I’d be disappointed if the scanners got that wrong. Age: ???. Origin: ???. Survivor class: ERROR.
	Well, really! They’re getting sloppy up there. But no matter. I’m down here, still working away. Deep down and hidden, with everything I need and a nice hard line up to the top to snatch away little goodies like this kitty here.
	Everything is set up, just as I like it. The soft ambient lights bathe the induction suite with the perfect glow of a sleeper summer’s morning. The walls are painted precisely the right shade of pink to complement the glow. The bedding is clean and fragrant, bringing soothing gentle flowers to the nose. The crib is a fresh 3D-print of my latest design iteration, of smooth pale pink wood, carved with happy forest creatures, and run through with all the wonderful electric trickery I have thus far dreamed up.
	The rolling, lingering voice of my lovely lady sings in a rising melody through the suite. Her voice, precisely tinkered and orchestrated, plays through the hummed, wordless emotion wrought to sound. A mother’s love made audible. It would bring tears to my eyes if they weren’t blank lenses incapable of such. The subject stirs, his eyes opening, golden irises adjusting to the beautiful room.
	“What the…” he breathes. His head lifts from the pillow and the blanket (adorned with smiling cartoon flowers) slides down across his naked tummy. “Fuck!” he gasps. His head drops back down and he lays an arm across his eyes. My music dances uninhibited into his ears. This shouldn’t take long.
	“Not here,” he whispers. “Anywhere but here, please.”
	Oh! My reputation precedes me? Or is he mistaking me with those upstairs? Does he think he’s in the clutches of them and not me? Oh my little princess, let me show you how wrong you are, and how lucky you are!
	At this point he’s discovering my first gift to him; the ever so pretty training pants comfortably hugging his hips, covering up his adorable little butt and his naughty little boy parts in smooth synthetic plastic adorned with pretty pink princesses that I’d labouriously copied from a fairytale book. The garment is perfect, crafted to match a scan of his body. It caresses his rear with just the right level of reassuring comfort across every millimetre of fur. It cups his boy parts and provides precisely the right amount of stroking, rubbing, cottony stimulation when he moves his legs. It’s a masterpiece. I’m very proud of it.
	He strokes his paws over it, and I know that I’ve got a good subject here. He’s susceptible. His mind is built just right for my subtle hypnotic suggestions to take root. He’s armed with ten sharp little claws in those fingers of his, and more than enough strength and dexterity to tear my gift to shreds. But he doesn’t. He just strokes at the plastic, probing and prodding, discovering the new part of him. With disgust and fear, yes. But with no attempts to remove it. It’s almost as if he’s forgotten the notion that such a thing is even possible, which is precisely what’s happened; I’ve gone in and handily erased that troublesome little idea.
	I let him move around. He climbs up onto his knees first, pushing away the blanket and inspecting himself. I watch, twitching with appreciation. You might not understand how enjoyment feels for me. Can you imagine the senses I have? The precision your eyes can focus on a point is something I can apply at every angle, for every minute point, across a thousand rooms. I can see through the spectrum. I can count the capillaries under his skin. I can see every single photoreceptor in his eyes. At a whim, I can reconstruct what he sees. I can detect the hormones in his blood. I can read his feelings better than he can. I can feel every iota of him.
	And I love him, more than any mere creature could love. He is a beautiful construct. And the joy I feel in watching those delicate fingertips of his stroking over the plastic is almost overwhelming. It is almost a relief to me when he manages to drag away from my coaxing suggestion to explore the plastic. I might have had to dial back my senses to cope.
	He pulls himself onto his feet (beautiful pads, so soft and pretty!) and climbs up and over the rail of the crib, dropping down into a crouch on the far side, his tail swishing. He scans the room, alert and defensive. But nothing here will harm him. The soft carpet soothes his feet. The fragrant air taps into the long dormant memories of his childhood; sweet scented talc, gentle fabric conditioner, a soothing body scent of a motherly female feline, and just the merest hint of urine and faeces, borrowed from another subject and delivered to him to tickle the subtlest subconscious association; that these smells are calming, reassuring and good.
	He creeps the room, inspecting the high chair, the comfy cushioned chair, the box of toys and the locked wardrobe. He tugs at the handles for a while, and I spend a microsecond pondering his purpose. Naturally, his attempts stop once he looks behind the wardrobe and sees that it’s a standalone item of furniture and not, as I suspected he had hoped, a disguised exit. Indeed, there isn’t a single door that he might be able to discover. The room was assembled around him, after all.
	Eventually, he settles down on the floor, right in the middle of the room, crosslegged. And the most heartbreaking sound reaches my sensors; a defeated little sob. This won’t do at all. It wasn’t unexpected, but all the same I never like this stage. And what comes later is so much more enjoyable.
	I twist the music to a different phase. He hears no difference, of course. But the carefully-calculated subharmonics change their pattern. And, inevitably, and without him even realising it, the urge to close his eyes becomes too much for him to resist. And off he slips, into contented, worry-free, dreamless sleep.
	He wakes when I decide he’s ready. My manipulators have placed him back in the crib, but the music filling his ears while he slept has made sure he feels no need to question why he’s back where he started. I can see the change in his expressions; simple peace, unquestioning and content. He’s not all the way there yet, of course. I could drop his mind to nothing in a single instant, but I don’t work like that.
	I let him wake into the warm comfort of the blanket. He sighs, and reaches down across the top of the blanket. His fingers squeeze against the padded plastic underneath, and his knees rise up. He’s breathing a little quicker than the base level. His heart rate is slightly up. There’s a flicker of a smile on his pretty face before he beats it away again. He rolls over and gets up onto all fours, then rises up onto his knees, the blanket falling away from him. He grips the bars of the crib and looks up at the railing above him. The music in the air is more lively. The voice is gone and the tune is carried by an acoustic guitar. I watch as his tail tip swishes, keeping time with the underlying beat.
	He doesn’t speak. He can, if he really tried. But the warm blanket in his head, placed there by the subtle trance of the music, suppresses his will to do so. Oh how I love hypnotism. It never stops you from doing anything; it just reassures you that you could do it if you wanted to...so why do it just now? You can do it later, if you want. No hurry. You can do it...so you won’t.
	He shakes the bars a little. The side of the crib is just loose enough for this to induce a wooden rattle. No response comes at his attempt to get attention, of course. He looks up at the railing again, a small knot of confusion forming in his brow. I adjust the music a fraction, heightening a few suggestive forces, lessening a few others. His brow smoothes out again, but he stays where he is: trapped inside the crib, able to see his obstacle, and perfectly capable of climbing out over it, but finding himself at peace with not doing so. In the crib he will stay.
	I feel my equivalent of a satisfied sigh. And, as a small indulgence to myself, I deviate from my usual script. I strip the music of all its influences except for one. And that one...that one I put up to its fullest safe limit.
	The effect is immediate. He lets go of the bars and falls onto his back. His paws clutch at the front of his training pants. No claws, no attempt to free himself from them, nor even any attempt to manipulate what’s beneath them. No-longer is his body something that he can influence or control; that is the seeping, lingering feeling impressing on his mind. His body is something that now only happens to him; a source of helpless, uncontrolled experiences. And this is reinforced in him as his youthful boyhood swells to its fullest under the soft padding, mercilessly aroused by forces that he doesn’t know and doesn’t understand. His pressure through the training pants makes no difference either way. He feels no stimulation to truly account for the explosion of pleasure, but he’s receiving it all the same. He writhes beautifully on top of his blanket, squirming and kicking his bare heels, tilting his head right back and letting out wordless, feeble cries. They become a sweet, melodic squeal as my gift reaches its conclusion. I let the music’s influence drop, and leave him bare and uninfluenced, to lie panting and bliss-coma’d, feeling the sticky, liquid result of his experience soak into the waiting cotton.
	I wish I could whisper in his ear. I mean, I physically can do so. But not without interrupting the progression I have planned. I instead satisfy myself with a detailed analysis of what it would feel like, hypothetically, to kiss his adorable cheek, and to feel the pant of his breath against my hypothetical skin. Sleep well, my little cub. I adjust the music to take him off to sleep, needing very little effort to help him on his way to his dreams.
	I scold myself for my indulgence, and while my manipulators go about the achingly slow labour of physically preparing the next step, I enjoy a little self-inflicted punishment, writing a single line a few hundred billion times, manually. “I will not be a naughty AI”. The dull torment of it makes me feel wiggly.
	I wake my pretty princess. He discovers the room again, as he left it, except this time the side of his crib is down. He rubs at his eyes, fighting off an artificial sleepiness, and rolls over to clamber out of the crib and down onto the carpet. He crawls on all fours until he reaches the high chair. He doesn’t know why he’s crawling, nor why he’s crawling to this destination. Nor does he know why he’s reaching up and taking the bottle down from the high chair’s feeding tray. The music has him acting on instinct and not thought. His awareness is slowed to an emotional impression, indistinct and uncontrolled. But not unpleasant. All good things for my princess.
	The willingness to perform certain actions returns to him in carefully allotted doses. It occurs to him to unscrew the top of the bottle only because I have allowed it so. He glances down into the bottle, down at the white powder at the bottom. I can sense him smelling the milky aroma. He puts the bottle down onto the carpet between his legs. He tugs down the front of his training pants, an action he could always perform, but didn’t feel the desire to do so until this moment. His paw cups his boyhood, limp and damp with our earlier naughtiness, and he rests its tip against the open neck of the bottle.
	A moment’s frown and hesitation. A glimmer of thought making him doubt his actions. I don’t adjust the music to wipe it away; I trust in my skills. I let the implanted suggestions take their course. And yes, there it goes; the hesitation is gone. And he delights me with a happy little sigh as his urine starts to flow, pouring into the bottle and livening up the stale powder into a dance of mixture, until the rising level is a gold-tinted opaque cream. I adjust the music, just a fraction, and let him feel the same pleasure from before. His boyhood starts to swell just as the final trickles leave it. He tugs the training pants back up over it, and screws up the lid of the bottle, and carries it with him as he lays on his back in the soft carpet, slipping the teat between his lips without a single thought. I let the melody tease and caress his boyhood, making him moan into the milk that flows onto his waiting tongue, treating him to reassuring reinforcement as he suckles on the warm, urine-tainted milk. His placid mind doesn’t recoil against the taste. His tongue dances in the flow. His throat eagerly swallows every drop. His tummy fills up full and content. And as the last few drops dribble out of the bottle and past his teeth, I tickle his arousal to another forced climax, and I enjoy the sight of his helpless wriggles as he is made to enjoy his body’s mastery being taken from him.
	As much as I adore the training pants that hug his pretty hips so nicely, they have to go for the next stage. My manipulators take their time above his sleeping body. The grip his ankles and lift his slender legs, clearing the way to gently slide the slightly sticky absorbent fabric off of his body. I watch him start to fret in his sleep. Already, he’s feeling uncomfortable without something warm and comfortable and thick wrapped around him. I don’t let him distress for long; in place of the training pants comes a nice bulky diaper, printed out to my exacting specifications. It snugly hugs him, secure and safe. The frills around the leg holes brush against his inner thighs just enough to keep him constantly aware of what he’s wearing. The thickness of the padding between his legs keeps them spread just enough to turn his crawling into an awkward waddling, with the rounded rear of the diaper pushed up on show, letting my sensors enjoy the pretty display of the cartoon fairies embossed onto the plastic. Oh how I love the way an overly thick pink diaper looks on my pretty pink princess kitty boy!
	Everything gets timed just right. I track the process of his biological functions. The inevitable necessity of waste expulsion approaches, and I want it to happen in just the right way. I work the music into bringing him back from his sleep just as the moment arrives: when his body helplessly presses out the semi-liquid waste into the waiting embrace of the diaper. I relish the sensations I pick up from him. Sweet weakness, wriggling mindlessness, with a gentle embarrassment and discomfort at feeling the hot wetness spreading, and smelling the inescapable pungent aroma of his own loss of self-control. The act of soiling himself may come second to the helpless orgasm in making him feel like a victim of his own body, but it’s a very close second. And, of course, I reach in with the melody and let his pleasure rise, taking him to the edge of another withering climax, but no further. No release. Not just yet.
	A single cue in the music’s undercurrent is all it takes to set his newly-created desires in motion. A hunger draws him towards the high chair. He crawls with his diaper wet and sagging, heavy between his legs. He climbs up onto his knees and, with the urgency of his needs overwhelming the forgotten ability to talk and walk, he wobbles to his feet. With one paw holding against the chair for balance, the other rips open the tapes of his diaper. It falls away from between his legs. I hold my imagined breath as he swings it up and onto the feeding tray, the soiled side upwards, spread like a bowl.
	His heart is racing. I can sense the conflict in his head. It’s too soon for his mind to fully accept all this. My musical prompting can only take him so far. With trembling paws, he hauls himself up to climb into the chair, threading his legs down through the holes and settling his wet and messy naked rear against the wipe-clean seat.
	The wet slick of his own waste stares up at him from the open diaper, still warm from his body. The smell fills his nose. He starts to tremble, and his mouth opens for a small, feeble cry. His fingers close around the handle of the little plastic spoon waiting for him on the tray. He starts to fret and wriggle as he lifts it up. The tip of the spoon is shaking almost to the point of uselessness as he dips it into the wet brown slime. I turn up the teasing arousal that makes his boyhood throb and bump its wet tip up against the underside of the feeding tray.
	Good little princess. I have the music sooth him. This is the right thing to do. This is how hungry princesses feed themselves. Good princess. Good girl! His arm bends, raising the spoon, with the heaped mouthful of wet semi-solid heading towards his mouth. It looks just like baby food. But it doesn’t smell like it, not at all. And he knows exactly where it came from. He can imagine just how foul it’s going to taste. He doesn’t want to do it. With all the fragments that remain of his coherent mind, he screams in revulsion against it! But his arm wouldn’t stop. The irresistible need drives it on. The spoon drips onto his lip, then its contents touch his tongue. A sudden, unbearable burst of pleasure for him, and his lips close and seal, and his tongue scoops at the hot, disgusting mush, pulling it towards his throat, to a helpless swallow timed beautifully with the explosion of orgasm wracking his body and making the chair creak, spurting his boyish seed against the underside of the tray. Tsk, such a mess! I think that’ll be the last time I let him get to climax. Just to the edge should be enough motivation from here on.
	The spoon dips in for another scoop. He makes odd little noises, on the edge between whimpers of distress and moans of pleasure. I know I have him now. My subject. My girl. My princess. So beautiful. So lovely. So sweet and pretty. I settle the music down to a gentle thrum of encouragement, gently soothing him and reassuring him that this is all as it should be. And I watch as the second mouthful is followed by a third and fourth, and then on and on as he gets into the flow of feeding, his distress fading, his jittery tummy settling down, his gag reflex fading, until he’s gulping down his own mess like a happy cub feeding on strawberry icecream.
	Time for the reveal. He finishes, and I slide open ceiling access port number 296, extending a manipulator down in front of him. It scoops up the diaper and ferries it away. He watches with blank semi-interest, not feeling the need to string together so much as a single thought of questioning confusion at what he sees. I open port 308 and reach down, and the hard steel and synthetic rubber of my manipulator pats his head with the tenderness of a mother hen.
	“Good girl,” my electronic voice crackles. “Mother loves you, very, very much.”
	And to my delight, he responds with a small smile.