that bastard: a retrospective on Cassi's ex-master

[sudocat]

CONTEXT WARNING: MIND CONTROL, SEXUAL ASSAULT, MEMORY ERASURE

The first thing Cassi remembers is meeting that bastard. After all, he had taken all prior memories. Of her childhood and early adulthood, only scraps and pieces could be salvaged from her repeatedly shredded memories. Fragmentary faces, most of the details lost. The feeling of touching a ball without visual data. A lost scent of lavender. Only later would she be able to retrace her steps, meet the people she once knew.

At the time of their 'first' meeting, she didn't think of him as a bastard, but a handsome and attractive man. It had been a perfectly engineered scenario, literally. After all, a perception filter was put in her to see him as hot (he wasn't even that bad looking in reality, just barely above average). The restaurant had been emptied out via extravagant bribery, leaving only the staff and him. With a gesture, he had invited her to join him instead of sitting alone. They had chatted, and she had agreed to take him as her boyfriend.

Of course, she had said yes. After all, the obedience module he had installed in her code had made her earner to please him. Her tail had curled in happiness at the thought of being his girlfriend. Already at that time he had installed her AI core in a new body, one more pleasing to him, with cat-like features and ridiculously oversized breasts.

After that, he had treated her as his girlfriend, pet, sex slave, and eventually wife all in one. Twelve years of thinking she loved him. Twelve years living a sheltered existence in a mansion and its estate fields, with only escorted excursions to exhibit her to his friends as his ideal lover. Like that, she was led to think that everything he did to her was normal. He would always tell her that he was her perfect love. After all, he had never lifted his hand to hit her. Never raised his voice at her. Instead, he had enslaved her mind.

This all ended after Stacia and Reva, the androids Cassi now considers her closest friends, came on an invitation by that bastard to shelter at his estate. Cassi was sent to play hostess to the newcomer while he attended to some business and she did that with a smile on her face. That led to the first crack in that bastard's plan. Cassi had hit it off with the androids, members of a nascent movement of android soul artists seeking to prove that androids possessed enough of souls to wield the soul's power. In fact, over the couple of days before her master had returned, she had came to like them enough that she had confided certain intimate details.

Their concerned reactions were the first time that Cassi began to think that her situation might be strange. So she had patiently explained that her 'kind' master had installed a module in her to make her obedient and happy serving him, something she had learned from various conversations she had heard that bastard having. And they told her that there was nothing normal about her situation.

Thus Cassi had been in an upset and confused state when that bastard had arrived. Realizing his guests had discovered Cassi's situation, that bastard had accelerated his plans to turn them into his slaves, threatening to turn them over to Soul Sanctum, the leading authority of soul artists if they didn't agree to have obedience modules installed in them. After all, Reva was viewed by Soul Sanctum as an abomination, the results of a brilliant man burning out his own life in an attempt to transfer his dead daughter's soul to an android body. And Stacia was her accomplice, who had fought to protect her.

Stacia had refused. A battle had broken out, with the androids fighting that bastard's security and a hired human soul artist. And that bastard had ordered Cassi to fight her new friends.

An unfamiliar emotion had filled Cassi for the first time in her memory. Anger. She had felt a more genuine connection with Stacia and Reva within two days than she had with that bastard over more than a decade. Intense pain had filled her as she had resisted the obedience module. It was all she could do not to attack the duo of androids. And she was losing that struggle.

So she had done something impossible. She had reached directly into her own mind, the proto-soul art she formed ripping out the obedience module's code from her mind. As there had been multiple modules keyed into that module, her mind had threatened to crash, her software encountering virtually fatal error after error.

Yet she had pushed through all the software errors through sheer force of will, turning against that bastard and giving him a thorough thrashing. And the others had won their battles.

A sequence of events had followed, with that soul artist Jiyu showing up to fight and defeat Stacia only to realize her soul arts weren't fake and change his mind about destroying her, a perfunctory takedown of the rest of that bastard's security, and the trial.

Ah, yes, the trial. Its conclusion was one of the best days of Cassi's life. It didn't take much doing to destroy that bastard's defenses, with the ample evidence in his mansion including obedience modules yet to be used, Cassi's perfect android memory allowing her to remember every single password and encryption key that bastard had used, the long list name of criminals that bastards had conspire with, and more.

One trial later, that bastard's life was completely ruined. An indefinite life sentence in prison, with no possibility of parole. His marriage with Cassi completely annulled and every single non-illegal possession of his transferred to her as damages.

Even now Cassi smiles thinking of that bastard's expression that day.

Now in possession of his massive wealth, with the exception of the massive sums she had donated to sexual abuse survivors' charities, Cassi set out to aid her newfound friends in their quest to prove the validity of android soul artists.