Chapter 5 - Dead Woman Typing

The body of Marisee Sanders, the young woman that disappeared three weeks ago was found on the coast of Southern California. Her body had been severely decomposed by the salt water and wildlife, but dental records confirmed her identity. Those that followed this story from previous weeks might recall that initially Sanders was presumed kidnapped after a small episode in an online game, “Aion,” where someone claimed to be Sanders and stated she had been kidnapped. However, moderators quickly determined that it was a hoax from a Chinese gold spammer, or a person that hacks accounts for money, and the police did not pursue the matter.
 
It took Marisse a long while to read through the article, both in shock and in confusion. Overnight her reading comprehension of English characters had deteriorated significantly, causing most words to lose their meaning entirely, and many letters at times looking like a simplistic drawing than actual words. Even when she could sound out what she was reading, some of these words just plain did not conjure up a definition in her mind. The realization that not only had the search for her been abandoned according to this but also the inability to get all the details due to...whatever was happening to her, had flared up that anger once again. 
 
Pressing the arrow key she saw her birth records, her death certificate, and other documents confirming “Marisse Sanders’s” death. 
 
She knew she needed to do something about this. If she did not, no one would come and help her, but Marisse could not help but feel anger with her home. They gave up that easily? Where they really so lazy? No! There was no time for that. However recognizing that she was having trouble typing things out, even if she was misguided by the thought that it was temporary, she did feel her spoken words were still overall fine. Spotting that headset besides the computer, she remembered that there was skype, as well as other voice chat programs, or even voice chatting in one of the games if she wanted to be innocuous, if she really wanted to shoot for help of course. 
 
Skype - she recalled seeing the little emblem on her start menu before, and she could remember that one of her few pieces of instructions reminded her to use programs like it to… What was it again? To prove her validity? Something like that. Her fingers trembled as she plugged the headset in - she was shaking like a leaf, both from the news that the flash drive had held and figuring out another avenue of escape… 
 
“Is it?”
 
As she boots the program up, she slumps back into her chair, looking at her hands - watching them shake and twitch, seeing them glisten somewhat in the dim lighting with as greasy as they were. The first thing she considered was that they might be watching her - just like she’d thought they’d be in the games… But that was the least of her concerns now. They were able to fake her death - provide DNA, news coverage, a… A… A corpse. What’s to say what they could and couldn’t do? She felt like she’d almost forgotten that they were able to kidnap her in the first place!
 
“If I talk at the mother, men of JadeTech can make with hurt!” she groans, holding her head in her hands. 
 
She… If she talked to her mother, not only would she risk putting herself back on JadeTech’s radar, but she’d put her family at risk… Her mother, her sister, her… Oh god, maybe even her friends. She wouldn’t do that to them… She…
 
Marisse relaxes. Slowly, she pulls her head from her hands and looks up. “No,” she begins, a light smile coming to her face. “I must. Men of will make scary to me. Make scary to me so I not do the not want things!” she reasons, everything making significantly more sense in her head.
She couldn’t let them scare her. All being scared would do was hurt her. After all, she needed to tell her family something - to give them hope, even if they couldn’t do anything to help. Presuming JadeTech didn’t give her her own hacker account, she could faintly recall her own information, and more importantly, her sister’s. A soft, wet fart escaped her as she leaned in toward the screen, bringing a blush to her cheeks… Not entirely one of embarrassment. Fanning around herself to clear out the scent, she scans over the keyboard, figuring out which keys would allow her to enter the correct info.
 
It was tricky. On one hand the risk she was taking could be profound. Sure, they could hurt her, or her family. But, at the same time she had yet to experience any blatant violence from her captors. No one had beaten her, aside from feeling like she had been hit by a truck when she awoke from the gas, and no where had there been any threat against her family as far as she could tell. No, if anything these people seemed mostly focused on passive aggressive tactics, or indirect conflict.
 
Skype itself was fortunately pretty universal in its layout. And, while all the text was still in Chinese, she could figure out a good portion of it through intuition, and of course the growing understanding of the characters themselves too. However, Marisse found herself stumbling over the keys all the more.
 
Syntax, spelling, it was all a garbled mess in her head. Part of her wanted to simply just type using the keyboard as laid out in kanji just for the ease and so that she would not have to go purely on memory, a thing she felt was betraying her a bit too often of late. Still, she managed to make it work, roughly, in enough time.
 
Soon enough she had managed to log in under her old username. A prompt came up for her to test the headset. A prompt came up in both kanji and English asking her to speak into the microphone and confirm if her audio sounded right through a playback. As she started to work through it she saw that a good portion of her old contacts were online, including her sister.
 
There was a tight feeling in her chest, reaching down to her gut, making her feel numb and bubbly all over… She figured that it was hope - seeing her sister, her friends, seeing something from her life before she’d been whisked halfway across the world and held captive by these hacker freaks. However, it might well have been the candy messing with her digestive system or the hunger she’d all-but-forgotten about. 
 
“Sister…” she gasps, holding her hands before her mouth, almost in awe. “I… I see you, I think of I see you not again!” Of course, she wasn’t talking directly to her - she still had to test the mic. Sure, they kept her tech in top operating condition even as her surroundings deteriorated with every fuck-up, but she just had to be sure. 
 
 
Marisse dons the headset… For all of a minute before taking it off, beginning to fuss with her hair. The hard plastic and cushiony foam felt like it’d stirred up a beehive atop her head with as itchy as it’d become. Her nails, slightly longer and bearing dark rungs of dirt beneath them, seemed much better suited to alleviate herself with as sharp as they’d become. 
 
“Aya…” she grumbles, a particularly hard scratch evoking a spark of pain. 
 
Patting down her limp, greasy hair as best she could manage, she replaces her headset, adjusting the mic close to her mouth and beginning the playback test - giving it a simple test.
 
“Do, re, mi…” she begins, playing it back… And wincing as she hears it. Too loud, she figures, turning it down to give herself a clearer listen, but even then it doesn’t solve the problem with it. Her voice is too deep - nothing like a guy’s, but lacking much femininity to it. It’s nasally too, and hearing it only begins to grate on her. 
 
“Aaah, what are the happen?” she grunts, rapping her knuckles on her desk in frustration, reaching over for her water to clear her throat out. Coughing a few times, she repeats - “Do, re, mi!”, and though her voice isn’t as warbled, it’s still just as deep and grating. 
 
Marisse exhales quickly, fuming. “Cheap pig fuck asshole.” she grunts, slouching lower as she curses out JadeTech - they gave her faulty equipment, with shitty reception… She didn’t have to look at the brand of headset to know it’s from a western developer. 
 
With another sigh, she concludes her audio test. While not content, she submits to the fact that her equipment is poor… Well, to her knowledge, anyway. After all - she knows that if she can get a video call going, her sister won’t need sound to recognize her! The camera on her laptop could be showing her in the lowest resolution possible and she’d still come through clear. After all, there wasn’t much changing her face could do. The only difference she could tell was that she didn’t have makeup on! 
 
Selecting her sister, she begins to smile - she showed up under her proper name, Danielle. Even if she couldn’t get across to her sister where she was or how she’d been taken, she could still give her sister hope that she was still alive. That alone could expose her death as a lie and get people looking for her again! It was perfect!
 
“With luck of mine, Danielle will be doing with walk away.” she murmurs, giving a deep chuckle and pulling another bundle of noodles out of her first box of food. She starts a video call, looking away from the screen briefly to fiddle with her hair, trying to get it into presentable… Or, at least, recognizable condition.
 
As she kept trying to speak into mic and then her following thoughts, Marisse found that the strange cadence and inflection that had been creeping into her dialect was only getting worse. On top of all the issues she was having making herself sound competent in English with her failing vocabulary and grammar, Marisse was starting to have trouble enunciating correctly. This combined with her new pitch of her voice only made her sound more and more the stranger to her own ear.
 
It did not even occur to her that she was eating while getting ready to talk over the internet. While there was a moment where she tried adjusting her hair, it was very superficial. She gave no thought to her sweatiness, the lack of clothing, the poor lighting or how she might really look after all this time in captivity.
 
Clicking the call button the usual Skype pinging noises began, the camera light turning on automatically as the call set itself up. After a few rings a picture appeared on the screen of a young woman that looked much like Marisse, or at least how she had when all of this had started. The woman looked tired, as if she had left the computer on and had been asleep.
 
“Who is this, do you know what time it-” she paused, looking down at the screen to see the username. “Ok, who the fuck hacks a dead person’s account! If you have any sense of self preservation you should hang up and go-”
 
Danielle was getting going in spite of her tiredness, her words filling with a mixture of anger and hurt. Marisse needed to act quickly before things got out of hand. Danielle was leaning into the screen a bit, as if trying to make out the image, “A-are you not even wearing a top?! What the hell?” With that she hit the end call button, leaving Marisse in silence once more. Her sister’s username was still green, maybe if she could quickly explain herself she might be able to get back on the call. 
 
In spite of it being her sister, another pang of fury whipped through Marrise’s mind. Of course, Western woman jumps to conclusions without thinking about things. That bái mù chòubī! Always-
 
What did she just think now? It had slipped through her mind in a voice so natural for a moment it was horrifying, completely pulling her out of her complacency and reminding her that she really did need to get out of her, and soon, before she lost whatever will was left to bother. 
 
She did need to get out of here - if she didn’t, she wouldn’t be doing any of this. She wouldn’t have appealed to the incompetent administration of the first MMO she’d been spamming up, she wouldn’t have one-sidedly aided the backstabbing players of the other one, and she certainly wouldn’t be trying to contact her sister who certainly didn’t just mistake her for a stranger.
 
Of course a sooner rescue was better. The sooner she was out of here, the sooner she could put all of this behind her, and some methods of escape might actually be easier… But on the other hand, her addled mind found it hard to muster any sense of urgency. It was content in the knowledge… Or, rather ignorance, that she didn’t have any time limit, as it were. She didn’t have X amount of days before something happened to her… At least in her mind. 
However, that docility was lost for but a moment as she saw her sister hang up on her. Her face reddened as if she’d cracked into her box of General Tsao’s, her hands trembling over the keyboard. She shut her eyes and looked down, raising her hands to her temples and simply sat, stewing and sweating, waiting for the initial rage to pass through her. A dozen things crossed her mind at this time - all of them rife with detest for her sister and society - but she tried her damnedest to tune it all out. 
 
It mostly worked. 
 
Despite not having moved a muscle in roughly five minutes, she was breathing heavily, almost fuming with sweat and the last dying embers of anger, even as reason… Her reason returned. Surely her sister was shocked. Distressed that the sister she thought dead suddenly contacted her. After all, a corpse was provided, and a funeral was held. It was probably more realistic to think she was dead than to think she was alive and that it was all a hoax. 
 
Definitely a hard thing to reason against, she figures. 
 
What breaks her out of her little ball of anger isn’t that - reason alone would’ve taken longer. The tension that’d been building and building was simply shattered by a single wet fart, the suddenness taking her off-guard and… Making her snicker a little. Being angry after that felt like it’d take effort to do… And, well, she didn’t want to waste any more time fuming than she needed to. Stress is bad for the skin, she thinks 
 
Her fingers, now steady, lower themselves to her keyboard, her eyes opening. She has to blink a bit of blurriness out of her eyes, which stubbornly persists for a moment before clearing… Mostly. If she wasn’t so focused on typing out her responses and she took a look behind her, she’d find the opposite end of her little apartment wouldn’t be entirely in-focus. 
 
“no no no marise is me” she types, offhandedly musing about making a file she could just copy and paste to explain her situation. “they find girl that is wrong not marisse”
 
Every sentence she types is immediately sent off, barraging her sister’s feed with her messages. 
 
“my dead is not real”
“taken to china”
“help”
“love our mom tell her”
“please”
“no person listen”
 
Her final post took a while to type… The anger she feels, though hot, is more like ice than anything else, if only for how it melts into deep sorrow. 
 
A gurgle escaped her stomach like a growling lion. In spite of having just eaten, the noise was accompanied with a hunger pang, as if her irritation had only blossomed her gluttony further. The cocktail of drugs swirling within her system were indeed producing such a result, if not inadvertently. Irritation, anger, pleasure, it all released various hormones and neurochemicals in response. Unfortunately for Marisse, the adrenaline she produced in her anger only furthered the work that her captors were doing to her brain, specifically her frontal lobe.
 
Her prefrontal cortex, which regulated her ability for complex cognitive behavior, personality expression, decision making, and self regulated social behavior had eroded substantially over the recent days/weeks. Had Marisse stepped into a CAT scan, the comparison between what would show up now to what her brain had been before would be striking. Some might say that it had even regressed to the complexity of a young teenager, leaving her impatient, impulsive, and nearly unable to thoughtfully plan her actions, let alone the distant consequences of them. In the end, it made her all the more conducive to do what felt good now, regardless of what would happen later.
 
Each message she sent seemed to make her feel a little woozy, unaware that the combo of the emotional surge she had experienced a moment ago with the stimulation to her lingual centers only accelerated the process. In a sense, every message she sent came along with a small part of her English, each stamped with a do not return to sender tag. As the last one went through she waited, hoping that she would get a response. 
 
After a few minutes she heard the telltale chirp of a new message.
 
“Assuming this is not a cruel joke, how would you even prove this? How can you prove you are really my sister?”
 
Marisse leaned forward to read it, finding herself leaning more than she had before. It took her a moment to process the sentence, a good portion of the words garbling in her head almost as badly as her English was to those around her. What? Why was her sister typing like that? Was she drunk? It seemed strange that her sister would act in such a way, though it did help to explain why she had hung up on Marisse. 
 
A flash of frustration spawned at the back of her throat. This was a matter of life and death, and here she was having to baby each step out for her ingrate of a white girl sister. Marisse could not help but let out a sigh as she tried to figure out a proper response. Sitting there, Marisee could feel her temples throb to the rhythm of her returning frustration. It was like no one got her anymore. Were people really so petty? Part of her generalized it to the West, but she did realize something. She had not reached out to people from the East yet either. The thought struck her with a flicker of hope. It was an avenue she had not pursued. Maybe the irony of her escape would be that the people of her captor's culture would be the ones to set her free.
 
As she looked up to the computer though, she realized that while all the programs were in Chinese, every game she had played had been rigged for a Western server or demographic. Maybe if she-
 
“I’m blocking this account if you do not reply right now you sonofabitch.”
 
Marisse turned back to the Skype window, brushing back a lock of sweat soaked hair, and began typing. As she did she could feel the keyboard grow greasy from her sweat and excess oil, unaware her body paled in comparison to the keyboard. That pair of undergarments were already damp and nasty from the heat at that. Had she been able to wear anything else she might have found the rest of her outfit in a very similar state. 
 
And yet part of her enjoyed it. 
 
It was a small part of her, but growing. Perhaps in response to wanting to rebel against “Western” standards, or maybe it was a pain/pleasure response mechanism. It was hard to say. But one thing was for sure, Marisse’s soul was taking a turn for the perverse, step by step, with a growing smile on its face every bit of the way. 
 
A small burp escaped her lips as she leaned in further, her softer ass shifting about on her cheap, sweat-soaked seat. It was becoming a bit more of a bother than it was worth to read everything - not just because she was quickly losing the capacity to understand everything, but because of the remnant blurriness. 
 
Her body put in terms she’d have understood before being kidnapped, was fucked twelve ways to Sunday. The chemical cocktail that was circulating through her body, constraining and eroding the things keeping her her while feeding and augmenting everything to keep her where JadeTech wanted her to be had done just a bit of damage to her vision - her corneas were being slowly damaged, leaving everything past a few meters blurred.
 
On one hand, JadeTech likely wanted their hackers shackled to their computers - there was no need to go out anywhere else… But on the other hand, they didn’t want them blind. That’s what the glasses were for… Something Marisse was just finding out. 
 
‘No camera to see me.’ she thinks. ‘Sister does not see the me of me, too.’ There was no need for her to keep up appearances if she wasn’t being watched, after all - she could put on the glasses, presuming they’d help… And, lo and behold, they did. They were a bit much for her, as her captors had no accurate way of telling how fast her sight would decay, but they allowed her to get her face away from the screen. Her breath was fogging it up, anyway. 
 
“ask marrise things” she replies. “only marise know”
 
It was the obvious course of action - if she knew something only she’d know, she was fine.
After all, it worked in the movies, whenever they had to tell if someone was a clone. 
 
She smiles and reclines in her seat, placing her box of food upon her breasts and spreading her legs. Though she knew she should probably panicking, freaking out about JadeTech discovering her… She felt comfortable. The food made her feel content and gassy. The pungent scent of gas and sweat made her feel horny. The horniness made her feel hungry… And now she had the worst thing any procrastinator could possibly have: a plan B.
 
She had no reason to devote all of her effort into play A, securing rescue by way of her sister, if she had a plan B, after all. Said plan B was reaching out to the...Locals. Probably not her neighbors, but easterners - sure, a handful of them got her into this mess in the first place, but at least they were doing something. All she’d gotten from the west were excuses and idiocy, even from her family.
 
Hell, if she gets out of her with no help from her family, she won’t even go back to them! Yeah, that’ll show them! She could start a new life when she got back home, or maybe she wouldn’t go back at all and… 
 
She stops herself. Even though she… Did feel an impulsive desire to see that plan though, she was still lucid enough to realize it’d just defeat the point of escaping if she didn’t go home. 
 
With a sigh, and a scratch of her armpit, she awaits her sister’s response. 
 
Her eyes felt like there was a film over them, keeping her from being able to see just right. It was annoying, much like everything of late. All Marisse wanted to do was sit back, eat, sleep, and, oh yeah, escape! She shook her head of the concern, rubbed her eyes once more in vain effort to make her vision work, and tried to get back to the task at hand. With the glasses on however, her vision was just fine oddly enough. Marisse pondered the convenience for only a moment, after all, everything else had been controlled by them, why not that too?
 
A snort escaped her widening nose as she looked over the entirety of her conversation, and the lack of its results so far as another message appeared.
 
"The scar on my left foot, where did I get it and how?"
 
Every passing moment of this conversation was becoming more and more of a hassle for Marisse. Was her sister so untrusting? The desire to eat and maybe kick back for a few hours grew all the more appealing as her options became more available in her mind. Maybe she could snack a bit, watch some youtube, maybe open a bit of porn and-
 
What?
 
Marisse waited for her mind to reply, as if she was entitled to some sort of justification. But nothing came. She wanted to look at pornography. Simple as that. She sat there, the realization oddly...liberating. It had never really been an interest of her growing up. After all, pornography was typically seen as a “guy” thing. But here she was debating it. Well not even that, she outright wanted it. 
 
The growing warmth between her legs further decreased her patience with the current conversation. Of course, the combination of frustration and arousal was not doing her body or mind any favors. It felt like the room had grown warmer over the past few minutes, her body sweating more as a result. The smell of her body odor was growing quite potent of late as her unshowered body continued to ferment in her own self made juices. Inside of her, her sweat glands had swollen in size to compensate as a strange side effect of her treatment. Her other glands had grown as well, salivary, pituitary, and the like. Of course, this was far from the only change that was progressing. That stubble under her arms and between her legs had only grown more dense, the hair actually growing in thicker and quicker than before. Not inhumanly quick granted, but far more than most people out there, with her testosterone sensitivity spiking and causing her hair follicles to activate in many regions of her body, be it her crotch, under arms, forearms, legs, or even about her areola, it would guarantee that she would be too “unsightly” to want to leave her newfound job for something more public oriented anyway. 
 
There was too much to type. Even at one question it bothered her. 
 
“When did we find that squirrel nest?”
 
Another question. Great. What next, a blood test? Maybe a pledge of allegiance? She sighed and found herself looking to the headset. The idea of talking while having her hands free to eat was appealing, but what if her sister got upset again? The convenience, or more realistically laziness, was getting the better of her at this point though.
 
Well fuck her if she got upset. She should have more patience! 
 
Marisse… Took her time in responding. She didn’t indulge her desires fully, after all, she didn’t know if she had reliable access to a browser, and as such simply sat doing… Nothing. She ate, rubbed herself a little, and simply allowed herself to fester. It felt nice, comparable to how she’d felt when she climbed into bed after taking a hot shower. 
 
Not that a hot shower would feel terribly nice to her now, of course. Her mind was active, even if her body was not - she was thinking back to her childhood, where she figured these questions were from… She couldn’t be terribly sure, with how oddly her sister was writing them. Maybe she shouldn’t be doing this while her sister was drunk…
 
Whatever. If she was too drunk to understand, it was her loss. “you jump in leaf heap from top of home, at first home we life at” she responds to the first question, grumbling softly.
She takes a swig of water, finding herself running out… She breaks away from responding to look for another bottle of water, or something to sate her thirst… Unfortunately, there wasn’t anything else. Anything… Except the vodka, and she wasn’t about to crack into that. 
 
By now her workstation was littered with the three emptied boxes of takeout and almost-empty bottle of water. Something about it… Makes her smile. Well, it delights her a little - the look of focus on her face kept her from smiling. It took visible effort to decypher the second question, and even more to type it. It was becoming more trouble than it was worth, she thinks. 
 
“in” she types, before pausing. She knows where she found the nest… But she forgot the name of it. The… Thing that’s above the fireplace. The thing on the roof. The… 
 
“Shit, fuck fuck fuck…” she grumbles, slamming one hand beside her keyboard, making the lighter objects on her desk jump a little. 
 
“in hole above fireplace” she sends. “we look for chrissmas man” 
 
She sighs. It’ll have to do. In her lounging, taking her sweet time, she failed to notice the clock slowly ticking by… Only as she waits for her sister to reply does she notice it, and remembers: she has a deadline. In her ‘haste’, she forgot that she still had work to do today. 
 
Hurriedly, she sends off a quick message. “good???? have no time plesae”
 
Sure, her work was easy… But it was unreliable. If her inquisitive sister kept barraging her with questions, she could miss it! Who knows where she’d end up next if that happened? The thought of failing JadeTech struck the girl a bit more than the thought of her having to start working on escaping anew.
 
A few more minutes went by, still no response. Fuck! She had not time to deal with this. She needed to-
 
"What do you need from me?”
 
Marisse looked at the message, staring at it until it made sense to her. Help? Was she finally going to get help? It was too good to be true. But she had to go for it right? With a grunt she moved to respond, her brain finding the words much like an old man trying to reclaim lost glory, or in other words with little results.
 
However, she did not need to worry about it for long. As she began to type the screen suddenly cut to a blue screen. It was not long before she heard a familiar noise. Turning around she saw that familiar gas hissing through the vents. The gas began to fill the room and quickly Marisse began to feel herself losing consciousness. Dipping into the blackness she vaguely recalled the warning on the slip of paper she got initially, but then, nothingness.