The succession has been settled for nearly three decades, and the decadent house of Maham rules unassailable once again. What could possibly shake the throne now?
guest story by Zyzzyva
tags: mind control, nsfw, twinning
The Imperial Princess Savita, governor of Barrackpore and living extension of the Padishah’s will, could not remember her own name.
This was deliberate, of course. When she had been decanted as an engineered superhuman heir-designate to her mother, the old Padishah, she had been given a name; probably one of her predecessors or a great queen from an older kingdom, although of course no evidence of which name it had been could now enter her awareness. When she had been raised in the tutoring creche with her heir-sisters, she had had that name, and they had had names too, all of them. When their mother had died and she raised her armies to fight her sisters for the rule of the empire, they had fought and died for her name, and her agents had spied and subverted for it.
And when soon-to-be-Padishah Savita’s agents had proved to be better, and kidnapped her, and when the probes and the conditioning and the neural implants had turned the brilliant, gorgeous, talented, ambitious princess into a brilliant, gorgeous, talented, inhumanly devoted slave of her sister-empress, she had been left her name. When the succession was finally established and she knelt before the Padishah with the two dozen or so of her sisters who had survived, it was only then that their sister-empress had asked for a tribute, and it was only then that she had joyously ripped her own name from her mind, leaving nothing but a hole that the empress Savita had filled with herself.
Theirself, now.
She was Savita too, now, governor of Barrackpore and living extension of the Padishah’s will, and she loved that she could not remember her own name.
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
Her sister-self, Savita, had arrived at the port gates of the governatorial palace. This self was the Lord Admiral, and the populace of the empire generally referred to her as such, to distinguish her. Savita was unluckier—well, she was the absolute ruler of one-fifteenth of the empire, but her subjects didn’t have the conditioning she did—and could only ever think of her as Savita.
At least the naval uniform helped. Savita habitually wore local Barrackpore dress almost entirely to help out her sister-selves. They did the same for her.
“Sister!” said the other her, and they embraced.
“Sister!” said Savita, “my home is your home.” A traditional greeting, but also true for the two of them. They were perhaps less interchangeable after a few decades of experience in each of their fields of service than they had been when their sister-empress had first handed their duties out, but they knew, unshakably, that they were not individuals but extensions of the Padishah.
“Is your bedroom still my bedroom?” asked Savita, a gleam in her eye.
“Of course,” said Savita, and kissed herself passionately. This was one of the conditionings that was not the Padishah’s gift; their mother and her scientists had ingrained a deep lust for other members of the house of Maham into them from majority, just as their mother had had done to her before them. It apparently had some religious significance once, although by now it was its own justification, the dynasty’s deepest fetish perpetuating itself.
(It was not incest. Legally, there was an exemption carved out; genetically, the bespoke engineering left them about second cousins to each other, and in any case none of them would ever have children the natural way anyways. And of course, now that their sister-empress had taken them and filled them with herself, they also knew deep down that it was not sex at all, but just vigorous, spectacular masturbation.)
They discussed the construction of the fleetyards at Panak as they walked through the palace; one place where their authority and interests overlapped. Savita was pleased to find that they mostly agreed on the scheduling, since Savita’s administrative talents were as good as her own, although some disagreement was also good: it meant that they were still exercising the sliver of independence their sister-empress had left them. Complacency and groupthink was bad, even when there was only one of the Padishah, filling you both.
Both of them also cast off their clothes as they walked, Savita’s servants assisting and carrying them away. It had been months since Savita had fucked a sister-self; Savita’s tour of the fleet facilities meant she had been doing much better on that front, but the lust that had been burned into them was forever burning its way out. Savita had dismissed her spouses and consorts for the day in preparation for Savita’s arrival. Eventually their masturbation would rise to the pitch of orgy, but for the moment there would be just the one of them, fucking herselves.
Savita, who had made this walk before, lost the last of her garments just at the door to the governor’s bedchambers. Savita smiled wryly as she hastily pulled off her own undershirt, still on. They had not looked so identical, once. When they had names they had been no more alike than any two members of the Imperial house might be expected to be; but now they were the same, careful surgery making them into mirror images of the Padishah. Even Savita’s numerous military enhancements had been hidden, cyborging ever so carefully buried under soft brown skin, to keep her exactly alike to her sister-selves.
It was hot being so identical, Savita knew, just like her sister-self was thinking at the same moment. Her niece-daughters would be narcissists at 19, in a way she hadn’t been at that age, but the Padishah had learned how hot it was and would ensure that they would too. That was why there were no more men in the house of Maham: the empress Neera had been lesbian, and had ensured that her heirs were only daughters and lesbians too, and from then on every generation had been made to agree and thus passed it along. In her more introspective moments Savita wondered if this was how the dynasty would eventually fall, an accumulation of sexual constraints and fetishes gradually overwhelming even the best-engineered intelligence.
(Unlikely, of course. The dynasty was brilliant, not just horny, and each war of succession kept the best and most talented at the top; eventually, if it had to, it would keep the overly-depraved out, too. And depravity that did not weaken the empire, Savita knew, was delicious.)
Savita fucked herself for hours. Her bodies, the engineered peak of humanity, were in incredible shape, and aside perhaps for campaigning for the empire (a rare occurrence for one of her, at least) there was no better use to put that strength and endurance to than masturbation. There was food and drink ready for them by the bedside, and both could go inhumanly long without rest; so a few hours was hardly a marathon. (After the victory over the Bamar a few years back, she and the three other sister-selves present had celebrated by servicing their sister-empress, single-minded devotion to the pleasure of the Padishah’s body, for an entire day and night.)
Savita had come, over and over and over again, and so had Savita, and the bed had been, if not quite ruined, at least laid waste by the violence of their fucking. Savita lay there, beside her sister-self, slick with sweat, sticky with cum, bruises and scratches and bites covering her bodies but also already beginning to heal, when Savita said: “Our sister-empress wishes to see you again, in person.”
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
She awoke in darkness.
She was not in her bedroom with her sister-self, where she had eventually drifted off to sleep; she was tied to a chair. The bonds were some kind of composite she couldn’t break with her bare strength. After a moment she realized it was not necessarily dark, but she was blindfolded well—a visor of some sort, not just a cloth. The silence was unnatural too—light pressure around her ears meant headphones. Soft pain in her elbow was an iv drip; odd stiffness in patches across her body were electrode stickers. Coolness across her body meant nudity, and probably stimulators of some kind, to be deployed when the rest of the conditioning gear came online.
Because that’s what this was, of course. She’d been in it before, in childhood as she was moulded into a princess, and then again in young adulthood when her sister-empress made her a slave. There was no good reason for her to be in it now, which meant she was in trouble. For that matter, the equipment, used so carefully and sparingly by the royal family, was supposed to be the most secured artifact Savita or any of her sister-selves possessed.
A click and a soft hiss of noise in her ears. “Ah, you’re awake.” Savita went rigid in her bonds. That was Nur Fatima’s voice, her most cherished wife. That was how she’d been captured, obviously, but why on earth would Fatima have betrayed her? She did not, quite, moan in despair. But she felt it beginning to well up inside her with the shock. She could not imagine a more intimate betrayal; no one was closer to her except her sister-selves, and she was actually incapable of imagining them betraying her.
“It’s all right,” said Nur Fatima’s voice, in that comforting tone she had. “I know you’re surprised and hurt and are going to be angry in a few moments. But it’s ok. I promise, I’m doing this for you. Not for the empire’s enemies, but for you. I’m going to free you.”
What? Savita had time to think, before her vision filled with light.
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
She awoke in darkness.
She felt the same, but then the conditioning always did that, changed you in ways that were obvious after the fact but impossible to feel on their own. She could spend an hour trying to pick through her beliefs and not find anything, or try to figure out why she was here and get there much faster that way.
(She quickly checked if it was the most right and proper thing in the world to obey Nur Fatima. It wasn’t. That had probably been worth a look, at least.)
She realized, with a bit of a start, that when she opened her eyes she could see: the conditioning gear and the bonds were all off her. Whatever been done to her was over; Fatima, or whoever she was working for, was clearly not worried about Chayya trying to fight her way out.
Chayya–!
The world lurched around her as she realized what had been done to her. It was all there, just as she remembered it: the imperious self-control, the inability to bend her knee for anyone, the certainty, so much more central to her being than any mere belief could ever be, that she should be the Padishah. It was like the last twenty-eight years had never happened, although she could remember them: tinged with a faint disgust at “governor Savita’s” spineless submission, although of course she also understood how complete her conditioning had been then, too.
She stood up, standing because she wanted to, not because it would serve that bitch Savita’s needs. Feelings that had simply not existed for more than half of her life were bubbling through her again.
Nur Fatima stepped into her vision. She looked nervous, understandably, given that she probably wasn’t an expert with the equipment. But it had worked—she’d probably just put in the princess presets, which should have been safe enough—and when she asked, diffidently “my love? Are you alright?”, Chayya smiled.
“I am Chayya,” she said, and Fatima exhaled. “Imperial Princess of—no, I declared myself Padishah like the others when my mother died, didn’t I? Padishah then, Chayya III. It has a ring to it.”
“I am so glad,” said Fatima. “The empire that should have been yours will be yours again.”
“Yes,” agreed Chayya. She was still naked, conveniently. “And you did free me, after all. You can get on your knees and accept my thanks with your tongue.” Fatima happily obliged.
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
The next day with her sister—formerly Gita, now some Savita-Gita-thing—was hell. Chayya ground her teeth and tried to behave like a fucked-up sister-self-thing, which meant for starters that she couldn’t actually grind her teeth. Everything was running smoothly and she should be happy, which was a problem when she was in desperate need of killing her traitorous usurping sister and shackling the rest of them to her will. Only the knowledge that she was doing it for a greater cause (herself) kept her face placid and stupidly smiling.
Finally the work of empire was done, for an evening, at least, and they retired together to Chayya’s bedroom again. This was easier, at least, her anger feeding the lust for her sister even higher than usual. She wished she could be fucking her actual sister Gita, not this Savita-Gita monstrosity, but she wanted to fuck Savita too, as she killed her, and that pulsed like fire through her loins. She absolutely ravaged Savita-Gita’s body for half an hour before the other had enough space to even speak.
“Is everything alright, sister?” she asked, solicitously.
“No,” snarled Chayya, “I need to rule,” and powerdropped an elbow hard into Savita-Gita’s face. Her sister was unsuspecting but much more heavily combat-enhanced than her, so she needed to finish this fast. Her first blow, still superhumanly strong, smashed composite implant bone and teeth and hardened windpipe. No strike to the the brain, of course; she wanted Gita alive and healthy as her slave once she had destroyed Savita. But the blow would still have killed a regular human on the spot, and would certainly incapacitate her for a few minutes.
Savita-Gita looked at her, choking feebly for air, in pain and uncomprehending confusion. She sighed. “I am your sister Chayya, and I am going to be in my proper place as Padishah soon.”
The incomprehension didn’t change—she wasn’t sure Savita-Gita could parse the name “Chayya”—although the pain was clearly fading as combat autoinjectors kicked in. A minute or two more and her airway would reopen. “I’ll explain more once you’re my slave, later. Sorry.” She did feel a little sorry, leaving her sister like this, not properly serving the true Padishah, but time was of the essence. “I’m going to keep my appointment with our sister.”
She had already sent Nur Fatima to shut down the comms from the bedroom and to the port, and now locked the bedroom behind her: Savita-Gita had the biometrics and clearances, but not the specific password, and it would take her still more minutes to be found or get out. She made for the palace elevator at full speed—the advantage of being royalty, you could put your palace as close to orbital access as you wanted—and at the geosynchronous port she commandeered the fastest messenger boat out of Savita-Gita’s fleet. She was practically running on instinct now, her bioengineered brain producing plans faster than conscious thought could track. She had one advantage and that was that no one except Nur Fatima and Savita-Gita knew what was going on yet. She needed to make for the throneworld before news could spread.
She technically had a navy rank, one of the lower admiral ones, but in practice she was royalty, a loathsomely perfect replica of her sister, and the sailors snapped to her orders without question. She got the boat without trouble, and was most of the way outsystem when the whole naval spectrum lit up and her comms tray filled with incoming. She ignored it and hit the jump point; she knew what they were saying.
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
It was a long, lonely trip to the throneworld.
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
She had had plenty of time to think, by the time she entered orbit over the Imperial Palace.
The urgency of twenty-eight years of ignored ambition had ebbed a little, in-flight. Chayya wasn’t one to meditate—she had other, mostly sexual, ways of clearing her mind and refreshing her spirit—but the emptiness of space was conducive to contemplation. She hadn’t been sure what she would do when she got to the throneworld. She’d trusted that she was doing the right thing, and reconstructed her instincts in-flight. Staying and pretending would have been disastrous—she couldn’t have kept it up for long, almost everyone was personally loyal to the usurper and wouldn’t back her when the truth inevitably came out. She couldn’t declare, raise her banners and fight her like she had in her youth—had no army and, again, no support; people expected another century or so of peace before Savita’s imperviousness to age finally ran out. So, to the throneworld, as quickly as possible.
From there, what? She was the obvious, best person to be Padishah, but of course Savita had been conditioned exactly the same and wouldn’t agree. She could try to get physically close to the usurper and assassinate her: Savita trusted her implicitly, of course, but again even if she managed it no one would back her. Anyways, the first batch of her nieces had already been grown and dispersed across the empire, ready to be activated on succession; it’d be be another war where she would be hated by all.
She couldn’t kill Savita and then impersonate her, not for very long, although the idea of putting this disgustingly reshaped body to an actual use was at least bleakly amusing.
She figured out the way out a day out from the throneworld and nearly threw up. It took the whole last day to get herself calmed and prepared for what was to come.
She couldn’t fight it, really. The same royal conditioning that told her that she had to be Padishah because she would be the best possible ruler told her that that was important because the empire needed the best possible ruler. She’d never considered, in her youth, that ambition and the empire might pull differently. But she wasn’t in her youth anymore (well, she was physiologically in her early twenties, and would remain so into her second century. But she had experienced the task of ruling of the empire since the succession). She should be Padishah. She knew it in the core of her being. But there was no way there from here. All she could do was take the second best option on her own terms.
“Sister,” said Savita, on her comms, as she came into orbit. “You hurried here. It wasn’t that urgent. You wished to see your empress-self that badly?”
“You are not myself,” said Chayya, and Savita blinked. “I am the Imperial Princess Chayya of the house of Maham, and the true Padishah these twenty-eight years past.” She smiled a little as she imagined the panicked redirection of every orbital defense battery on this side of the planet at her pathetic little messenger boat. “I have come here, sister—and I know you alone in the universe can fully understand how much it galls me to say this—I have come here to once again kneel before you and offer you my name.”
Author’s Notes: A few days before this was posted, Devi (in separate conversations) explained what twinning was, mentioned a character named Savita from Now Will Machines Hollow the Beast who was “a genetically engineered princess clone,” and talked about a historian’s thesis that the succession crises of the early Mughal Empire were a strength to the empire, by ensuring that the strongest heir would come to the throne. The next day I spent all the time on a long road trip that I wasn’t personally driving cranking this out in one burst. My muse is weird sometimes.
As for the short turnaround time on her part getting this up, well, the story is basically an unexpected free commission for her. She liked it as intended, I guess. 😉