Mens thumbed the door opener under the front of his desk and looked up as the door whispered open, displaying his version of a smile to the young man standing nervously at the entrance. "Come in, Pietro." He gestured. "Have a seat."

"Yes, Your Eminence." Pietro nodded spastically and scuttled to the chair in front of the desk. It was hard to know how to act in a private audience with a god. Though Pietro was consciously aware he had earned this privilege.

Mens waved a negligent hand. "Dispense with that. You're a demigod now. 'Sir' will do."

"Yes, Y... Sir."

Mens shuffled some infoslabs around on his desk. "Now, since you'll be working for me, I'd like to bring you up to speed on some of the projects my office is working on. I know you know the theory -- your test scores have been outstanding, by the way -- downloading minds, uploading, imprinting, all of the things we do within the mental environment of clones. And you've also excelled in the lab, getting some hands-on experience with the principles in actual practice. As you know, Hypnos handles the technical end..." Hypnos, god of sleep, Pietro's always-busy mind reminded him. "...and pioneered the sleep-teaching technique we use for general distribution clones, while my own contributions have been on the theoretical end. Your especial strength on the theoretical side is the reason I've invited you to join my little team." He flashed something of a smile again.

"Yes... Sir. I'm grateful for the privilege, and eager to get started." He smiled back, trying to look relaxed. The smile was too quivery. He put it away.

Mens cleared his throat. "Now, of course, your actual experience with clones, other than those you've experimented with in the lab, has been limited to standard issue girlimals, virtually mindless, their bodies and what there is of their minds adapted to specialization in a single particular task -- physical labor, farm produce in the form of meat and milk, and of course, in the case of dollies, sexual gratification. Hypnos runs the operation that gives them those abilities."

Pietro nodded, glad to be able to give such a simple response to his new boss. He waited eagerly for Mens to start telling him things he didn't already know.

Mens continued, "But there is another type of clone, those into whom, for various purposes, we have uploaded the memories, the minds, of the original crew of Aurora. Oh, and of course, one new one. You've seen the new clones?"

Pietro nodded again. "Yes, Sir. It is really strange to see a brand new face on a girlimal."

Mens nodded in return. "Indeed. The face came from Major Megan Duchain, who arrived here about six years ago in search of her sister, Lieutenant Janica Duchain. Janica is that one with gold-colored hair."

Pietro blinked. He'd never heard names attached to the faces before.

Mens caught Pietro's surprise, and gave him a smile that was becoming more genuine from exercise. "You've reached a new level, Pietro. In the work you're going to be doing, you'll need to know the backgrounds of the crew, and of our more recent interloper. That will be a critical help to the work we do with them. Here." He picked up an infoslab from the pile, reached across and handed it to Pietro. "This contains the names of the Aurora crew, images so that you can match names with faces, and as much biographical information as we could glean from the ship's log and from hypnointerviews. You should take that with you and study it. You may open it now if you'd like."

"Yes, Sir." Pietro tapped the surface of the slab, bringing the first page to the screen, showing a list of the names, ranks, and shipboard duties of the crew members, plus basic info on Major Megan Duchain. "So Lieutenant Janica Duchain was the science officer."

Mens nodded. "Yes. Anyway, as you know, it takes five years for a clone to grow from birth to full physical maturity, after nine months in gestation, so it's only just now that clones of Megan Duchain are being released to the general public. We have, however, had units from the very first litter for a few months now, and have already conducted some experiments, making use of the downloads of Major Duchain's mind that we recorded immediately after her capture.

"For the most part, the ideas behind the experiments we do with the loaded clones come from Dionysus -- such an active imagination the man has! -- and the results have entertained the gods for years. It is, as you can guess, my office that makes them possible."

Pietro, finding the god far more affable than he would have imagined, was becoming more comfortable, enough to venture a question. "So the types of experiments, the sort of things I worked on in the lab -- they're not just for pure scientific research purposes? They've been put to a practical application?"

"Yes, some of both. Scientific research to be sure, but also, yes, practical uses. For example, you are familiar, of course, with the races. Specially trained girlimals, in dog form or horse form, race in front of an enthusiastic crowd, betting ensues, all that."

"Certainly, Sir. I've been to many races myself. Both the trained ones, as you said, and also the amateur races in which local farmers bring their own livestock to compete."

Mens nodded. "Just so. But you most likely did not know, because attendance is restricted to gods and demigods only, that we also race clones into whose brains we have uploaded the minds, the memories, of the Aurora crew. Each upload into the appropriate body, of course."

Pietro's eyes widened. "So... if I'm following you correctly... you race dogs who actually think they are Aurora crew members? A dog with the body of..." He glanced down at the screen of the infoslab, "...Polina Grishova really thinks it is Polina Grishova? It has all of Captain Grishova's memories?"

Mens smiled once more. "Precisely."

"Memories as of when, Sir?"

"Good question. We use the minds of the crew downloaded as of landfall. The memory of each crew member goes up to the moment of falling unconscious on Aurora, before our sleeping pods were disabled and we awakened."

Pietro shook his head in wonder. "So each recalls its entire life, and the mission of Aurora, and then after landing on Freeworld and feeling woozy on the deck, it suddenly wakes up and finds it is a dog forced to race naked on all fours before a crowd of male onlookers?"

Mens's smile broadened. He nodded.

"And... what do they make of it? I assume you monitor the discussions among them."

"We do monitor their activities, but there aren't any discussions. We've rendered them unable to communicate with each other."

"But what happens when one of them sees another clone with its own face? Surely that would be confusing to a nearly incapacitating degree."

"I'm sure it would be, but we avoid that. It would indeed spoil the illusion. We maintain a kennel of seven dogs, one of each crew member. And in a separate facility, seven horses. Each of those thinks it is one of the Aurora crew members. The horses don't know about the dogs. And none of these ever sees another clone of any kind."

Pietro shook his head slowly in admiration. "Amazing, Sir. I assume the purpose is total humiliation. From admired Space Force officer to mute performing animal. And sexual objects as well, of course, being forced to display their bodies naked before dozens of men."

Mens gave Pietro an irritated look. "I should think that goes without saying. These are the women who wanted to maroon us here. But for them, we would be on our way to controlling Earth right now, instead of settling this backwater world."

Pietro tensed, not having wanted to offend. The question of why Aurora crew members, or rather clones who believed they were crew members, were treated as they were should indeed have been so obvious as to go without saying. "I apologize for seeming dense, Sir. I really was just thinking aloud."

Mollified, Mens nodded. "I should allow for the fact you were born here. You've read the history, but that's not the same as having lived it."

"No excuse, Sir. Neither of us is on the planet we should be on." He breathed a sigh of relief when Mens smiled again. "Are there plans to return to Earth?"

"Tentative plans, yes. It would be foolish to do so with our current technology. There are dozens of us versus billions of well-armed women on Earth. We do have a project, through Ares' office, seeking to find a way to overcome our disadvantage in numbers, but any such breakthrough is probably centuries away."

"I hope it's in my lifetime, Sir." Pietro switched to the subject of a question that had occurred to him. "Are you able to measure the emotional reactions of the crew in either or both formats? The racing dogs and horses?"

"Yes, and we're very pleased with the results. Each has an EMI..." Pietro knew the acronym for Emotion Monitor Implant. "...in its brain, which can distinguish among a wide variety of positive and negative emotions, and the readings we receive can be expressed as a number on a scale from ten, a delirium of joy and happiness, down to minus ten, the depth of despair, emotional pain, and hopelessness. We're working to find way to push the readings ever lower. The racing dogs and horses are quite miserable, their EMI readings holding steady at an average of minus seven." He handed another infoslab across to Pietro. "In our experiments we have gone still lower in the EMI index, but due to the entertainment value, we plan to keep the dog and horse racing program running indefinitely."

"How long have the races been going on, sir?"

Mens paused for thought. "What is it... about twenty years, I believe." He smiled once more. "We'd keep it running in perpetuity, but given the longevity of the human body, two hundred fifty years is probably the limit. The clones were brand new at the start, far younger than the crew members inhabiting their brains thought they were, but there is still that limit."

Pietro blinked. "But still, long-term indeed. Don't they rebel? Go on strike, refuse to run?"

"No, for a number of reasons. That actually did happen in the first version of the experiment, so we terminated that and made some tweaks. Each clone now has electrical stimulation devices implanted in its rectum and vagina, to give painful shocks if the clone seems not to be giving its best effort. Even that proved insufficient in the second experiment, so we added some psychological conditioning by a technique similar to sleep-teaching. Hypnos handled the technical work on that, of course. If any clone refuses to run, or refuses to eat, in case you were going to ask about hunger strikes next, it feels an intense anxiety, which builds gradually with continued refusal, similar to that in an alcoholic denied the opportunity for a drink in a stressful situation. And when the clone finally gives in, the small sense of relief is submerged under a heavier sense of shame for having resisted. The combination of pain and unbearable emotion seems to work well. No clone has succeeded in prolonged resistance, nor attempted it more than twice."

"Oh! I just remembered about the new one! Megan Duchain. Since you now have an eighth model, are you planning to add her to the kennel of racing dogs? And the horses?"

Mens shook his head. "We're not going to fold her into that particular experiment, no. It's been stable for a long time, and a new clone, whose presence would be unexplainable to the current clones, most of whom don't know who it is and none of whom would have any idea how it got there, would almost certainly be disruptive. It's inevitable that, even without any of them being able to speak with the new clone, at least one of them, particularly Janica Duchain, might realize that a rescue had been attempted, and though it obviously had failed, a successful one could come later. It would give hope to any of the clones that reach that conclusion, and hope is exactly what we don't want." He paused. "Of course, we have other experiments in mind for Major Duchain. We've already completed one, and started on a couple of others. The goal in the first one was to determine whether we could imprint the Duchain sisters on each other. The standard sexual obsession."

Pietro's eyes widened. "Imprinting on a loaded clone? But that can't be possible! You can only establish an imprint in a blank mind, not in an already-existing personality. All our textslabs are clear on that." He stopped himself from pointing out that Mens himself had written the textslabs.

"Well, we find on occasion our theories can be wrong. Dionysus suggested the idea for the experiment with Major Duchain to begin with, and I admit I was skeptical. But I started turning some thoughts over in my head, and it occurred to me it might be possible, if the mental resistance to the imprinting could be reduced somewhat.

"You've read, in your texts, my theories on the immune system of the mind, similar to the immune system of the physical body. It acts to prevent the mind being controlled from outside without the mind's consent. In standard hypnosis, the hypnotist does appear to control the subject's mind, but in normal cases only because the subject has voluntarily permitted such control, and even then the permission is quickly revoked if the hypnotist tries to take his control too far. Such acts of hypnosis bypass the mind's immune system because the subject, in a sense, has turned the system off.

"But just as the body's immune system can be suppressed from outside, by various environmental factors or by specially designed pathogens, I came to believe that the mind's system could be suppressed as well. I spent six years developing a two-pronged approach: one part of the protocol consisted of a chemical intervention, a cocktail of drugs that turned out, indeed, to reduce the mind's protection from outside forces, and the second part consisted of a certain amount of psychological preparation to make the mind more suggestible.

"All of this was aimed at an initial experiment along the lines of the proposal by Dionysus, at the time Major Duchain was captured. The idea caught the attention of Zeus, who was eager to see Dionysus's plan put into action, and Zeus assigned to my office the task of making it work. So that is what I spent those six years on, with the work coming to fruition, fortunately, at just the time the first clones from Major Duchain became available.

"Dionysus's proposal was that we take clones of the Duchain sisters, upload the minds of the two sisters into their respective clones, and then imprint them on each other -- give them, in other words, an insatiable sexual need for each other, meanwhile also making them amenable to sexual use by the gods.

"Obviously their minds would be very resistant to such an imprint. But the rewards, in terms of emotional distress, would be great indeed. The Duchain sisters would react strongly to their helplessness at finding that a force from within their own minds was imposing an incestuous relationship on them that neither of them desired nor approved.

"I felt the drug cocktail alone should be sufficient, based on preliminary tests with loaded clones during that six year period as I developed the treatment, but I thought that the addition of the psychological preparation would make success a near-certainty.

"When clones of Major Duchain became available at last, I decided to include, in the setup of the experiment, the imprinting both with and without the psychological softening-up, to determine whether the latter was really a necessary part of the treatment. With the Megan Duchain clone, after uploading her mind into it, I used both the drug cocktail and the psychological intervention, while with the Janica Duchain clone, I used the drug cocktail alone..."

Pietro was feeling relaxed enough in Mens' presence that he did something he wouldn't have tried at the start of the session: he interrupted. "What does the 'psychological intervention' consist of?"

"Dionysus helped with that. In interviews with Major Duchain before the experiment began, he presented himself as being more helpful than she had expected, revealing a large amount of information and even carrying out, in good nature, one of Major Duchain's requests, having to do with the dolly in her possession when she was captured." Mens smiled. "That part took some doing. We went to the farm on which the dolly lived, and borrowed it from its owner... what was the name... Jason, and spent an hour or so reinforcing the dolly's memory of Major Duchain -- after all, the dolly hadn't seen the major in six years, and Major Duchain needed to see that memory in the dolly's eyes, since the major thought that at most a few days had gone by since her capture."

Puzzled, Pietro almost interrupted again, but decided he could probably read about the circumstances of Major Duchain's capture in the infoslab.

Mens issued a raspy chuckle, surprising Pietro again. "Dion took some pride in his ability to encourage Major Duchain to form desired conclusions in her mind without actually telling her any lies. It was something of a game to him. Most usefully, he persuaded her that her sister was dead, and then managed to make her grateful for that." Mens rolled his eyes and grinned. "Be careful around Dion, Pietro. He'll convince you your left foot is missing. In any case, with Major Duchain, his efforts did help dial down the emotional temperature a few degrees. The goal was that Major Duchain, while not in any way trusting us, was led to relax her vigilance, and in consequence her resistance to hypnotic suggestion was relaxed as well. The drugs did the rest.

"As I said, we didn't make use of any of that prior preparation in the case of Lieutenant Duchain -- Janica. We simply used the drugs, followed by the standard imprinting procedure. It was my belief that the protocol used on Megan Duchain would be successful, but that the less complete one, with drugs alone, used on Janica Duchain might go either way. But in either case, the results would be of interest. If imprinting succeeded on Janica Duchain, as it turned out it did, then each sister would be sexually obsessed with the other. If the imprint failed, Megan Duchain would experience uncontrollable sexual need for her sister that was not reciprocated.

"There were some additional preparations we made, including various related brain implants and drug-aided hypnotic suggestions, but you can read about the details in your slab." He gestured at the more recent one he'd handed Pietro. "Let me show you the initial results."

He touched a panel on his desk, and after several selections an image appeared in a large cube at the side of the room. A clone of Janica Duchain, about half life-size, appeared, sitting on a bed, as another clone entered the room: Megan Duchain. The two stared at each other briefly, each looking stunned, and then the Janica-clone made a hand gesture towards the Megan-clone. The two then rushed to each other, embraced, and then initiated sexual activity that grew steadily more intense. Mens touched the panel again, and the image faded.

"Remarkable," said Pietro, who seemed to find it difficult getting comfortable in his chair for a moment. "Did they have any sort of sexual relationship beforehand?"

Mens shook his head. "It was very important to establish the absence of any such relationship, of course. We questioned both clones thoroughly in a hypnotically absent state, so they, of course, couldn't recall the questioning afterward. And no, neither had ever for a moment felt any sexual attraction nor considered any such intimacy with her sister."

"What was that gesture?"

Mens smiled. "Dieter's idea, and a very good one. Dieter is on my staff, and will be one of your coworkers. He thought that, in the absence of any ability to communicate, Megan Duchain, who knew about the existence of clones, including in dolly form, would think she was simply meeting one of them, rather than her actual sister. So we implanted a false memory in each of them of a hand gesture they could use that would convince Megan Duchain she was really seeing Janica."

Pietro shook his head in wonder. "Ingenious. I'm eager to meet Dieter. You said the experiment was terminated?"

"Yes. It turned out a little disappointing in the long run. Reading of their emotional reactions from the EMI were acceptably low at first, between minus eight and minus nine, but gradually rose to average around minus four. The two subjects seemed, especially in certain circumstances, to take comfort from each other, including in a sexual context. In the end, we decided to end it, but to try to gather just a little more information before the clones were terminated. We managed to cancel most of the imprinting -- not all of it, as I wanted to leave a small residual trace -- and turned the two clones loose in a hunt. I asked the hunters to hold off on the kill for a day, because I wanted to see what happened under that sort of stress. The result bore out our earlier observations: Their sexual relationship had become not only mutually agreeable, but an actual source of happiness, with the EMI reading reaching positive figures. Certainly not what we wanted."

Pietro frowned. "So you're not going to try that again?"

"Oh, quite the contrary. When any experiment doesn't work out, you simply adjust the initial conditions and try again. Always remember that, Pietro."

Pietro felt his face flush. He should, he realized, have known that. "So the new experiments you spoke of are revised versions of the original?"

Mens nodded, then looked at his timer. "Why don't you come back, after you've finished studying those slabs? We can pick up from there next time."

Pietro stood, just before Mens himself did. They shook hands. A lot to think about, Pietro told himself.