“Hi,” I said to her, smiling broadly. I was finding it hard to believe that my captors were allowing me to have company.

“Hi yourself,” she said playfully.

“What are you in for?” I asked.

“What do you mean?” she said. I noticed that her smile was beginning to fade.

I was at a loss for words for a few seconds. Her change of expression almost derailed my train of thought. I finally found my words. “Well, I have no idea what I’m here for, but I thought maybe if I knew what they got you for, I’d have some idea what was going on.”

“Hmm…” she started. “They didn’t tell you why you’re here? Well, how are they treating you?”

“Well, before I answer that, can you tell me just what or who they are? It’s kind of creepy being bossed around by gloves and driven around in a car with no driver, and I have no idea why I’m here.” She chuckled at my question. I felt greatly relieved; I was beginning to think that she was involved in all that was going on.

“Sounds to me like they got something on you,” she said.

“What do you mean?” I asked. I had figured out on my own that they were somehow using ideas from my stories to taunt me, but I still had no idea just who they were or what they wanted with me.

“Well, are you into fembots and mannequins and stuff?”

“Yeah, kind of. That and invisible women. They went through my briefcase and I guess they picked up what I like from my stories and pictures.”

“Well, they must have seen you doing something they didn’t like to have brought you here,” she replied.

I was kind of bewildered by that response. I didn’t know what I could have done to piss these… these “people” off, and I said so. “I don’t know what they wouldn’t like because I don’t even know who they are or what they have to do with me. One minute I was in a store, trying to figure out this funky mannequin, and the next–”

She cut me off. “You were what?”

“In a clothing store,” I started, “there was this mannequin I bumped into that seemed to have real skin. I knew it was just a mannequin because it had no head, yet its covering felt just like skin, and when I bumped into it, well, its breasts felt just like real ones.”

The woman’s eyes flashed briefly in response to “just a mannequin,” but she just nodded quietly at first, without saying anything. After a couple of moments, she said, in a voice betraying no emotion, “So they saw you poking their mannequin, and–”

This time I cut her off. “Their mannequin? You mean, these people are connected to the store?”

“No, not to the store,” she replied. “I mean, they don’t own it or anything, but they -- they make the mannequins, and they’re very protective of them.”

Up until this point, we were standing right where we were when we first saw one another. As she talked, she started walking away from the front door toward a pair of frosted-glass doors at the end of the corridor. I followed, surprised that my captors seemed to be leaving us alone.

“So *that’s* my transgression? Poking at an inanimate object? Couldn’t they have just scolded me or something?”

Her eyes flashed angrily at me again, and this time she did nothing to hide it. She didn’t say anything, though. She didn’t need to. I was already sure that she was somehow on their side, though I did what I could to try not to show it in my speech or actions.

When she next spoke, it was in carefully measured tones, like she was trying hard to keep herself under control. “So,” she said, “I suppose they poked at you and taunted you all the way here?”

“Well, no, they didn’t,” I replied. Then, almost as an afterthought, I added, “Maybe they were waiting until we got here.”

“Maybe indeed,” she agreed, somewhat wistfully. She stopped next to a portal in the wall next to her. It looked kind of like a sideways garbage disposal. “So, you like invisible girls, huh?”

Uh oh, I thought. “Um, yeah, I do. Why? What are you about to do? I don’t want–”

“What you want,” she replied sharply, reaching into the portal, “really doesn’t matter at this point, fella. You’re just like all the others. You think because you see things a certain way, that’s the way it has to be and everybody has to see them that way. You thought you were poking at just a mannequin. Well, it was a mannequin, all right, but a special kind of mannequin.”

She pulled her hand out of the portal, holding onto an ordinary-looking bath towel. “That mannequin is the product of much research and a whole lot of money. Do you know why it cost a whole lot of money? Of course you don’t, and if you weren’t here you probably wouldn’t care because it’s only a mannequin, ‘an inanimate object’ as you put it. Well, that’s where you’re wrong. It’s actually as sentient as you are, thanks to technology you probably wouldn’t appreciate unless it was used on you.”

She fixed me with a cold stare as she continued. “You’re probably wondering what I’m going to do with this towel. Well, I’m going to use it to see just how much you really like invisible girls,” she said. She wrapped the towel around her head and neck, then just as quickly unwrapped it, and her head and neck were GONE!