The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

Nathan Bowers had just turned twenty-one, and, as he had learned to do most things, he was doing his “celebration” alone. Technically, he wasn’t alone, since he was in a fairly crowded bar with a lot of loud music, not too far from the University, on a Friday night. He just didn’t know any of the other people, and they didn’t know him.—So, technically, he wasn’t celebrating.

“So I’m drinking instead,” he said out loud.

“So am I,” said a voice to his left. A female voice. Young female voice.

He turned in her direction and saw a young woman, probably older than he was, but it seemed as if everybody at the University was older than he was. She wasn’t a lot older. She smiled at him, so she was probably a professional. Women as pretty as she was did not walk up to guys like him and do . . . whatever she was doing—he didn’t even really know what that was. However, the data observed did not fit the hypothesis. First, she wore her hair pinned up in a bun, even though it was clearly long and promised a glossy fall a little on the dark side of auburn. Pinning it up exposed a long and shapely neck—much admired on women in the nineteenth century, he remembered, but not much remarked in the twenty-first. And for a Victorian beauty, he now observed, she had a little too much trapezeus muscle running from neck to shoulders. Her clothes, makeup, shoes, bore none of the trite features of the “sexy babe” uniform. Not a lot of eyeshadow, the eyelashes either natural or applied with some restraint and skill. Instead of fuck-me heels, flats. Instead of a clingy dress with a high hemline, a pair of shorts—not even all that short. She wore them with a blue-green blouse close to the color of her eyes, and the blouse, while it didn’t disguise the fact that she had pretty nice breasts—”

“—In case you missed it,” she was saying, smiling a little ruefully, “I just handed you an opening to start talking.”

“What? Oh. No, I . . . guess I did miss it; I was . . . thinking,” he said, with a confessional smile allowing for the possibility that thinking might be considered one of his bad habits.

“You do a lot of that?”

Now his antennae were up, feeling for any slight vibration of mockery. Women who would set up guys like him just for amusement were fairly rare, but they weren’t nonexistent, and every encounter with one of them left him a little less confident, a little closer to chronic self-contempt.

“I like thinkers,” she said.

(What?!!)

“I’ve been known to think myself, now and then,” she added, with a wry but not unkindly closed-lipped smile. Nathan calculated furiously, analyzing her body language (open but not deliberately seductive and therefore more likely to be real) and the inflections of her voice. The peculiar rounding of her long ‘o’ sounds suggested an upper-middle-class Washington suburb, maybe Bethesda. He tried to allow both for the hypervigilance he had learned to maintain around pretty women and for his yearning that she might—only some merciful god knew why—be into him. Finally he decided, Fuck it; if she’s playing me I’ll find out soon enough and won’t be much worse off than I am now, as long as I don’t expect anything. Just let it play out. He smiled hesitantly back at her.

“What do you like to think about?” he asked.

“Lots of things,” she said. “Professionally, critters in the sea. I double-majored in marine biology and psychology. Did my graduate work on the biological side. What about you?”

“Zoology and linguistics,” he said. “I’m still in graduate school, almost done, I hope—if they don’t trash my dissertation when I defend it next month.”

“What’s it on?” she asked. He scanned her face again. She didn’t over-project interest; it just seemed a friendly, casual question. Maybe she thought that they might have some professional overlap.

“I’m examining animal communications,” he said. “I’ve written a program that decodes animal sounds, taking into account pitch variations to a much greater degree than earlier researchers have applied to most animals. My findings indicate that many animals communicate at a much more sophisticated level than we have believed.”

“You didn’t mention computer science among your majors,” she said, eyebrows rising a little, as if this might be a joke on her.

“I did an online tutorial on C++. Then I invested a summer in messing around with it.”

Much to his surprise, she raised a hand as if offering a high five; after a brief hesitation, he met it with his own hand. “That is some hard-core geekin’,” she said, and interfolded her five fingers with his, held them there, then withdrew them slowly, her forefinger brushing lightly over the back of his. She went on. “Listen, how would you feel about deserting this place for one where we can actually hear ourselves think? I’d like to talk some more.”

“Ah, um, yeah, I guess. Where do you propose we go?” he said. Is this really happening?

“Well, on the basis of that slightly-less-than-lukewarm response,” she said, raising an eyebrow, “I’m guessing I should not propose my place.”

Idiot! He screamed silently at himself. Are you really going to fuck this up?

“No, yes, absolutely, I mean your place would be great,” he babbled. “Where do you live?”

“Over in Somerville,” she said. “I have a car; it’ll take about ten minutes. Maybe now it’s time for us to communicate a little more, like telling each other our names?” She had a chuckle, low, relaxed, and musical. “I’m Laura.”

“Nathan,” he answered. “Very glad to meet you, Laura. Maybe beyond very glad.”

Wow. Had he really said that? Was that smooth, or pathetic?

“Right there with you,” she smiled. “Let’s see how the evening progresses.” She put two twenties on the bar. “Please don’t ruin things by going all Twentieth Century on me. I have a job, and you don’t, yet. Let me get this.”

“I’m a teaching assistant knocking down fabulous bucks, but okay. Thank you.”

She smiled approvingly at him. It was a smile he wanted to see a lot more of.

The moment he recognized that desire, he began to construct a scenario in which this was some nasty, hyper-elaborate prank. Then he considered the fact that no one around here knew him well enough to invest all this time and trouble in pranking him without worrying about his pressing charges for criminal abduction.

She drove an anonymously “sensible” silver-toned Subaru Forester. As he climbed in on the front passenger seat, she walked around the rear of the car, behind him, to reach the driver’s seat.

“Don’t forget to buckle up,” she said as she slid in and slipped the key into the ignition. “I’m kind of a stickler for that.”

Nathan grabbed the tongue and socket of the buckle but found that he couldn’t make them fit.

“Something seems to be—” he began, and then yelped in surprise and pain as lightning struck him in the side of his neck and shook his body in one great paralyzing spasm. . His heart kicked at the shock and then began to race as the implications of what had just happened appeared in front of him. From the corner of his eye he could see Laura preparing a syringe. Her facial expression was watchful, intent, neutral toward him at first, then, confirming his helplessness, almost kindly.

“I wish we didn’t have to do it that way, Nathan,” she said, “but I have to keep you still. An intravenous injection is too difficult if the subject is moving at all, let alone resisting. Don’t be scared; this is just a sedative. It will actually bring you some relief from the effects of the taser, but I need to adjust the dosage for how much you’ve had to drink. I don’t mean you any harm.”

His arms were numb in places, but he could feel a band around his arm just above the elbow, a cold, wet wipe, and the piercing sting of the needle. Warmth seemed to move up the veins in his arm; then a wave of dizziness came over him, soon followed by an eerily inappropriate calm.

“I haven’t really hurt you, Nathan, except maybe your feelings,” she said softly, “and I’m sorry about that, too. Really, I am, but your country needs you, and we also need to keep this secret. It will be okay. Just go to sleep for now.”

As he heard the engine start, his eyes darkened.

He woke up on his back, looking up into one of those wide-lens lamps that dentist’s use. After a moment’s confused, dizzy paralysis, he remembered, and sat up, or tried to. He bounced back against the strap across his chest, reached to pull it off him and found both hands cuffed to the arms of the chair, which now began to feel more ominous than dental.

“Don’t worry; the straps are for your protection.” That was Laura’s voice, coming from behind him, out of sight. Laura, right, like that’s her real name. His mouth was dry and had an unpleasant bitter taste. He wondered hopefully, briefly, if this could be some kind of incredibly elaborate abduction for ransom.—Not with all this equipment; so much for that theory. The alternatives were still less appealing.

“Could I have some water, please?”

“Sure,” she said. “You were sleeping with your mouth open; that’s all.” She came into his field of vision from the right, handing him one of those metal thermos bottles with a spout that you have to bite in order to suck out the drink. He did, greedily, pausing only to lick his lips once his tongue was wet enough to do it. He noticed that she was now wearing a white lab coat.

“Listen,” he said. “I’m afraid you’ve made some kind of identity mistake. I really am just a graduate student, not some secret agent or—”

“No, Nathan,” she said. “You’re not just a graduate student; you’re a brilliant one. You shouldn’t even be in graduate school yet. You graduated from Stanford at eighteen, and now you’re a month away from a publishable dissertation, at twenty-one. And your country needs both your linguistic expertise and your knowledge of biology.”

“If that were true, why would you need to kidnap me? Why the whole, nasty ‘Hot-chick-is-into-you’—wait-just-kid—napping?”

She sighed, as if his bitterness were a back pain she woke up with every day. “Okay, Nathan. I’m going to talk about this just once more, and then I’m through apologizing because we don’t have the time. We have a situation which threatens our national security seriously. Very seriously. In fact, it threatens world security, if you’re a one-worlder. I’m not exaggerating at all when I say that innocent lives will be lost at least by the hundreds if this thing goes sideways. We think you’re the person most likely to be both available and able to help us. So. Yes, Nathan, I exploited your loneliness and your sexual desp—, uh, hunger. Was that mean? Yeah. Sorry. I’ve done many things much, much worse to people. I hope I’ll never have to do any of those things to you. Now it’s time to go to work.”

A threat wrapped in an apology, the analytical part of his brain still observed. She’s good at this.

“Work? What am I supposed to do strapped in this chair?” He looked at her expectantly, as if he were indignant rather than terrified.

“For now, just one thing,” she said. Then she put a set of thick-padded earphones on his head and pushed a button. First, he heard a soprano voice, as if from far away, moving slowly toward him, it reminded him of things he’d read about, swift-footed Achilles riding in his rage, powerful arms dyed with blood, hefting his great roofbeam of a spear ready to plunge it into some Trojan’s guts, into Hector’s guts, but first he would have to kill his way through many Trojans, who had killed Patroculus, best of men, and would receive no mercy now. ATTACK! But he couldn’t move forward. He was bound; Hector might escape him; he had to GET LOOSE AND ATTACK!

Laura watched Nathan heaving desperately to get free; his wiry but thin arms strained at the straps until every fiber of every muscle stood out. He roared and gritted his teeth with the effort, and the strap on his right arm snapped! With the freed hand he began tearing at his other strap, like an animal willing to bite off his own limb to get out of a trap, he screamed in rage and bloodlust, until Laura stepped carefully behind him and injected him again. He roared in despair and fury and then gasped, subsided, relaxed . . . He was asleep.

“Mother fuck!” she whispered, almost reverently. She quickly began to speak in his ear, first calming reassurances, then a focus on her, on trusting her and relying on her guidance, then remembering every detail of what he heard and thought when he was hearing the voice.

Nathan woke up again, this time with both his arms aching, as if he had spent the last hour chopping down a redwood with a dull axe. He looked at his right arm and saw that a second line of canvas strapping now lashed it to the arm of the dental chair. A flair of pain in the arm brought back a disjointed memory; he was Achilles, the manslayer, son of the sea nymph Thetis, descended from the line of Zeus. His fate was to die young, but crooked-minded Zeus owed him some honor first, honor to be won by killing thousands of . . .

“Nathan!”

He came abruptly back to reality. Laura was standing in front of him, showing no intention of freeing him from the chair any time soon.

“Just relax,” she said in a soothing voice. “Nice and calm: just tell me what you heard through the headphones, and what you thought. First, were those words she was singing, or just random noises?”

He made a wry mouth. She couldn’t tell a human language, one within historical time, from random sound? No wonder research into animal communication was so backward.

“Of course it was a language,” he said. Probably some form of proto-Greek. But not one I recognized, and we can only guess what that language sounded like, so I only caught about half of it, by applying the sound-change laws, which aren’t really laws, more—”

“What was she singing about?”

“It was about things in Homer’s Iliad, but the Iliad is written in ninth-century Ionian Greek; this was much older. It was about Achilles’ mania for revenge after the death of Patroculos.”

“Do you remember your . . . feelings while you were listening?”

“Kind of,” he said. She waited for about ten seconds, then rolled her eyes skyward.

“I told you, Nathan, we don’t have time to screw around. “HOW DID YOU FEEL?”

“I wanted to kill anyone who stood in front of me!” he shouted. “I wanted to choke a river with dead bodies! All right?”

“If you hadn’t been in the chair, could you have controlled the impulse?” There was a slightly shorter silence, and then Nathan the scientist, to whom demonstrable fact was sacred, said,

“I’m not sure. I think . . . no.”

She took a deep breath and sighed it out.

“Okay,” she said, shaking her head, talking to the air, or maybe the surveillance cameras. “I was right. They told me she was an animal, no more human than the first upright hominids were human. Idiots. An animal that recites Homer?”

She turned back to him. “Okay, Nathan, this is why you’re here. In a few minutes, you’re going to meet your first mermaid, or maybe we should call her a siren.”

He stared blankly at her for a moment, then shook his head. “Please, I don’t know what kind of psych experiment you’re running on me, but just let me go home. I won’t even press charges, if you—

She stood up, walked to a panel next to the door of the room, and pressed a button. A theatrical curtain at the far end slid open to reveal a large glass window, like the ones on the shark tanks in the fanciest aquaria. The large window allowed viewing both over and under the water. Sitting on a flat slab of smooth rock, just above the water line, was a beautiful woman, naked, long, dark hair running over jutting breasts. Above the knees, her thighs were not only human but very shapely. Just below her hips, in the water, her legs fused into the bifurcated, iridescent green tail of a very large fish.

At first he was absolutely silent, his mouth twisting at the corners as if to comment on the hoax, but he had seen the “live mermaids” at that place in Florida as a boy, and he remembered exactly how their human legs inside their plastic “fishtail” sheath had looked. There was no human bone or muscle showing underneath this fish tail; this was a fish tail.

“Good God,” he whispered. “What. . .?”

“I told you,” said Laura. “A mermaid. Or a siren, except she doesn’t have any bird-like features—no wings, no talons.”

“Mermaid . . . “ he muttered. By his facial expression, she seemed able to see him accessing his huge wetware database, sorting through relevant keywords. “Western myth is ambivalent toward them, or, rather, the separate mythoi are based on conflicting conceptions. Sirens—not much conflict there. Everyone saw them as monsters—with their song seducing sailors onto their islands, then devouring them.” Odysseus—”

“Yes, I know that one,” she said. “But either Homer got it wrong or the man-eating sirens have died off since his time. We haven’t been able to find any evidence of humanoid teeth on the bones—except the teeth marks we matched to one of the human skulls.”

His eyes went wide. She rather enjoyed serving him up some facts he didn’t know.

“What bones?”

“Five years ago, two sets of human remains were found on an island in the Indonesian archipelago. You may know how enormous the number of small islands in that group is. They’re not even all named.”

“Yes yes,” he said, his curiosity hungry enough to overcome his fear, for now. “How old were the remains?” If the bones could be carbon-dated against paleo-Polynesian myths of—

“Eight months,” she said.

He couldn’t say anything, then, and part of her enjoyed that, too. He just sat, pale and staring at her.

“They were identified as the bodies of Henry Rossingham and two crew members from his yacht. Rossingham was—”

“—A coastal real estate mogul,” he said. “Disappeared last year. Inherited hundreds of millions, turned them into a couple billion. Specialized in taking his family’s Rape the Coastline campaign worldwide. Made friends with a lot of corrupt foreign autocrats—or bought them. Fucking idiot. ”

“Idiot?” she said. “So you think you could make two billion dollars?”

“Starting with a hundred million, and no scruples?” he laughed. “Sure. So could you. So could the supervising custodian in my apartment complex. So could some of the guys he supervises. Anyway, have you found out what killed them?

“Starvation,” she said. “—And exhaustion. The birds didn’t get at all the soft tissue on the undersides of the corpses. It dried out. Our forensics people found that the fat content in that preserved flesh was next to nothing. The body had begun digesting muscle tissue for energy.”

“Wait. You said he disappeared with his yacht. Was it wrecked? Why didn’t they call for help?”

“We found the yacht wrecked, but not on that island. It had drifted away, unmanned, until it foundered on the rocks of another island. There were no bodies on the yacht, or the island.”

“This doesn’t make any sense,” Nathan said. “They anchored on this island, where somebody marooned them and sailed away in their yacht, then abandoned it and disappeared . . . what?”

“No,” said Laura. “We believe that the men jumped overboard, without anchoring, and swam to the island. Since then, there have been six wrecks with no clear cause, in clear weather, with no bodies found on board.”

“The crew jumped off? What for?”

“We have theories, not explanations. Right now, thanks to your experience in the chair, my theory is leading the pack.”

“So what is it?”

“Some form of mind control,” she said. “It involves the use of the siren’s voice. Very much like the Odyssey, isn’t it? Remember Odysseus having himself—”

“—Lashed to the mast. Everybody knows that. He wanted to hear the song without losing his ship and his life. He put beeswax into all his men’s ears, so they couldn’t hear the song. Once the song had cast its spell on him, he begged them in tears to let him go to the sirens, but his men just kept rowing. Eventually, he got his right mind back. Homer says something about the island being strewn with the bones of men the sirens had devoured.”

“That’s where I think Homer got it wrong, or things have changed since his time,” said Laura. “I don’t think these men were cannibalized. I think they were fucked to death.”

Nathan looked at her, silent, thoughtful. He nodded his head slightly, a few times, took a deep breath.

Then he screamed, “GET ME OUT OF HERE! PLEASE! I’M NATHAN BOWERS! I’M BEING HELD AGAINST MY WILL! CALL THE FBI! CALL THE—”

Laura jammed a hunk of surgical gauze into his mouth, leaning over him.

“Nathan . . . Nathan stop . . . Nathan WILL YOU STOP? I don’t want to inject you again; that sleepy stuff is an opioid; it’s habit-forming. But I need you to calm down for me. What is so much harder to believe in this story than what you’ve already experienced? Think, okay? If I take the gauze out, you’ll behave?”

He groaned, then nodded. She pulled out the gauze and silently passed him the water bottle. He washed it around his mouth and swallowed.

“What do you want from me?” he asked, hoping his tone wasn’t too close to a whimper.

“For now, we just want you to observe her, from the chair, for a couple of hours. We’ll route the mike out there to the speakers here, and we’ll have video recordings of both of you.”

“To find out what?” he asked.

“What she’s communicating, and how,” she answered. “Finally, what she wants. None of us has been able to get through to her; that’s one reason why we need to know how she’s communicating.”

“Why just me?”

“We’ve observed . . . that she vocalizes more often when viewed by a man. A man alone. Also . . . If she induces that murderous mood you were in just before I injected you, we don’t want anyone around for you to hurt.”

“How many incidences of this behavior have you—”

“Nathan, we can talk about the background later. Right now, I don’t want to pollute your observations with someone else’s. We’re going to leave you with her for a couple of hours.”

“Shouldn’t I take notes?” he said.

“Take them out loud,” she answered. “We’re recording every sound, both from you and from her. See you in two hours.”

“Wait—” She punched a number pad on the steel door (six times, he noticed,) and left the room.

A few minutes later, he heard her voice over the loudspeakers in the room.

“We’re ready to go, Nathan. Just stay calm. I’m going to draw the curtain and turn off the one-way field on the glass. You and the subject will be able to see each other. I’m going dark now; we don’t want anyone else hearing her until we can analyze the signal and scrub it.”

“Scrub it? What do you think it’s going to do . . .” To me, he thought.

“We’re going to find out, and we’re going to keep it under control. Don’t worry. We have no reason to believe that she’ll try to hurt you.”

Yeah, what’s to worry about?

Then the drapery across the huge viewing window drew aside.

She was in the water, floating underneath the surface. She must have seen the movement as the one-way-glass effect disappeared, because she turned and looked straight at him with those blue-green eyes. They held eye contact for a moment, and then he looked away, instinctively. He heard the splash of her fluked tail and saw that she was swimming on her back, the overhead sunlight flashing green off the scales. She swam to the end of the pool, dove, somersaulted under water, and rose to the surface going the other way. She continued like this without making a sound, for several minutes. He would be bored, if this combination of fear and arousal left any room for boredom. He said aloud,

“Subject uses the caudal fin like a cetacean, not a fish, but for now she is swimming on her back, allowing her to remain well aware of my presence; she keeps turning her head to maintain eye contact as she goes toward the end of the pool. No attempt at communication that I can detect.”

One minute after that, she opened her mouth and he heard a shimmering pure soprano that carried a slow melody, meandering up and down in a minor key, a melody that rose and fell like the waves of the sea, almost as if he were in a boat, floating on that sea, a very comfortable boat that he didn’t have to row, or even steer, where he could just lie back, rocking, rocking, back and forth, back and forth, his eyes held by the sparkling of her tail, yet tired, longing to close, and now he heard a voice in his head, but it was his own, and the words seem plucked from deep memory,

O let me then by some sweet dreaming flee

To her entrancements. Hither, sleep, awhile!

Hither most gentle sleep! And soothing foil

For some few hours the coming solitude.

“She’s . . . he heard his own voice murmuring, his consonants sluggish, slurred, “She’s singing, but no words. It is beautiful, certainly, but I don’t feel . . . I am tired, though . . . there are words in my head but they’re mine . . .no, not mine but not . . . ”

Then he heard the words in a woman’s voice, a low, velvety voice. Hers? It must be, but was he hearing them or just feeling them inside his head? He thought of asking Laura what they were hearing, but then he couldn’t remember why he wanted to know, and he was too tired, “Too tired,” the woman’s voice said from inside his head, and although he vaguely thought it said other things, too, he couldn’t remember them. He went to sleep.

He woke up to a pungent, burning ammonia scent, gasped, and coughed, hearing someone say, “Come on, Nathan, wake up!” He turned his head aside irritably; the smell decreased, he took a deep breath, and he was awake.

“What happened?” he asked, and started to cough.

“Nothing,” Laura said morosely.

“What do you mean ‘nothing’?

“You watched her for a while; she was singing, but it was just a chant, nothing like the first transmission you heard. Then you fell asleep.”

“That’s bullshit! I took notes—those oral notes you wanted! I told you . . . cetacean tail propulsion, um . . . she was watching me and then . . . no attempt at communication . . . I . . . Well it’s all on the recording; analyze it!”

Without replying, she put headphones on his head, connected to a small, highly sensitive audio unit, and played back . . . nothing but the siren chanting. He listened to it, important to listen . . .

Laura shook him and slapped his cheek—not hard, well, not too hard.

“Wake up!” she shouted. “That’s all that’s on the recorder, just her wailing away, and you making a few self-evident observations, and then nothing. You just sat there, dead still for ten minutes, eyes open, I don’t even think you blinked.”

“What happened after ten minutes?”

“It was really exciting,” she said sourly. “You closed your eyes and went to sleep, or actually, the sensors recorded you in theta brainwave activity. So you weren’t exactly asleep, but close enough. I think we know how the sirens draw victims to them. It’s a kind of hypnosis. Did you hear her say anything? Maybe not out loud. Did you hear her . . . in your mind?”

“No. I don’t remember anything like that. Can I get out of here now? It’s not very comfortable being bound to this—Hey! Where are you going?”

“I need to confide with the team.”

“So I’m not on the team now?”

“The management team,” she said.

“What about—”

“We’ll bring you some dinner,” she said. “If you’re still sleepy after that, I can adjust the chair to make you more comfortable.”

She had turned her back on him and was walking toward the door. She ignored him, but he kept calling after her until she reached the door. Then he was silent, concentrating on her fingers on the panel. He saw her fingers hit ‘D’, then ‘3’, ‘0’, ‘5’, ‘2’, and ‘Q’.

The meal they brought was takeout from some Northern Chinese restaurant, with a plastic mug of some lager beer, maybe Tsing Tao, not richly flavored, but refreshing. Half an hour after the meal, he had to urinate. He called out, and Laura came back in.

“Would you like a shower, too?” she asked kindly. “We have to do a lot of things for security reasons, Nathan, but we’re not monsters. We want you to be as comfortable as the mission parameters allow.”

He giggled slightly. Did people really say “mission parameters” outside of cheesy spy movies? He felt her eyes on him, vigilant but also . . . sad? She wasn’t such a bad one, he thought.

“A shower would be good,” he said, and yawned.

“Okay, listen,” she said. “We gave you a little something to help you be more comfortable tonight, but you might be a little dizzy when you stand up. I’m going to walk you to the shower. It has a seat and a detachable spray nozzle, so you can shower safely, sitting down.”

“Some privacy, finally?” he asked. She smiled indulgently, as if he were a child.

“Well, not exactly. But you won’t mind.” She was already unbuckling the arm and leg straps.

“How do you know?” He was just curious, not mad.

“You find that you don’t mind, do you?” she said softly.

“Um . . . no,” he said, and laughed at the joke on him.

“I know, Nathan,” she said affectionately. Was she into him after all? That would be cool. “You’re a good sport, Nathan. Up we go now.”

She hooked one of his arms around her neck and passed her inside arm around his upper back, helping him rise from the chair. She was right about his being dizzy. His legs felt a little spongy, too, and she had to help him off with his clothes. The shower was blissful, and she even let him shave with one of those disposable razors, which she collected immediately after he was done.

Then he lost track of things for a while, and found himself back in the chair without remembering how he got there. Laura was buckling the fourth strap, the one on his left ankle.

“Now we just have one more thing to do, Nathan,” she said. “You may find this a little strange, but it won’t hurt . . . in fact our male test subjects have said it feels very good. Just relax and go with it now. . .”

She bent over him and pulled his zipper down.

“Wait, what?” he said, muzzily.

She stepped off to his side, just out of his field of vision, and brought over a device about as big as a shoe box, much of whose volume appeared to be taken up by a coiled, transparent plastic hose that she removed from a compartment in the top and plugged into a bushing on one end of the box. He noticed that a power cord ran from the other end; she plugged it in somewhere below his line of sight. She laid the plastic hose on the dental instrument tray off to his left side.

Then she stood in front of him and pulled off her medical gown. Her breasts were well rounded, firm, and bare. She ran her hands softly up and around each of them.

“Two nights ago, you probably hoped we would do something that would involve this, she said softly. “It couldn’t happen, Nathan, but I’ll tell you something unprofessional: I wish the recruiting protocol for your case had allowed it. You’re . . . an appealing young man.”

She brought the fingertips of her right and then her left hand up to her mouth and licked them. She used this lubrication to slicken her nipples as she rubbed them in little circles, slowly. He watched them rise under her ministrations, and he began to rise as well.

“Yes quite appealing,” she said. “If we both get out of this we probably will never meet again, but don’t sell yourself short. Not all women are fools or have . . . the restrictions that I have.”

She reached into a lower shelf on the instrument table and picked up a tube of some ointment, which she smeared on one hand.

“Unfortunately, this is as close as I can come to demonstrating my opinion,” she said, and he felt the thrill, the fluttering, surprising touch of a woman’s soft hand on him. He moaned. Then she picked up the plastic hose, and he saw that it had a fixture at the end. His erection, which had swelled under her fingers and palm, held its ground, although he was puzzled and obscurely disturbed.

“Easy, baby,” she crooned. “Nathan, I swear to you, I’m doing this for your own benefit. I can’t swear you’ll thank me when . . . everything is over, but I do believe you’ll be glad about this part.”

She slipped the strange nozzle over his erect member; now he saw that she had lubricated him only to make it easier to slip the device on him. His penis began to deflate, until she pressed a button, and he was doubly assaulted by a maddeningly exciting vibration and a rhythmic suction.

“Just go with it, Nathan,” she murmured, working her right breast with her left hand, while her right hand caressed—or appeared to caress—her mons. “Just enjoy it. Feel the pulsing pleasure, the suction, the suction coaxing your seed out of your balls, up into your shaft, making you want to come . . . come . . . come.”

He groaned, arched his back involuntarily, and squirted into the device; from the corner of his eye, he saw his own semen sliding down through the plastic tube. When he had stopped spasming, she left the machine on a few more seconds to vacuum up the last drops. Then she flicked the switch, and vibration and the suction both ceased.

“How do you feel?” she asked, with the not-unkind but rather clinical interest of a medical professional.

“Like a cow,” he said.

She laughed, as if this were a joke at nobody’s expense. She finished cleaning him up with a damp disposable wipe, tucked his penis back into his pants, zipped him up and gave him a friendly pat.

“There,” she said. “You just relax, get a good night’s sleep, and we’ll continue with the research tomorrow.”

“More testing the jerk-o-matic?” he asked, in an ironic tone of boyish enthusiasm.

“No,” she said, sounding surprisingly serious and surprisingly embarrassed. “But believe me, Nathan: that was for you.”

He wondered dimly just how much better an automated orgasm was supposed to make him feel. Then he sighed and closed his eyes.

“Sweet dreams,” said Laura, and he heard her footfalls moving toward the door. Something about the door? He couldn’t remember. Better to get some . . .

He woke up with her voice in his mind: smooth, velvety, and this time, inviting.

Come to me, beautiful man. I want you. I want to make you shoot your hot seed into me. You have never felt anything like the warm, smooth, sucking pleasure of my sheath, drawing the blood into your member, and then drawing the seed out of it. You want me, and I want you. Mother Ocean commands that we come together. Come to me now, my love; love is kind to the least of men . . .

At first he thought the voice was a dream caused by the jerk-off machine. Then he opened his eyes. It was dark in the observation lab, for the first time. Again, the voice in his mind crooned:

Come to me. He tried to sit up before he remembered the straps, fell back, and sighed. But then he noticed that the right-hand strap felt different. It was looser. He rattled his forearm, up and down, side to side, and then back. His forearm slid back through the strap by a couple of inches; now the wrist strap was lined up with the back of his hand. With the slack he had, he was able to pivot his hand toward the inside; by curling it tightly, he worked his hand free of the wrist strap altogether. In minutes, he had freed his whole right arm; in minutes more, he had undone the left arm strap and both leg straps. He was free . . . he could—Now there was a low, musical humming coming over the speakers.

“I’m coming,” he whispered. Remembering that the surveillance film they had shown him did not cover the bottom two feet of the room, he sank down to his stomach and army-crawled toward the door. When he reached it, he snaked his right arm up toward the panel while remaining on his knees, punched in the code, and was just barely able to reach the door lever and open it enough for him to crawl through.

He was in a windowed corridor, its whole length giving him a view of the siren’s environment.

Come to me. There were no speakers in the corridor, so he could no longer hear her physical voice; it didn’t matter. Whatever spell her singing had cast on him was now more then replaced by her murmured invitations in his mind. The moon was high and nearly full, its light glinting on the ripples of her pool, which she must just have left, lying, instead, stretched out on the little plot of mown grass beyond the “basking rock.” Her legs were . . . Her legs? The scales were gone now, as was the powerful caudal fin. Her legs were almost supernaturally white in the moon’s glow. She seemed to enjoy having them back; she slid one against the other luxuriously, crossed and uncrossed them, reached down to caress the thighs with her fingers. He reached the door leading from the corridor to her area, realizing too late that he had not even checked for an exit sensor before stepping outside. His heart had begun to race needlessly; there was no alarm. She looked at him, her dark hair like a flow of black shadow over her shoulders and breasts. Her blue-green eyes caught the moonlight as she looked right into him, smiling with welcome and with a lust that seemed so pure, so devoid of other considerations, that it seemed as absolute as some love was said to be. With one smooth, white arm she reached up and out toward him, her smile both hungry and self-assured. She knew he wanted her.

Uh, yeah, because I’m not, you know, dead? his own thoughts spoke in his mind, and he laughed a little, drunkenly. She laughed too, as if she could overhear him. Her laughter was almost as enthralling as her singing. She beckoned him to sit down beside her on the grass. He was just wondering what to say—or whether he had to speak at all—when she slid her right hand softly around his neck to the back of his head, drew his face towards hers, and kissed him, open mouthed, her tongue sliding slowly into his own mouth. His face flushed, his thigh muscles clenched and drew his legs together as he felt himself stiffen all over, but especially in his cock. He groaned; she withdrew her mouth from his and kissed lightly along his cheek, jaw, licked his ear, licked down his neck and softly bit the muscle between his neck and shoulder. One of her hands reached out and placed his own on her breast. He was excited first by the silky texture of the skin on the breast, then by the quick thickening of the nipple. He pinched it softly, not sure why he even thought she would enjoy that, but she hummed “Mmmmmmm” in his ear, and now her free hand stole into his pants, lightly stroked his cock and then slid away under his scrotum, which she tickled with her nails and then softly squeezed. At the same time her black hair, which dimly surprised him by being dry, incredibly fine and soft, silked across his belly, She whispered in his ear, not just in his mind, a command whose lust made it sound almost imperious: “Suck my nipple. . . . Yes, . . . harder . . .” When he did, the nipple stood up nearly an inch high, and thick. His penis responded like a tactile echo; even though he had thought it was already fully erect, the bulb of its head swelled more as it became more sensitive. The caressing voice in his head again:

Inside me. So moist for you, so warm.

She climbed above him, holding him with her cerulean, almost luminous eyes, and lowered herself onto him; he felt the additional friction as lips of her vagina resisted, then parted and buried him in warmth and wetness. She was squirming on him, up and down and around, and now singing again, the melody with a rhythm that matched that of her loins, slow at first and then building, faster, harder while he thrust back, harder, faster until the slippery warmth around him clenched as she rose and all of his bodily strength went into a thrust that met her coming down on him and he bellowed in ecstasy, ekstasis, the Greek for standing outside oneself, an out-of-body experience while still in his body, more in his body than he had ever been before.

Again, she moaned, demanded: Again. Exhausted as he was, his penis incredibly began to swell once more, all the energy in his body and mind flooding down into it now; he was barely conscious when with a distant, muted surprise, he realized that there were other people in the environment, in dark armor, with both breathing equipment like those of firefighters and large headphones walling off their ears. They pulled the siren off him as she turned on them in fury and then changed her features, smiling, and began to sing, an agonizingly seductive song, You, too; I have pleasures undreamed of for you, too. Take off those foolish things and come to me, all of you. Nathan responded as if the invitation were for him, reaching his leaden arms out for her, but Laura, shaking her head to clear it, stood before him, then slipped behind, hooked him under both armpits and was dragging him back toward the door, then into the corridor, whose door closed. He fell into a deeper darkness than the drugs had cast over him.

He woke up in the chair, strapped in as usual, facing the window wall as usual. He was thirsty.

“Water! Please!’ he called out. “Laura! Please, I did what you asked—let me go home, please! Or at least give me some water. Goddam it, give me water NOW!” While he sat there, wondering at his own vehemence, the door opened and in came Laura, with a plastic insulated pitcher of ice water and a plastic cup.

He was still angry. She had used him, deceived him, endangered him, and she had no right. He wanted her to know how it felt.

“Undo these straps. Now!” He barked at her, and she did. Someone in a dim corner of his mind wondered why she was suddenly so compliant, so much in contrast with who she had been to him—except the false version of herself in the bar, when she had maneuvered him into going off with her, afraid that he would be missing the chance of a lifetime if he didn’t follow her, when all she was offering was the pain and terror of the taser, then kidnapping, then using him for a lab rat—he knew now that all that flattery about his academic prowess was just another way to handle him, to lay on him an entrancement not much different from the siren’s.

“Look at me,” he said to her, not in a shout now but in a low-pitched, resonant voice that he had never noticed coming out of him before. “All your attention on my face, my eyes, especially my eyes. You can’t look away. You shouldn’t look away; you know that it’s only fair that you listen to me, listen very carefully, paying attention to every word because you know you have treated me badly, even though you didn’t want to, you were so focused on this difficult project, all this difficult work, so demanding, you must be so tired, exhausted, so now you can set that aside for a while, just a little while as you begin to drift and float comfortably on my voice, drowsing comfortably. And you want to right the balance between us. A good way to start would be for you to take your turn sitting in the chair, you actually want to, because as you keep relaxing to my voice, your body is getting so heavy, heavier and heavier, it would be so pleasant to just ease yourself into the comfortable chair and let go, let go of all the weariness, all the cares and worries you’ve carried so long, that’s right, that’s it, so comfortable now, so attuned to my voice.”

“Do you remember when you aroused me, made my cock stiff, so that you could pump the semen out of my balls with that machine? Yes, you do. I don’t think you feel quite right about that, but it’s all right, we can balance that, too. While you’re resting there so comfortably, you feel that pleasant tingling all over, a vibration that feels both relaxing and arousing, in fact you feel it centering in your sex, which is becoming warm, warm and wet, warm and wet and hungry. It needs a hard cock in it now, and I have a cock that’s hard for you, that can give you what you need, fill up your pussy and give it something firm and smooth to clench on, as I slide in and out of you, in and out of you, my pelvis and hard stomach muscles pressing on you in a powerful rhythm, a rhythm that builds and builds, becomes harder and faster. But we can’t do that here, with everyone watching. So tonight, at midnight, you’re going to electronically open the door here and meet me in the corridor, from which you will lead me to your room, avoiding or disabling all the surveillance devices, so that I can give you what you want, what you need, what you are throbbing for and will be aching for all this evening, but you will not reveal your lust to anyone until midnight, when you call for me and take me to your room . . . Until that time, you will not even remember this time alone with me, here. Now on the count of three you will awake, very preoccupied with something that you have to do. One . . . two . . . three.”

She found herself looking up at Nathan. In his chair? Why?

“You see what I mean?” he said. “For a chair it’s pretty comfortable, but I can’t get a full night’s sleep in it without drugs. You don’t want to turn me into an addict, right? Remember what you said?”

She tried to remember, at the same time she tried to remember something else that had happened later, but now she remembered,

“Right. We don’t want to turn you into an addict. We don’t want to harm you at all, Nathan; please believe that. We have had to expose you to some risk, but we’re doing everything we can to minimize and control it.”

“Sure,” he said. “Listen, bring me some food, will you? I’m starving.”

“Of course,” she said, getting up at once and walking out.

He settled himself into the chair and thought with satisfaction and excitement of what midnight would bring. He was going to get what she had promised him falsely; god knew he had earned it. “Some risk?” She didn’t even know what the siren could do to him, would do to him. He couldn’t remember everything that had happened, but part of it was chaotic and violent, with people running all around . . . The memory faded. What remained was that he had been very much at risk. She left him in there with a creature believed to be a cannibal with mind-control powers . . . That wasn’t the important part, though . . . no reason to obsess about that . . . He was going to fuck Laura silly tonight, and when he shot his load into her, bareback, maybe she would learn something about “some risk.” That would be so satisfying. No condom. Bareback. Fill her up.

Laura invited Nathan to sneak into her room again the next night; the memory of the bulbed head of his penis leaking its own pearls of pre-ejaculate, the head smearing the slippery liquid around the mouth of her pussy—it made her wet all over again.

That arousal made it especially strange that, instead of slipping Nathan into her room that night, she followed him, matching his own stealth, as they stole through the corridor after disarming the alarm, walked through the moonlight to where she waited for them, already singing in that wordless soprano that somehow managed to be both soothing and arousing. Both of them lay down on the soft grass behind her rocks, somehow knowing that was what they should do, so that they could relax even more thoroughly, open their minds even more to her gentle visitations. When she could sense that they were ready, she lay down between them, whispering her instructions into their ears:

“I must take something away from you. You will perhaps think that this deprivation is cruel of me, perhaps because I do it in the full knowledge of what it will cost you over the years. Yes, I know, and I take responsibility for this choice. Your people often pretend that your most destructive acts “just happened.” You just happened to breed, as a species, far beyond the world’s capacity to endure your impact. You just happened to build your machine-based civilization on black muck dug or pumped from deep underground and then burnt, fouling the air for centuries. When your cleverest people had the means to make power in other ways, it just happened that the wealthy and powerful among you clung to the old, deadly ways that brought them greater wealth. Soon the air became hotter, decade by decade, the storms longer and more violent. You knew why, but it suited you to pretend that no one knew. Then ice shelves just happened to shatter and melt into the warming seas, and all the looping relations among creatures being born, eating, spawning, and being eaten began to break, and the creatures began to die. The world cannot endure any more of you. To save all species, we must end yours. This is just, but we do it because of necessity; we do not triumph in it. Many of our own children have been fathered or mothered by you. In fact, the sickness that has rendered many of us barren seems to have started with those of us who took your men or women as lovers. Perhaps that is why we don’t set out to kill you, whatever your bent stories about us say. Even now, we kill reluctantly, keeping the numbers as small as we can. But your breeding must cease.”

“I volunteered to breed with infected males of your species and ours; I welcomed the disease into my womb, so that I could help it spread, in secret, to as many of you as possible. For that purpose I sang Nathan into my arms, filling him with lust for me. For that purpose, I taught him how to master your mind and fill you with lust for him, so that you, too, would carry the barren plague. For that purpose, both of you will have both the power and the urgent desire to seduce and infect as many of your people as possible. This, you will do, both of you, and no one whom you seduce and pleasure will ever have another offspring.”

“All of the few of my species left alive are committed to this voyage. If we are successful, within a century, your species will have few, if any, children, and ours will already be extinct. What you call “civilization” will dry up like a scabbed wound, and the world will, perhaps, begin to heal. You two will help to begin that healing, although you haven’t chosen to do so.”

“I do this knowing that I am taking from you one of life’s greatest joys, and that you may feel the loss of this joy for many years. So it must be. But I would not leave you with nothing. You will love each other all your lives, taking the greatest delight in each other’s bodies, even more than in the bodies of your other lovers. Neither of you will feel hurt when the other pleasures other humans; you will live your lives together, knowing that you are loved. I can offer you no more than that.”

There was a silence, and then she said, “It is more than I will have. Now I have some more instructions for you. You will not consciously remember them, or anything that I have told you tonight, but you will act upon them.” She turned to Laura and held out her arms, her hands swirling in the air in a graceful dance that drew the eye irresistibly.. “Take off that gown and come to me, lovely.”

Laura shrugged her nightgown off her shoulders and smoothed it off her hips, stepping out of it and into the offered embrace, her face clear of any thought other than blissful devotion. The siren smiled tenderly running her fingertips lightly up Laura’s ribs and both sides, then turning inward to cup her breasts, squeezing gently, flicking out her unusually long, agile tongue to surround the nipples, swirling around them. The siren looked at Nathan and he knew at once that he should move behind Laura. The lips of her vagina were already shining with her juices, but those were not his yet. He would worship her anus with his tongue, first, coaxing it into opening a little so that his finger could slide in comfortably, then two fingers. As Laura moaned, he could not tell if his ministrations were the cause, or the siren’s. It didn’t matter; they were a triangle of pleasure, every point defining the whole.

Laura was trailing her tongue over the siren’s nipples; her sea mistress smiled and moaned lightly, “Splendid, my beauty; now worship my sheath. As Laura kissed and licked her way down the siren’s belly, diverting briefly into the bowl of the pelvis, her own buttocks rose up higher to meet Nathan’s tongue as he plunged it deeper into her while his right hand reached around the front of her to smear her juices over the swelling nub of her clitoris. Laura gasped in pleasure on the edge of pain as Nathan slipped his cock into her sheath from behind, while the siren caressed her scalp with her nails and whispered to Nathan’s mind that he must not come, no matter how fierce his delight, because his seed must go into the siren’s hot sheath, opening the little mouth of his penis to drink her sterilizing juices.

In a few minutes, the three of them cried out in a chorus of pleasure and, on the siren’s part, a mix of triumph and grief.

Later that night, an enormous explosion destroyed a marine biology lab on the California Coast, rumored to be the site of secret government research. All staff were presumed to have died in the explosion or ensuing fire, which was so hot that the exact number of bodies could not be determined. Sabotage was suspected because the mesh gates on the sea canal that fed the tanks and pools on the site with salt water were found open—not destroyed—after the explosion, but the investigation revealed nothing conclusive.

She was sitting alone at a bar, not sure if she would be more humiliated if a man hit on her in some crass way, or if no one hit on her at all. A young one—at least three or four years younger than she was, she imagined—was walking toward her from the corner of her eye. The woman sitting to her right was prettier and was dressed to send a sexual message. “Don’t even think about this one,” she told herself. He was a nice-looking boy, she thought. Slight, but very muscular and big in the shoulders and forearms: a gymnast?

To her shock, he passed by the bottled blond and sat down at her left. The bartender moved toward him, but before his arrival, the boy turned to her and said,

“I’m not dumb enough to assume that a pretty woman here by herself automatically wants to talk to me, but . . . do you, by any chance? ” Like a bad poker player showing his feeble hand after an unsuccessful bluff, showed her a rueful, self-deprecating smile.

“If not it’s okay; I can move,” he said.

“I’m just sitting here thinking,” she said, realizing what a wimpy, indeterminate answer that was. It wouldn’t tell the poor guy anything; stay or leave. But he smiled at her. Nice teeth.

“I like thinkers,” he said.