The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

1.

This smaller rear courtyard at Yasumu Electronics corporate headquarters was empty except for the security guards at the street and building entrances, and the Yasumu Smile Team, a small knot of young women in scanty costumes clustering near the minivan. There were few windows looking down at this end of the building, and the guards might well have wanted to scope out the young women—who were, after all, very pretty—through their wraparound shades. But the iris sensors in the sunglasses would have tipped off the watch supervisor, and the guards knew better.

Fujiwara Hikari stood apart, watching her charges and waiting for the last girl to emerge from the reinforcement session. She was a little warm in the high-collared leather minidress and thigh-high boots, but she was glad—again—that being Chief Deputy for Yasumu’s VP for Projects, despite being one of the weirder jobs in the corporation, at least didn’t require her to dress like the girls.

The girls themselves, of course, utterly loved being Race Queens for Yasumu.

The Smile Team all wore hotpants and matching bandeau tops, most of them matte-black. The berets, the suede knee boots, the collar-like necklaces, and the satiny opera gloves that held the tightly-furled umbrellas were black for everyone. Everything bore the silver Yasumu insignia. Each girl had her Yasumu cellphone at her hip, and next to the van they looked like a landing party of sexy, if somewhat dazed, space travelers waiting by their shuttlepod.

The two girls whose shorts and tops were bright yellow instead of black were their blondes, Cindy and Tanya, chosen not only for their striking gaijin looks but also for their fluency in Japanese. Cindy was an ex-computer intern from South Africa, a natural blonde whose chief interest in computers now was staring into them. Tanya, an American who’d taught English to Yasumu salesmen, had actually been a brunette, but since being recruited as a Yasumu Race Queen she’d happily agreed to bleach her hair and help give the team a more exotic look. Like Cindy, she’d left her prior position at Yasumu to be a fulltime event girl: her Queening had left her far too submissive to be left alone with a roomful of salarymen, even if she weren’t dressed this way.

Both girls’ blonde hair, real and contrived, was cut to match the others’ raven pageboys. They were identical. Even their light tans blended with the Japanese women’s golden pallor.

Hikari tried again to reconcile this with her own mission at Yasumu, and what her friend and lover Toshie, who was not only VP/Projects but also the sister of the company’s heir apparent, was trying to do from the inside to undo decades of objectifying female employees. It was a pact they’d made when they’d met before university, when Toshie had joined Hikari’s career to hers, even before they’d fallen in love.

What did Toshie really think, using the girls this way? Was she watching them now, before they left? Her office might even look down on this courtyard, too—Hikari realized she’d never tried to figure it out when she was there, and she only looked outward from the windows. Maybe Toshie never looked downward, either.

Boots clicked from the doorway, and Hikari winced inwardly at their uncertain rhythm. Kaga Natsumi had resisted, with everything she had, the process that had Queened her, and she’d held out longer than any other woman under the reprogramming. While she’d only reproached Hikari once—and then apologized deeply later—she’d kept looking at Hikari in increasingly hopeless appeal each time they met as she’d been processed. If Natsumi’s programming hadn’t taken by now, at least enough to let her function with the others, or especially if she were still fighting the control, then they’d use more dangerous methods. If they couldn’t bend her will, they’d shatter it.

But Natsumi straightened now as she came out and made herself look almost as perky as the other Race Queens by the time she came to attention beside Hikari. She saluted, bringing her black-gloved hand to the Yasumu beret that drooped adorably over her left ear and putting her bootheels crisply together.

“Yasumu Smile Team Girl Natsumi reporting, Team Leader!” she chirped, and then put her hand to her side. In her other hand, a umbrella rested point-down in the spotless asphalt.

Hikari turned to inspect her. “How do you feel?” she asked softly when her face was turned away from the other girls.

Natsumi stared straight ahead, smiling vacantly. Hikari felt sick. Another girl had become unavailable and they’d recruited Natsumi on short notice. Her reorientation had been faster and more intense than usual, and it was possible that she’d been more deeply affected.

No—fried, Hikari told herself. I was sempai to her since she joined the firm, and a month ago we were planning her next ascent in the Yasumu chain—and then I let them fry her brilliant mind. She’d begged Toshie not to do this. Natsumi was just the sort of woman they were trying to groom and start up the ladder. Doing this to her was—

“Strange,” Natsumi said.

Hikari stopped looking at how snugly the degrading—but-sexy—event-girl suit fit her and watched her eyes regain focus.

“I feel strange, Fujiwara-san.” Hikari frowned at the formality. Natsumi blinked. “I’m sorry, after everything new I just learned it’s hard to think of you as . . .”

She blinked again, her eyes even dimmer now. “You are the one I must obey today.”

“Natsumi. I’m your friend.” There was no time now. The girls were assembled and they had to leave.

Natsumi closed her eyes more deliberately and made her head turn toward Hikari. “I . . . know.” She opened her eyes. “You tried to . . .” She trailed off. Hikari tracked her suddenly thousand-meter stare and realized Natsumi had seen the logo on her collar. It was an obedience trigger for all the girls, and fresh from her reinforcement session it was still quivering like a newly-shot arrow in Natsumi’s mind.

Hikari put her hand over it but it was too late. It had just erased Natsumi’s effort to remember her.

Now Natsumi smiled. “I am eager to advance Yasumu Electronics’ corporate mission!” Her voice was convincingly passionate. “Please tell me how I may obey your direction!”

Hikari sighed. “Come with me. It’s time to go.”

“Yes . . . Mistress!”

Natsumi’s stride was brisk now as she followed deferentially. The rest of the Smile Team started to greet her but then all fell in line and came to attention at the sight of Hikari. Despite herself she was getting into the dragon-lady role and scanned her little squad for flaws.

There were, of course, none. Yasumu’s Race Queens were deeply and continuously conditioned, and they lived to please. Their tasks were simple ones. And there wasn’t much to the uniform to start with, so wearing it right wouldn’t hard even if it weren’t one of the only things in their minds.

Natsumi stood as rigidly as the others, apparently lost in the same devoted trance. Hikari didn’t know whether to be relieved or sad.

“Embark now,” she told them.

“Yes, Mistress!” they chorused, in an eight-part harmony that she felt along her crotch. Then they pivoted as one and stepped into the van, filing in and sitting without delay. She followed them, pausing to let the driver download the checklist into her PDA, and sat at the back. There was no giggling or whispering as the girls fastened their belts and sat straight. The van started and they rolled away.

2.

Hikari read over the checklist. The monitor had been tested and the indoctrination disk loaded.

She looked up at the girls again. They’d come out of the daze that any focused obedience—responding to her presence, or boarding the event van on a command—put them into. Each girl had begun talking quietly with her seatmate, and by this time Hikari no longer needed to eavesdrop to know what the chatter was about.

Yes, it’s wonderful to have been selected again for the Smile Team!

I was so unhappy with my old assignment at Yasumu, that, now, I no longer even remember what it was!

I am so proud that Yasumu Corporation finds my Smile Team performance to be excellent!

Isn’t it nice that we may wear such revealing costumes all the time? I feel sorry for the ones who must wear dresses or pants—how disobedient it seems!

The two gaijin in yellow had been conditioned to sit together, but their faces were as sleepy-joyful as the Japanese girls looked, and their programming was the same. Hikari knew their files—their Japanese fluency was useful not only for charming prospects at events, but also because it had made Cindy and Tanya susceptible to the same control scripts that had brainwashed girls like Yuki and Sachiko and the others into obedience.

Prettier foreign girls with poorer language skills had been rejected as Smile Team prospects. Their exotic accents and errors might be usefully cute to the men they spoke to, but if they were subjected to standard conditioning it would be difficult to determine how much of it had actually become part of their minds. It was too expensive to customize a new enslavement program, and the project leader—Toshie herself—would not hear of making a translation, with all the semantic and idiomatic pitfalls that involved.

Natsumi had her head together with Norie, and it looked like her eyes were going glassy as Norie quietly advised her. Hikari swallowed as she saw the logic. Someone had paired Natsumi with Norie, the girl who’d been in the Queen program the longest, with Smile Team truths burned most deeply into her brain. In the trance Natsumi would spend her day in, she’d be very receptive to everything Norie had to tell her about what Yasumu Smile Team girls must think and do. It wasn’t kindness for the new baby fish, just efficiency. It would train Natsumi faster and help her forget her independence more easily.

When she spoke of her own Race Queens, the ones she converted to serve Yasumu, Toshie called them narikin, the word for social climber. But Toshie’s private joke with Hikari was from the term’s meaning in chess—a pawn that reached the eighth rank and became a queen. When Toshie turned a girl into a Race Queen, the girl became Toshie’s pawn forever.

Hikari looked out at the eight obedient pawns she’d been given, knowing one of them, at least, had seemed destined to be a player and not a gamepiece. She had a sudden moment of vertigo, looking at them, when the berets looked like the round featureless tops of chessmen—and she could not tell Natsumi from the others.

She swallowed and looked out at the cityscape. It was time to program the girls.

Calling up the menu on the PDA, she keyed the program on with a single stroke. The overhead monitor, which on a normal shuttle van would have displayed movies or TV, blinked on and off several times with the Yasumu logo, white-on-black then black-on-white, and the girls’ talk stopped as if switched off. They’d been trained to stop thinking, focus, and await visual instruction at that signal. Now Hikari watched six black and two blonde heads under matching berets swivel to face the monitor.

Having won their complete attention, the monitor now displayed a counter-rotating spiral, within which the Yasumu logo was almost a ghost image, and the girls all sighed together in joint surrender. After their initial conversion, they’d been deconditioned from simply going into trance whenever they saw the company symbol—it was everywhere, and that would have been awkward—but it was as though they saved all that devotion for the times when they were allowed to fall under its spell, seeing it on authority figures like Hikari herself, or in overtly hypnotic settings like this.

Hikari listened as eight high voices intoned the obedience mantras together. She saw Natsumi sitting transfixed like the rest, rapt in the display and proclaiming her unquestioning willingness to obey all orders from Yasumu.

The display started to throb, and Hikari nervously averted her eyes as always. She hadn’t been brainwashed to succumb to this, but it still made her nervous. Before she’d joined Yasumu, she’d thought mind control and hypnotic enslavement were just some science-fiction thing that fans of hentai manga dreamed of. She didn’t want to find out that her own apparent lack of susceptibility was just another uninformed—and wrong—assumption like that.

Soft moans reminded her this sequence was the sexual intensifier. The girls had already been taught to remember their erotic nee d, and their hands flapped uselessly as they tried to respond to it. But they weren’t in the training chamber astride their vibrators, and they couldn’t remember how to masturbate.

Instead each girl held her seatmate’s hand tightly, so they could at least endure the wanting together. This was Natsumi’s first session on an event bus and she just sat, frantic and horny, until Norie reached over and took her hand. Natsumi subsided at once, and Norie stroked and petted her until both girls were looking placidly at the screen before them.

The throbbing ended and the colors grew less intense, and the girls grew calm, their minds softened and remolded into the single shape Yasumu wanted them to be at this point. Docility filled the van like a thick pink liquid. The screen pulsed OBEY.

The girls whispered it in ecstasy. They had been rehypnotized and then stimulated, and Hikari could feel them opening helplessly to whatever was poured into them next.

The programming started.

3.

Onscreen was a girl wearing the Smile Team hotpants-bandeau-and-boots ensemble, at stiff attention. Her smile was almost doll-like and her eyes were as the night sky of Tokyo—starless, emptied of their own lights by the corporate glare.

Hikari recognized her. Kei-chan, whose family name no one ever seemed to recall anymore, was the iconic advertising girl for Yasumu Electronics. She’d been an idol singer in her teens, and then spent a year or two making commercials for Yasumu personal entertainment systems. Her slide into obscurity had itself been obscured by the rise of newer, younger girls, and her following now was mostly male and online, at least as interested in trading possibly-genuine nude pictures as in decrying the lack of new material. The rumor was that she’d put aside her hectic media life and settled down as an office lady in Osaka, waiting for someone to marry.

Kei had never actually been a Race Queen for Yasumu, although toward the end of her singing career she’d briefly portrayed “Space Lieutenant Kimiko” in a TV science-fiction series that had dressed her in a uniform nearly as scant as this. In fact, currently she was most often seen in this costume only in internal Yasumu indoctrination videos, by other women dressed the same way. Hikari was one of the few who saw her while actually fully awake.

Looking at her now, Hikari wondered how much of Kei there still was, behind those unfocused onyx eyes. Toshie’s behavior modifiers seldom used anything as inelegant as drugs, and she wondered what could have so thoroughly put the light out there.

She glanced at Natsumi, still holding hands with Norie, both of them gaping at the girl on the monitor. Like the others, Natsumi wanted to be Kei-chan now, the poster girl for mindless obedience to the corporation. The brainwashing had taken her that far.

“We belong to the magnificent Yasumu Electronics Corporation!” Kei said brightly. “We always obey our instructions! We do not question!”

The girls were whispering their agreement and nodding.

“We have no will or initiative!” Now they shook their heads slightly.

“We are very sexy, and quite harmless. We are fun girls.” Kei giggled as though someone had pushed a button on her, her eyes staying dark and empty, but the eight Yasumu girls in the van giggled back and squirmed, remembering how aroused they were.

“We are the happy Smile Team!” she assured them earnestly, and the girls nodded back.

“Now we must concentrate and remember important tasks,” Kei told them solemnly. “Because we are silly girls with weak minds, we are unsuitable for more intelligent jobs within Yasumu and we are fortunate to be allowed to serve this way.”

Hikari’s gut clenched as she saw Natsumi smile and agree that she was too stupid to be the junior executive she’d been a month ago. Right now Natsumi might be too deep to remember that anyway, and right now, for her, there was only Kei-chan and her truth.

Behind Kei-chan now the screen was warping into another mind-snaring spiral.

“For important special tasks there is special hypnosis, which is even more fun and erotic than the regular hypnosis we enjoy as Yasumu girls. We must listen closely and obey.

“Girls?”

“We will obey!” they assured Kei on the screen, and when she smiled and nodded, they all laughed happily, trailing off as they lost initiative. As they waited passively for more from Kei, the spiral captured them again.

“Obey,” Kei said, her own face going blanker. “Obey. Obey. Obey . . .” Natsumi and Norie were saying it with her the first time. By the second repetition every one of Hikari’s girls was saying it, and it settled to a monotone. Soon, Kei’s hypnotized face had faded back into the spiral and the girls were rapt in the monitor. They released each others’ hands, letting them float down to their cool bare thighs.

“These are your targets,” said a new, deeper, more authoritative female voice. The screen showed a still picture of ten young women in another uniform. They were Hajime Industries’ event girls, with bikini tops and slit-sided microskirts in metallic red and white, with white half-boots and red ballcaps, covered with Hajime’sname and logos. Hajime did not compete with Yasumu directly—Yasumu’s keitai ruled the mobile communications market it wanted—but it belonged to a keiretsu which Yasumu’s own business group was trying to thwart.

Hikari remembered discussing this larger commercial conflict with Natsumi, a month ago. Now she watched Natsumi sit there with seven mindless copies of herself. The Hajime girls onscreen, even in the still photo, seemed almost to be moving, and Hikari realized it was their contrast with the Smile Team, who sat passively and stared at them.

“Your targets,” the voice repeated, and each girl reached to the cellphone at her hip without looking away from the screen. There was a beep, and the Yasumu Smile Team raised their keitai together, aiming them at the pictured Hajime girls in a single motion like an anime firing squad.

The beep repeated and Hikari saw Natsumi and the others all flexing their thumbs on the same function key. They hadn’t been told to turn the phones on, so nothing happened even within the van compartment. But the girls were automatons now, programmed to respond. They didn’t question the lack of effect, any more than they’d think of questioning their sudden compulsion to aim cellphones at other girls in red-and-white nanoskirts.

At another beep they holstered the keitai with the same mindless precision.

Now the screen showed an individual Hajime girl, flirting with a driver at a motor sport competition and twirling her open umbrella like a geisha’s parasol.

“My target is Sewa Michiko,” blonde Cindy proclaimed in her perfect Japanese. “I am programmed to use my keitai on Sewa Michiko.”

The next pretty woman in a skirt was a long-legged, shy-looking girl posing near a tent for a pair of middle-aged men with cameras.

“My target is Nobu Rie,” reported someone at the front of the van. “I am programmed to use my keitai on Nobu Rie.”

The litany went on. Norie and another “veteran” girl were each given two Hajime Race Queens to target, since the Smile Team were eight pursuing ten. On her own cue, Natsumi calmly announced herself as the weapon aimed at Doihara Yoko, a feisty girl with copper-dyed hair who spent most of her film segment making faces at friends offscreen, which only made her more appealing.

Hikari morbidly wondered if Yoko would still be able to make faces after Natsumi used her keitai on her, as programmed.

4.

The keitai had been tested by their own tech team before being issued to the girls, but there were other things Hikari needed to check on the way.

Right now, it was time to test the girls’ remote units. Hikari rose and went up the short aisle, looking back at her charges. Each one sat up straight, staring solemnly at the monitor, into the spiral it showed her. Hikari felt in her womb how deeply the girls were hypnotized, and no longer tried to deny how much it turned her on. She felt wickedly tempted to reach under her skirt and play with herself. The oblivious girls would never know.

Even seeing Natsumi as hypnotized and blank as the rest didn’t dampen that heat, although it started to dampen Hikari. When they arrived and she sent the girls out, they’d be perky and lively and sexy, but inside the giggles and soft murmurs and enthusiasm would be—this. Empty-eyed worship of the Yasumu symbol.

As if in reply to her thought the girls’ eyes started to flicker in a soothing rhythm. The screens had started to show them words. Obey, Stop Thinking, You Are A Toy. For girls who’d made the Smile Team, there was no need to make them subliminal.

Sighing, Hikari went to one knee next to Sachiko and lifted her hair to see the clip on her ear and the wire that ran back to the coin-sized unit adhering behind it. Sachiko sat passively as she was inspected. Her eyelids flicked once when Hikari touched her ear, but it was a body response—Sachiko’s mind knew only the spiral until it was redirected.

Or . . .

Hikari touched her PDA, and Sachiko closed her eyes and let her head fall forward. She probably hadn’t even been conscious of the little tingle the clip gave her, but the tactile trigger put her to sleep anyway. Hikari didn’t need to go down the list and test the other signals she could send to control Sachiko remotely; that was a matter of Sachiko’s own programming, which she had no reason to doubt. This was pure technical work.

She just noted Sachiko’s unit was functioning, and then touched the screen again. Sachiko blinked awake, but she was so thoroughly trained that she didn’t even look around but only raised her head and fell into the spiral again.

It wasn’t until Hikari was watching Norie shift from triggered sleep to spiral-trance that she realized she’d left Natsumi’s unit for last. Hikari’s own arousal was still with her—turning seven scantily-clad girls on and off like machines had done its own job on her—but she was remembering how bad it was to see Natsumi lost in this too. She made herself work the PDA and watch as Natsumi, too, obeyed the ear-tingle and slept, and then woke.

Natsumi started to let her gaze rise, like someone at a hypnotist’s show finding the balloon trick making her arms weightless, but she blinked and looked instead at Hikari, who genuflected by her seat.

“Yes, Mistress?”

Hikari searched her eyes, seeing nothing but tranquil acceptance. Natsumi looked calmly back at her, knowing that she was Hikari’s to look at, to touch, even to fuck if Hikari told her to. Whatever residual . . . Natsumi-ness had made her hesitant earlier, when she emerged from reinforcement, it was far from her now. Responding to Hikari as a Smile Team girl and spending all this time staring at the hypnotic video had drained it from her, and the brainwashing had smoothed her mind so everything slid off of it except what her controllers put inside.

Maybe it was gone forever, and somewhere on the road from Tokyo Natsumi had finally ceased to exist. Now she really was like Kei-chan, a robot-girl for Yasumu.

Hikari would even have welcomed the hurt she’d seen when they’d taken Natsumi away. Natsumi hadn’t believed she’d really been given to the brainwashers until she’d seen Hikari just sit there when the team had come into the office. She hadn’t even called Hikari by name. She’d addressed her as sempai and pleaded to be allowed at least to finish her project work.

The medtech was already at her side with the hypo, and when Natsumi saw it she forced herself to be calm. She’d go, she said, she understood—but even as she begged with her eyes for Hikari to do something, she was injected. The last thing she knew as a free woman was that now even her consent was unimportant.

The drug had hit Natsumi before she’d finished trying to protest. Then her eyes had looked like they did now.

Gone . . .

No! Hikari was being morbid. It couldn’t be this soon, and Natsumi wasn’t the bunraku puppet they’d turned Kei into, not yet. Kei had begun her brainwashing in earnest while Natsumi was still acing her way through high school exam hell—it took a while.

She reached forward and stroked her friend’s cheek.

“Natsumi. Do you remember who you are?”

“Yes, Mistress.” Natsumi seemed half-asleep, murmuring what she might have shouted, back in the courtyard. “I am Yasumu Smile Team Girl Natsumi. I have been brainwashed to serve the corporation with total obedience. I am honored to be pretty enough that my body can attract customers and make them associate Yasumu products with sex. I enjoy being a sex object. My only—”

“Thank you.” Hikari swallowed. She had known what that question would do, and she’d let Natsumi go on anyway. The Smile Team costume did not involve underwear, and Natsumi’s nipples were visible in the black lycra of her top. They framed the word YASUMU that ran in both English letters and Japanese characters between her breasts. Hikari looked at the tight line of Natsumi’s hotpants where they showed off her thigh.

Suddenly, the effort of keeping her palm off that thigh made Hikari breathe hard.

“Natsumi, we were friends before. We worked together. Do you remember that?”

Natsumi looked even blanker. “My true life began with my selection for the Yasumu Smile Team. Smile Team Girls should not try to think or remember unless their controller tells them . . .”

Hikari froze and looked down, seeing herself about to use the PDA to shut Natsumi off. She put her hand on her friend’s cheek instead.

It worked anyway, and she shivered to see the tactile trigger subdue the girl. Natsumi was conditioned to let anyone else’s will override her own. Her body might be poised to respond to other caresses.

“It’s all right, Natsumi. You are permitted to remember. Can you? Before you were allowed to become one of our Race Queens?”

Natsumi nodded. “Yes, Mistress. Then I was still a silly girl who thought I was able to serve as a brainworker. It must have been because I was allowed to sleep my way to the job. Otherwise I have no thoughts and think only with my hot pussy.” She smiled contentedly.

“I do not actually remember sleeping with anyone, but that must be because, after using me, they hypnotized me to forget so I would not stupidly embarrass them. They could control me easily because I am weak-willed and very susceptible to hypnosis.” She frowned at herself, but then brightened.

“They kept their promises to advance me, probably so they could tell other girls about me and convince them to agree to seku-hara also.”

“Natsumi, you were . . .” Hikari watched her friend smile fondly about nonexistent sexual harassment. She didn’t want to hear what this happily-brainwashed Yasumu girl would say about the projects she’d worked, or being friends.

“You were . . .”

She sighed. “Natsumi. Look back at the spiral now.”

Natsumi was hypnotized again before Hikari was fully upright.

5.

Hikari wished briefly for someone to talk to as they drove. The driver was a lower-echelon Yasumu employee in a closed-off compartment. She could reach him by intercom if necessary, but there was little to say. She’d learned that while the drivers of Smile Team vans lusted after their pretty passengers, they had a greater fear of the darkness around them—not to mention Yasumu’s security department—and were happy to be quarantined.

She looked at the girls, who’d begun swaying and chanting very softly in response to something the screen had told them to do. If there’d been someone with her back here, what could they really have talked about with that going on, anyway?

The screen just showed the spiral and logo now, pulsing slowly, almost at heartspeed. It held the girls spellbound, and she marveled at the power that made them so docile. Her blood was loud in her ears. It was in synch with the pulsing screen, and slowly Hikari realized it had been like that for a while now. She hadn’t looked away from the spiral, and it was just as hard to worry about that as it was to wonder why she should.

She’d been hypnotized somehow, but she didn’t want to do anything about it. About anything.

Her keitai beeped, a special tone she didn’t remember, but which made her really want to answer. It helped her find the will to move her hand. She had no will to speak, though, and her entire self became the act of listening.

“Hikari?”

“Toshie-san. Hello.” She got that out, even the formal address she always used in public, past the sudden, intense pleasure at hearing Toshie’s voice. With the quality of the phone that voice seemed to speak across a shared pillow. She lazily debated whether to tell her friend and boss about her trance. Letting herself get enthralled like one of her own h elpless little Race Queens was exquisitely embarrassing. It felt like the day at university when she’d somehow managed to be out of the dormitory with no clothes on, and she’d had to beg Toshie to smuggle her in.

“I hate to intrude on your busy morning,” Toshie said politely, “but I do like to stay in touch with my most trusted retainer, my samurai.

“Samurai. Hikari, do you recall the derivation of the word?”

Even mesmerized, Hikari made a face. Toshie never tired of the reference, the one tedious habit she had and one she seldom failed to inject into a phone call. “Yes, Toshie. From the word to . . .

“To . . . serve . . .” Hikari sagged back against the seat. She never managed to remember what answering that question of Toshie’s did to her—until it was doing it, and she wasn’t minding, and all that mattered was listening carefully to whatever Toshie told her to do or think.

“Hikari, dear? Are you all right? You sound much vaguer than usual.”

“Yes, Toshie-sama.” It felt good to address her lover and Lady with the higher honorific. The naked feeling no longer embarrassed Hikari, but soothed her. She loved to be naked before her Lady. She felt an urge to confess. “I had been careless and let the girls’ obedience display hypnotize me when You triggered me.”

“Oh.” Toshie’s soft laugh made her shiver, as much for its kind understanding as the beauty of the voice. “Well, I instructed you to let that happen to you the last time we spoke and you went to sleep, and you always obey my instructions.”

“Yes, Toshie-sama. I always obey Your instructions.”

Hikari watched the girls through a blissful haze. She was completely hypnotized, now, but she felt no kinship with the mindless Smile Team. Their thoughts were blunted and erased, while she was at her clearest, in the cool focus of Toshie’s attention.

“I wanted your trance deeper than usual when I called. Are you far from the auto show site?”

Toshie’s wish to know that gave Hikari the will to move her head and hand and query the van’s navigation system from the PDA. “Still about seventy kilometers, Toshie-sama.”

“And the girls?”

“Each one is programmed for her Hajime girl, Toshie-sama.”

“How is our Natsumi performing?”

The question lit up a memory, Natsumi in real clothes at her desk, pointing to her screen, tentative but firm in what she’d found. A path that had saved their division of Yasumu three weeks of trial-and-error.

“She . . . Toshie-sama, I need to . . .”

Toshie was silent, her breathing imperceptible even over the keitai’s flawless Yasumu sound. Toshie was quiet even in intense orgasm, as Hikari was remembering now, but her very silence ate into Hikari’s soul.

She fought to think. “My rudeness to You pains me, my liege.” The simple apology said more than the more elaborate ones she knew. “I know decisions have been made. But Kaga Natsumi should not be one of the slaves.”

“Who is ‘Kaga Natsumi,’ dear? You were assigned a Smile Team Girl named Natsumi. Is she resisting the control?”

“No, Toshie-sama,” Hikari murmured. “She is completely one with the control.”

“She is a very beautiful girl, isn’t she, Hikari? Especially in our Yasumu colors and that tight black slave suit she so enjoys wearing now. The shorts show off that lovely bottom so much better than businesswear. Is that what has you so agitated?

“I plan to give her to you, afterward, Hikari, as your concubine. Your own obedient Race Queen. She can wear that cute costume for you all the time and do whatever you tell her to.”

“My liege.” She closed her eyes, but all she could see was the soft glow of the light on Toshie’s round thighs as she crawled to them, her head full of Toshie’s languid commands. Last night, or any of a dozen nights she occasionally recalled, when Toshie let her remember more than orgasms and moonlight.

“I never felt that for Natsumi. It was her mind, her drive—she was everything You sought in Your new executives. I wanted her for You, to help build Yasumu.” Her mistress’ accusation was starting to sting, like a slap that had first made her numb. Her voice dropped. “You know the only bed I want to be in is Yours.”

Now she heard Toshie sigh and she wished she could take back the reproach.

“I know what you saw in Natsumi. I saw it too. And you spoke of it at night, after I had you gaze at the firelight so we could speak more freely. That was worse for me than any dalliance could have been, because she was becoming part of your heart, not just your pussy. Pure love is the worst kind.”

“But—” It hurt terribly to oppose her Lady, but it hurt also to see what her trusting kohai had been turned into. “Natsumi . . . Kaga-san is the kind of woman You want—the kind You are.

“She’s different!”

Toshie’s voice was gentle. “Not after this morning.”

6.

“I need you, Hikari. I need your love and loyalty and obedience, and I cannot share them with anyone. I could never make her your equal—I would not put anyone beside you at my feet, and she would never have the years I spent preparing you to serve.

“Natsumi was a jewel and I wish I could have polished her. But you are my sword, Hikari, and between the two there is not even a choice.”

“My liege.” Hikari could barely speak. She still needed to weep, but it was for her Lady now, and for the painful necessity her own softness had forced Toshie to deal with.

“Hikari, be tranquil.” Toshie’s voice flowed over her like the oil they put on each other at night, easing her. “I am not displeased with my samurai. The qualities I prize in you are what drew you to the girl and made you start to love her, alas. It is no one’s fault, just the way of things.”

“My liege, my . . . Toshie . . . sama . . .” Hikari could still hear her mistress’ pain and burned with it.

There was a soft sound on Toshie’s end, and then the voice that was owning Hikari was even more subdued.

“This is what we say each time I put you under my spell and send you forth, my Hikari. When we lie together and I touch you, so, your submission is blissful and I can be there to love you, but when you must do hard things for me you cry and bleed, when I let you. I cannot be forgiven for what I have done to you, Hikari. You are nobler than I can be, a great-hearted samurai for a cold-hearted liege. Your loyalty shames me.

“You cherished in Kaga Natsumi what I cherish in you. It seems like so much mysticism—but I am sorry you must pay my price.”

“Toshie-sama, I will pay any price for You.” Hikari shut her eyes tight and imagined kneeling, her head to Toshie’s feet. It was easy to feel Toshie’s hand on her. “I will do anything You command.”

“I command you, as always, to forget, my samurai. But remember that your obedience has, and will, always set my heart at rest.”

“I will obey,” Hikari breathed into the phone, sounding like a newly-programmed Yasumu girl but not at all troubled by that.

“I know, Hikari, love.

“The spiral no longer holds you. Awaken.”

Hikari sat up, looking at the phone’s display. Toshie had sounded a little tense, and she was guilty not to be at her side, ready to offer a massage or more, even if Toshie smiled and declined. Hikari put the phone back on her belt, biting back tears. It mattered that Toshie could know someone wanted to do that for her.

But she wanted me here. I’m her samurai, and I cannot show less discipline than my liege lady.

Up front, she heard an electronic warble, Yasumu’s catchy commercial jingle on a keitai ringer. No one turned, but she saw a gloved hand lifting a phone to a motionless blonde head. One of the gaijin girls whispered breathless compliance and put the phone back. Then she rose and swiveled until she faced back down the little aisle. Hikari could see her face—it was Tanya, at attention, expressionless but looking at her. Swaying slightly with the van’s motion.

Tanya kept her hands down and stepped slowly down the narrow aisle toward her. With each step Tanya seemed to be waking up, and a drowsy smile was spreading her mouth. Hikari was mesmerized by her smooth thighs, the way her fingers cupped like a dancer’s, posing. The roll of her hips in the tight yellow lycra.

Tanya was marked, too, as Yasumu property, the name across her breasts echoed around her slim belt, and just above the hem of her left thigh. It made her look thoroughly owned, and Hikari panted with how erotic that was. Some firms festooned their Race Queens with garishly large insignia, but Yasumu played subtly. It wanted customers to read its name across willing bodies posed close enough to see, and for the reader to know it was just for him.

The brainwashers had trained Tanya very well to be a display. She moved her body fluidly, not only seducing Hikari’s eye but drawing it almost hypnotically from name to name to name—waist under flat tummy, chest over softly rolling breast, boot-top under dimpled knee.

She was Yasumu, and Yasumu was sex. Hikari knew what it was doing to her, and it still did it.

The slave stopped, offering her breasts for a moment before floating down to the seat beside Hikari.

“Mistress,” she purred. “I was programmed to reactivate my keitai after the targeting ritual so I could receive new commands.”

She closed her eyes briefly as though obeying them was a pleasure she could barely endure. “The Owner told me you need to be distracted, and that I will be your distraction.”

Hikari no longer recalled the color of Tanya’s eyes, but after her conversion Tanya had willingly worn bright blue contacts to be the stereotypical western girl Yasumu wanted. Under the false blue they were glazed with hypnosis just like Natsumi’s, but Hikari was starting to forget Natsumi, too.

Tanya’s thighs felt as smooth and soft as they looked, and her mouth was a sweet drug. As Hikari slowly made love to her, discovering the girl’s startling ability to give and submit, she felt Toshie caress her in every touch.

7.

The Yasumu Smile Team lined up neatly outside the van. The auto show rep leered at them, and they smiled back shyly. Hikari had roused the girls from trance as the van parked at the open-air arena, so they seemed to the uninformed eye like oddly well-behaved but quite wide awake young women now.

Yasumu was prestigious enough that she didn’t need to trek to their offices to register, and the trade show official had been waiting for them. His lust for her covey of Race Queens dimmed a bit when he saw that his PDA was incompatible with hers and could not link—Hikari’s was a Yasumu prototype that was still a year away from general sales, even if there’d been a question of letting anyone else’s system talk to it.

He fumbled for the hardcopy and offered it to her on a clipboard. She smiled frigidly and made no move to take it when she saw his pen had a Hajime logo.

Hikari bowed back as he apologized. He was clearly mortified by his gaffe, but she could also see it turned him on just as much to be scorned by a leather-skirted dominatrix as it did to covet her submissive squad. Her heels gave her a bit of height and spotted her some presumed attitude, too, and she spent it silently on him.

Hajime’s HQ was closer to this arena, and their own team had already come. She could see the red-and-white-garnished flesh of their event girls circulating. She wondered what else the rep had gotten, or tried to get, from the Hajime girl who’d given him the pen.

Hikari relented, pulling a narrow signature-seal from a sheath on her leather sleeve, and he stared as though it were a weapon. She recalled that on Kei-chan’s TV show, one villainess, who’d turned Space Lieutenant Kimiko into a robot, had dressed something like this, and carried some of her mind-dimming tools in such a sheath. She saw him glance at the Smile Team.

You have no idea. She thought of what Toshie had been able to do, and what burned in her was pride.

She pressed the seal’s tip to the form and then sent the inked symbol onto the paper—a corporate signature. She was something of a Yasumu object herself here. Her place was to sign for the company. The attestation of Fujiwara Hikari meant nothing. Not even to her, she realized, and still felt proud.

The official left with a lingering look at her girls, who calmly waited for her to tell them what to do next.

They looked well-rested, she thought wryly, and wondered what they thought the trip had been like. She looked at Tanya, who looked back meekly without even seeming to remember her programmed distraction before. Toshie’s commands to the girl had ended by putting Tanya to sleep when she’d finished obeying them, and she woke with her mind emptied of the time she’d spent having sex with Hikari. Hikari thought again about how she’d repaired the girl’s makeup during that sleep, the way it had really been like putting cosmetics on a doll. She was tempted to go and squeeze one of Tanya’s supple asscheeks again.

Natsumi regarded her brightly, ready to begin her first real day as Yasumu’s slave. Hikari felt a pang, recalling Natsumi in her smart business suit, trying hard not to look like an obsequious office lady. Now her slim shoulders were bare, and even fetching tea or papers was far above her job description. But she held those shoulders up proudly, because Toshie had ordered her brainwashed to believe she wanted this.

Hikari felt the pussy-warmth again, and realized what a very pretty Smile Team girl her friend made. She looked so right wearing nothing but tight black nothing and a submissive expression.

She swallowed and looked at Natsumi, and the identically-poised girls on either side of her, paralyzed until she instructed them. She let herself think it again, about all of them. All of them—their minds surrendered to Toshie, who had placed them in her samurai’s hand.

So delicious.

“Girls, turn on your keitai.”

“At once, Fujiwara-san!” they sang, and some onlookers laughed and clapped. A few took pictures as the girls tapped their phones on in unison and came to attention. The Yasumu jingle-on-microchip beeped out eightfold, perfectly synchronized. No one really saw the girls’ eyes roll back.

“Are you dedicated to begin helping the world to admire Yasumu Electronics’ fine products?”

“Yes, we are, Fujiwara-san!” They were so earnest, their eyes wide now and shining, under the identically-canted berets, as if Kei-chan herself were looking on.

“We are the Yasumu Smile Team!”

Hikari looked at them, soft bodies taut, straining in their boots to go out and make the throng of buyers aroused and receptive, and decided that Kei would truly be proud of them. Kei would not even need a trigger-tone to tell her to think so.

She herself was having a hard time deciding which of them she wanted to strip and start eating first.

“Sh’taga’e!” she snapped.

“Sh’tagaimash’taaaa!” they called out deliriously in response. We obey! There was more applause at such keen and lovely employees. The girls bowed to her deeply and nimbly together, like a chorus line, and then twirled to go in to show themselves.

Hikari knew there was nothing on their minds now but excitement and exhibitionism and a warm urge to explain the wonders of Yasumu products to whoever stopped to ogle them. None of them would have any idea of the skirted Hajime girl she’d imprinted on, until the sight of her target triggered her.

Hikari nodded to the driver, watched him bow and stay by the van, and stalked in herself. The arena was a sports field, and the grass was just soft enough under her heeled boots to be annoying, but she put it aside. The girls had been programmed with the venue’s layout, and each one pranced toward her initial area. A couple were waylaid quickly by eager patrons, and Hikari was pleased to see from their body language how easy it was for them to relax and be enjoyable.

She saw Norie and Tanya veer together just as someone asked them to pose, and smiled as she heard the man ask them to move—close together, no even more, yes like you’re such good friends, no better! The girls were giggling and docile, and the mind control blocked them from letting anyone coax them too far into a sexual tableau, lesbian or otherwise. Only Toshie had pictures of anything scandalous between Yasumu girls in Smile Team costume, or out of it.

The blonde in yellow and the brunette in black made a pretty contrast, and they were too sweetly playful for the photographer to be angry when they refused his earnest pleas to kiss each other. They moved on, and so did Hikari.

She saw Sachiko alert first—alert was a word she’d heard used of trained dogs, and Sachiko’s face went blank for a moment in that same way. Hikari remembered her sitting passively while Hikari adjusted the control unit on her neck. Sachiko’s triggering went unnoticed by the knot of variously-costumed event girls from other companies that she’d joined. Sure enough, there was her Hajime prey, a girl surnamed Ito whose personal name Hikari had forgotten. Of course, Hikari hadn’t been programmed for her.

Now she watched, her cunt starting to hum as she saw Sachiko detach herself smoothly from the other Race Queens and begin her stalk. Anyone else would only have seen a pretty girl in a minimal black costume moving aimlessly through the cars, but Hikari could see the fixation.

Sachiko paused as if to admire a girl in what looked like an electric blue unitard drape herself across the hood of a silver sports car as several people took her picture. From the neck up the model was as demure as a schoolgirl; below, her body seemed to be wishing the car were a vibrator she could ride hard, in front of the digital cameras. Sachiko pivoted, her smile fixed under empty eyes, and trailed after Miss Ito. She’d only been waiting for the other girl to be done with some admirers of her own.

Hikari drew near as the two Race Queens met and talked.

“Oh! Yes!” Sachiko enthused. “Is that her name? She seemed very stern, but nice!”

The Hajime girl was smiling easily at Sachiko as they chatted, two friendly girls not even trying to compete for attention, walking toward a quieter area between some less-popular cars. “Yes, she’s very nice to the models, but she’s very stern to the guys who try to get into the changing tent!”

“Do you change here?” Sachiko was all wide-eyed curiosity.

“Oh, no. We come on our shuttle, like you do.

“Oh! You have a keitai. Do they let you make calls on the job? Can you call your boyfriend?”

Hikari slid behind the open side door of a minivan to avoid “catching” Sachiko doing that.

Sachiko giggled. “No, silly! That’s forbidden to do while the Smile Team’s at an event.

“And I don’t have a boyfriend.”

“Ohhh . . .” Miss Ito made a sympathetic face as Sachiko raised the keitai and pressed the button she’d pressed before, in the van, aiming at Miss Ito’s picture onscreen.

“Then who are you going . . . to—?”

There was a red dot glowing on her forehead, and Miss Ito’s cheerful expression loosened, as if she’d forgotten why she smiled but saw no reason to stop. Sachiko pressed another button, and now Miss Ito’s face went utterly blank, her eyes glassy as a doll’s. Her hands fell limply against the high hem of her nanoskirt. Sachiko leaned down to speak into the phone.

“You are totally obedient now!” she chirped to the other Race Queen, who heard this news through the beam transfixing her brain. “You will listen to the new voice and it will become your thoughts. You will think only your new thoughts and obey the new commands—and then you will forget them!”

It sounded like an extra-long commercial in Sachiko’s perky, enthusiastic voice, but Hikari watched the Hajime girl’s eyelids flutter as she accepted the message without question. She no longer knew what resistance was, and she stood still as Sachiko touched another button sent the keitai’s preloaded slave programming streaming into her mind. Sachiko smiled happily and kept the laser-pointer beam guide centered on the girl’s forehead.

Turning Miss Ito into a short-term robot took only a moment as the burst of new patterns swept over her neurons and replaced those that would block her obedience. Sachiko tabbed off the emitter with a brainwashed skill she wouldn’t remember two minutes from now, and then returned the device to her hip, taking her umbrella and opening the handle as Miss Ito swayed and blinked.

“I must obey,” the girl whispered.

“Yes, slave,” Sachiko said. “Do you know what you must do?”

“Must . . . do,” the girl mused, and then her eyes cleared. “Yes! I understand! I am fully programmed!”

“You want to put this on now!” Sachiko held out a little souvenir badge—not Yasumu, but for a festival on Hokkaido a season ago.

“Oh, yes! This is pretty!” The girl carefully put it on where it would be unobtrusive among others on her bra strap.

“You will need this also, to carry out your commands!” Sachiko held the little injector on her gloved palm.

Miss Ito smiled and took it, sliding it under one cup of her bikini top. “Yes, thank you! Now I am quite ready to obey!” She spun and marched off to rejoin the crowd. Her body was still in Hajime livery but her mind belonged to Yasumu now.

8.

Hikari stood near one of the arena exits, watching as the finishing touches were put on the soundstage for the pop star who was to be this auto show’s featured attraction. It was going out on television, on satellite, and as a webcast. The young singer was quite attractive, and photos of her were part of the visuals for Yasumu girls’ sexual conditioning.

The separate images that welded worship of Toshie to their minds with an orgasmic torch were subliminal, and they never consciously knew why a glimpse of her made them weak. But Hikari’s enthralled squad all knowingly masturbated to pictures of this singer, often together, and they’d seemed happy at the idea they might meet her here. They were not likely to get the chance.

All of them had reported success in their missions, whispering into the same keitai they’d just used to brainsmooth their Hajime targets. Hikari could see the other girls in white and red posing and smiling, simultaneously aware of and asleep to their new roles as puppets, even if they didn’t know Yasumu held their strings. Their usefulness did not include knowing, or caring, whom they obeyed.

When they were activated they’d only want the strings to make them dance.

She patrolled again, seeing that her girls were all obeying their next layer of programming, the one that drew them toward her exit so they’d be easy to gather up once the chaos started. She watched with quiet glee as one of the newly flash-brainwashed Hajime girls approached Norie and another girl in the colors of a car-part firm. They were good-naturedly feeding each other lines for their respective product pitches, and the Hajime girl joined in. The people watching them may not even have heard their patter as they posed together and giggled.

Hikari frowned. The Hajime model was Doihara Yoko, and the little outdated-festival badge above her bra cup showed discreetly that Natsumi had succeeded in enslaving her. Yoko looked as mischievous as she had in the targeting film of her, and Norie and the other girl giggled harder as she kidded them.

But where was Natsumi? She’d been programmed to return from that direction, and Hikari had allowed time for her to take several detours to sidle up to visitors to pout adorably and extol Yasumu phones, or to be photographed and chatted up.

Hikari closed her mind to a nightmare of Natsumi lost and terrified with her conditioning breaking down—perhaps helpless to resist a predator who smelled her weakness and commanded her to come away from safety.

She checked her watch, and lifted the PDA to scan for the signal from Natsumi’s control unit.

Her errant Race Queen was only about fifty meters away and staying still, and she tapped for the control menu. She passed the stylus over Sleep, and Obey, and held it to Summon, but paused. Activating a girl in public was against Toshie’s policy. If she were Summoned, Natsumi would stop in mid-act, in mid-word, and think of nothing but finding the source, and that would be rather conspicuous for a personable Race Queen to do in most situations. Hikari went to find her instead.

Natsumi was with an attractive young woman, and whatever they were discussing seemed to have discouraged onlookers. An auto show official was trying to intervene, the woman was waving some sort of credentials in his face, and Natsumi stood erect between them like an attentive, if barely-dressed, schoolgirl, her booted feet primly together.

Hikari paused to enjoy the soft line between Natsumi’s thighs, and when she turned to look at the other woman she startled herself by thinking the woman was overdressed. But she realized that she’d spent the day focused on Race Queens, and a business suit looked like a great deal of clothing after that.

No. Focus. Credentials could mean official notice, and complications—although the show representative wouldn’t be arguing this long with a police agent.

He looked even less happy to see Hikari. “Ah, Fujiwara-san. I regret all this unpleasantness. This woman insisted on speaking to your event girl and I was not—”

It fell into place for Hikari even as the woman held out the credentials to her. Sakai Eriko, a freelance journalist. So.

“Yasumu Electronics appreciates your protection of our event girl,” she told him. “I will deal with this.” She bowed, and he bowed back gratefully before fleeing.

“Miss Sakai,” she addressed the reporter, bowing a bit more shallowly and startling her into reciprocating. She turned to Natsumi, and the other woman did not interrupt.

“Natsumi-chan, is everything all right?”

“Yes, Fujiwara-san! Everything is wonderful, I’ve had so much fun and met so many really interesting people and showed them our outstanding Yasumu keitai and told them about our other excellent products!” Natsumi’s enthusiasm even drew a smile from Miss Sakai, and she neither said nor did anything to suggest the woman had bothered her.

It guided Hikari’s tack with her. “Excuse me, please, Miss Sakai, but the venue is very protective of the event girls—so vulnerable here, trusting and eager to please. I am certain he misunderstood.”

The reporter nodded. “I’m sorry, yes, I also think he did. I’m doing a story on women who work at these events, and one of the concerns I have is exactly that. I’m trying to deal with the threat of sexual harassment that they face in this job. I don’t think Natsumi-san is being harassed, and I don’t mean anything to reflect badly on your firm, but I need to speak to event workers to see what it’s like for them.”

Miss Sakai looked at Natsumi, who turned to smile at her while remaining at attention. Hikari could see how the show rep could have been upset, but the reporter’s body language was reassuring. She really was concerned about girls like Natsumi, and Hikari felt a small link form with her.

“Natsumi?” It was almost time, and Hikari saw her options for dealing with the reporter shrink to one.

“Yes, Fujiwara-san!”

“Did you have any useful things to say to Sakai-san about seku-hara here?”

Natsumi’s eyes grew wide. “Oh, no, Fujiwara-san!

“I am very sorry, Sakai-san, but this is my very first day as a Yasumu girl, and it has only been very pleasant! Everyone at this show has been very nice to me. There was no harassment. Everyone says such nice things.” She looked down shyly.

Hikari knew that many of them had been about how Natsumi looked in her tiny costume, or what she could be persuaded to do when she was out of it. But Natsumi had fallen into enough spirals to know how nice that was.

“Natsumi-chan,” Hikari said, not looking at the reporter, “if you wish, I can leave you to speak to Sakai-san in private, about anything you want to.”

“Oh, no, Fujiwara-san!” Natsumi’s instant smile was winsome, and looked so real Hikari’s eyes stung. “I have no secrets from our Team Leader.” She shifted the smile to shine on the reporter, and then just seemed to zone on her, as if seeing how pretty Miss Sakai was in her severe business suit had floated everything else out of her head.

Hikari looked at her brainwashed friend, and at the clueless free woman with them, and suddenly felt Toshie’s power loom before her like a primordial idol. It hit her on her brain and behind her crotch and she wanted to dance naked for Toshie, now that she understood.

She remembered trying to resist, but not why.

“Natsumi,” Hikari said, and touched her collar. The girl took the cue and followed her finger to the Yasumu logo, and when the trigger hit her she came to attention, her eyes going trance-wide. She was open to command now, and the reporter watching her had no idea how deeply hypnotized she’d just become.

“Natsumi-chan, perhaps you could show your keitai to this lady.”

9.

Miss Sakai flicked her an oh-please glance but Hikari returned an awww smile. She gestured at Natsumi, whose face lit up with unbearable eagerness as the suggestion realigned her paused thoughts.

“Would you care to see some of its fascinating features?” Natsumi seemed to be suppressing an urge to skip to her.

“Well—”

Hikari mouthed her first show and saw Miss Sakai melt.

“Yes, of course, Natsumi-san. Please show me.”

Hikari ushered them to the lee of a tent, out of the way of the tide of people starting to move toward the stage. The reporter politely ignored them all and turned her full attention on Natsumi as the girl gushed with precise recitations about the things her Yasumu phone would do. Miss Sakai seemed impressed with how well Natsumi had learned her patter.

“Not only that,” Natsumi said, holding it up, “but—it can also brainwash people into slaves!”

Miss Sakai couldn’t hold in the grin, and only made faces as she tried. Hikari raised her eyebrows. What a crazy kid. Natsumi was staring eagerly at the device and didn’t notice the byplay.

“Really, Natsumi-san!” Miss Sakai managed, forcing her face into a fragile version of the Intrigued Journalist. “In that case your company has truly made a marvelous keitai. How does it, ah, brainwash people? When they listen to it?”

“Oh, not when they listen, Sakai-san!” Natsumi giggled. She stood pertly in her boots and held it out, a sexy spacegirl again, now fending off an opponent with her hypno-ray. “It emits a beam that neutralizes brainwaves and paralyzes both the mind and will! No, really!”

She was already aiming it perfectly—more of Toshie’s trance-training paying off—and the bright red laser dot stayed centered on Miss Sakai’s forehead. The reporter saw the strand of light and stood still to keep it out of her eyes, staying right where Natsumi sent the beam.

“Oh! Now, Natsumi, be careful. You really shhhhhh—” It was as if her thoughts hissed from her mouth and left her head empty. Her hands flopped to her sides. Her eyes faded like headlights going dark. Her lips stayed parted.

“You are obedient now!” Natsumi said cheerily into the phone, as though calling to tell Miss Sakai she’d won a contest. Hikari watched the new knowledge hit and bend the woman’s defenseless mind. Miss Sakai trembled with agreement when Natsumi chattered on about obeying the new voice in her head.

Then Natsumi turned to Hikari. “Mistress?” she asked quietly. “Excuse me, please, but she is not Doihara Yoko. I am programmed only to brainwash Doihara Yoko. I cannot activate the imprinting system.”

There was no glee in how cleverly she’d snared the journalist—only a meek slavegirl worried if she were doing well.

“You have performed perfectly, dear Natsumi.” Hikari was genuinely pleased. “You obeyed my command to use the mind-control keitai to make Sakai-san receptive to new Yasumu instructions.”

They both looked at the stunned reporter as she swayed, almost plantlike, waiting to be told what to think.

“I know you were not targeted with this one. That is all right. Relax and I will take the keitai to implant what Sakai-san must believe now.”

Hikari went to her protegee, now excelling as a slave, and reached for the cellphone. But Natsumi looked so delightful, thighs together, looking at Miss Sakai like a girl with a new, but expensive and delicate toy. Instead of taking the control device, Hikari stood close to her friend, near enough to smell the perfume under her ear, teasing herself I won’t kiss it yet.

“Repeat,” she whispered into that ear, and bit her lip to hear Natsumi breathe in to prepare. “You believe utterly in anything Fujiwara-san tells you. You obey her without wondering why you must. You feel only trust and devotion toward Yasumu Electronics, and have no desire to do anything to discredit it or thwart its policies. You will tell no one this, except Fujiwara-san, and when you are alone.”

Hikari tried to remember they were semipublic, that anyone could come around the tent. It was all that kept her hands off Natsumi as she listened to her own breathless commands become the girl’s singsong patter as Natsumi spoke them into the phone. So evil and hot that they entered Sakai-san’s helpless mind that way, to bind her will.

“Repeat. Soon—tomorrow—you will realize that you must investigate Yasumu Electronics. You will feel no contradiction with your absolute trust in Yasumu. You will decide to go undercover as a Yasumu event girl, and volunteer there for an audition. You will admit to yourself that this is not for a story but really to let yourself become an object. You want to allow Yasumu to subvert your identity and turn you into its creature, to use your face and body to enrich itself. You will accept and enjoy everything that is done to you to make you an obedient Yasumu employee.”

She was panting, and looked at Miss Sakai as her brain absorbed the commands. The woman didn’t move. Hikari imagined her after her conversion, standing erect in Yasumu hotpants and boots. Hypnotized and reciting her command set to Hikari. Breathlessly gushing to strangers about whatever was put into her head. Standing like a doll, when nothing was.

Oh, Toshie-sama—I love you!

The auto show sound system crackled. Neither Natsumi nor Miss Sakai reacted at all.

Hikari slid her hand up and turned off the beam. At a whispered command Natsumi returned the keitai to her hip and resumed attention, while the reporter blinked awake.

“I . . . Fujiwara-san? Did something . . . ?”

“Yes, Sakai-san. You were very nice to let Natsumi show you the phone and its features.”

Miss Sakai’s eyes widened, and it seemed for a moment as though she saw Hikari for the first time.

“The brainwashing feature was my favorite,” she droned, and then shook her head. “I—I’m sorry.” She laughed nervously. “I have no idea what I just said.”

“It was very witty,” Hikari assured her, and she glowed at Hikari’s praise. “If you call me later, Sakai-san, I can arrange for you to speak with other Yasumu girls.”

“I—” Miss Sakai struggled with her new desire to spend more time with Hikari. “There is . . . something I must do. Ah, tomorrow. Or sooner . . .”

“Tonight.” Hikari stared into her eyes, and almost came as she saw the woman soften with the need to obey. “You will masturbate tonight, and then you will call the Yasumu office and identify yourself.”

“Yes,” Miss Sakai breathed. “I must! Yes!”

Hikari smiled and watched her victim shiver to see it. “You will ask them how to dress, and wear what they tell you to.”

Miss Sakai nodded, and her eyes were glazing with the need to play with herself not later but now.

“Goodbye, then!” Hikari bowed briskly, watching the reporter snap out of the trance and bow back—then blush as she seemed to want to keep staring at the hem of Hikari’s leather minidress. The woman rushed off, not even noticing Natsumi, who still stood at mindless attention.

Hikari just enjoyed Natsumi that way for a while, but she was wet now with her own compulsion to carry out Toshie’s plan, and she needed to secure the other girls.

She woke Natsumi and they went back around the tent, coming up to the chattering cluster of girls just as the lights started on the distant stage. A weirdly melodic feedback wail went through the sound system.

10.

Hikari could see a couple of the Hajime girls as the sound activated their new programming. They seemed to pause, their faces lighting up as though with the best idea they’d ever had, and they went still for the opening tap of the orgasm that was going to tease them into frenzy. People around them barely noticed, or thought it was the excitement of the music show tuning up, or just another sexy Race Queen thing they did.

Hikari enjoyed how their thighs tensed urgently under the barely-there skirts. And then how they started moving purposefully to their marks like the lovely windup toys they’d just become.

The crowd moved closer to the stage, through aisles among the cars planned for that purpose by the organizers. Hikari hung back, and Natsumi seemed to have imprinted on her, staying nearby and waiting for more orders. The other girls just stood, empty of orders, but then Cindy, whose vague crush on the singer was a bit stronger than the others’ as they’d jilled off to her videos, started to move dreamily toward the stage. The others blinked and started to follow her.

Hikari raised an eyebrow and took out her PDA, highlighting the seven control units and then tapping Summon.

Instantly they spun to face her and came back, Cindy as robotic as the rest of them with no thought in her head anymore of anything but obedience.

They were still staring at Hikari when the commotion started. On top of a high SUV, two women were dancing to the loud thumping music that had suddenly started roaring from its half-open windows. People were trying to open it to shut the music off, but it was locked and the girls were oblivious to the catcalls and the orders to get down.

They started to kiss and the dance was halfway to becoming standup sex, but as spotlights found them they kept their clothes on. Whoever was seeing them was admiring how the Hajime bikini and skirt set off their bodies. The music was just a beat to most of the onlookers, tunelessly savage and erotic.

As a small scuffle started surging below them around the SUV, new fans trying to keep anyone from stopping the fun, they shared another deep kiss as they writhed, and started to undress each other—one lost her top and the other her skirt, each keeping half of her uniform.

They separated and danced some more, wriggling out of what remained. In boots and ballcaps, still enslaved to the slamming percussion from the locked SUV under their feet, they started fucking each other in earnest.

Hikari watched with everyone else as the security staff responded. The girls’ fan club evaporated with the arrival of uniformed authority, though some of them kept their digicams locked on. Her own girls stared, looking astonished and childlike to anyone seeing them.

Another gout of music and raucous encouragement ignited a hundred meters away near another vehicle which Hikari couldn’t see. She wondered if the new pair of brainwashed Hajime girls had been programmed for an identical sex-show, of if the special keitai had burned instructions for something different into their brains. More guards and event officials flowed over, looking deeply annoyed.

The scheduled show started. Hikari was remembering Toshie’s briefing, now. It was likely that the producers did not even know the little diversions were pulling security’s attention here and there, away from the stage, and it was unlikely anyone had the authority to halt things if they had.

Only this part of the crowd and the security team seemed aware of it all. Onstage, the signature laser-light show started. The music came up and the stunning star made her appearance, resplendent in a metallic catsuit, with a quartet of adoring dancers in her wake. She sang, quite prettily, for a few moments. Then she turned, dramatically, as her lyrics had her appealing to her friends about her love. It was only then, when she saw them and faltered, that it became clear that the grinning girls in shimmering Hajime-logo’d white and red weren’t her four dancers. Hikari smiled, recalling how the Hajime girls had been programmed to put them out of the way before replacing them.

While the music went on, the star instead of panicking gamely turned back and tried to finish the number. Hikari could see Doihara Yoko, the girl Natsumi had made into a slave, leer madly at the other hypnotized Race Queens and gesture. They swept over the singer like sleek lionesses on an antelope, and her song trailed off into a confused but sensual moan. Yoko’s hand had claimed her cleft through the catsuit, and the other girls held her for Yoko.

Hikari dutifully mimicked the other onlookers’ shock as the crowd noise rose, and then cut into silence as shots rang out. Hikari closed her eyes to picture it—the last two of the Hajime puppets had been programmed to find a pair of hidden pistols and were guarding the backstage entrance against the depleted security team, after their sisters’ antics had drawn off the rest.

She tapped another command into her own girls’ minds, and Natsumi and the others turned to follow her like ducklings. She waved down another event official who was rushing from one spot to another, either without a clear duty in the emergency or unable to perform it. She gave him purpose.

“Excuse me! This is extraordinary! I must—”

“Excuse me, this is difficult, I don’t understand—” He was trying to placate her and disclaim responsibility at once and it must have been stressful for him.

They both turned, distracted by screaming from nearby as the security team found it harder than expected to separate the lovers from atop the SUV. There was more shooting, as if in response.

“I must get my girls away from this,” she said. The man bowed, relieved to have an excuse to leave the fiasco, and escorted them to the exit she’d already staked out. She saw others trying to leave, although many seemed to think the gunfire was part of the show or were just mesmerized by the stylized gangrape of the pop star by Doihara Yoko and her pack, up on the brilliantly-lit stage.

That was still going on. Sachiko’s victim, Miss Ito, had used the injector Sachiko gave her, and the drugged singer thrashed weakly as they mauled her. She was thrusting herself onto Yoko’s hand and eagerly putting her mouth around whatever or whoever sought it.

Hikari didn’t watch, since she knew she’d be able to see it online for a long time to come.

Toshie would be watching it now, live. Yoko and the others had kept their Hajime livery on, and it would show up very well until someone at the national level finally cut the signal.

11.

The Smile Team sat placidly in the van as it rolled back to Yasumu headquarters, hypnotized again by the monitor. This time it showed them a three-dimensional Yasumu logo that turned in space as though on an invisible chain, and they gaped at it as they had at the spiral.

Hikari knelt on one knee by Natsumi’s seat, gazing at her friend’s face. Just like the others, Natsumi had simply been a tool, programmed to bring Toshie’s devices close to her chosen victims, but it was still amazing to picture this blank-faced girl wreaking her share of the havoc.

Natsumi’s mind had been scrubbed clean of her dreams of being an engineer, a leader, a pioneer. She needed permission now to remember her name, and usually had no desire to. She lived to be looked at. Hikari considered that and let it dampen her.

This was what Toshie had done. Hikari felt her old platonic love for Natsumi, stared at it, and then let it melt in her hotter, deeper, devotion to Toshie. For a moment, looking at this slave, she wished there were some other harm to do to her, some way to degrade Natsumi further, to bind herself to her Lady and place more of her soul in pawn.

Perhaps it will be enough for Her that I want to, so badly.

For a brief moment, Hikari despaired, wondering how Toshie would know that. Then she smiled at herself, since it would take her Mistress only until the next time she casually cast her spell, and put Hikari into trance, to learn her deepest thoughts. She had no secrets from her Mistress, any more than Natsumi had secrets from her.

Hikari closed her eyes. She realized how much Toshie trusted her, by allowing her even the free will and ability to think that she did have. It made her glow, deep inside, to hope that Toshie already did know how far Hikari would go, to serve her.

Her finger was on her crotch before she knew it. She’d let herself wonder whether Toshie had put that thought in her, and that she was as much a robot as the girls she’d been operating.

She blinked and forgot and mooned over Toshie until her eyes focused again.

This time Hikari let herself stroke Natsumi’s thigh. In the hypnotic bondage of the rotating logo, Natsumi didn’t react. Hikari slid her fingertips higher, and ran one along the seam of Natsumi’s black hotpants, feeling the curbed heat of her pussy. She wanted to taste it.

Hikari’s head spun, and she leaned forward to rest it on her friend’s shoulder. She was having a vivid fantasy of stripping the tiny costume off of Natsumi and ravishing her while she was still spellbound. Natsumi would be helpless to stop her or even to respond.

I can’t do this.

As Hikari drew herself up again and looked at Natsumi, as if to make certain she was still dressed, she stared into the brainwashed eyes with wonder. She closed her own eyes, and savored for a moment the thought of crawling naked to Toshie and begging to be sent for conversion. To be Toshie’s personal Race Queen.

She made herself get up and step away from sweet mindless Natsumi and sit in the back. No. Toshie had had her in thrall since they’d first experimented with hypnosis in school—if it had been an experiment, she corrected herself wryly. Toshie had probably been devious before she could even walk, and maybe Hikari hadn’t really just “lost interest” in ever being the hypnotist until after Toshie had whispered it to her.

But if Toshie wanted a toy, Hikari would have long since been her giggle girl or personal slave or whatever else she wanted Hikari to become. Toshie wanted a samurai, and she’d found that in Hikari already.

Hikari smiled. She took her keitai and touched the right button.

“Hikari! Is something amiss?”

“No, Mistress,” she said clearly. “I know You were watching. It went as You planned.”

There was silence, as Toshie considered what Hikari had called her.

“Hikari, are you certain?”

She turned, sliding a hand along her skin below the skirt and above the thigh-high boot. She looked at her girls—at Toshie’s girls.

“I finally realized,” she said, “what ‘samurai’ comes from, while I was awake.

“This felt so good, Toshie-sama! Seeing Your power take everyone, seeing obedience. I wanted to do it for You. I—” She stopped, hearing Toshie breathing audibly. She recognized its rhythm and briefly regretted not being there as her love approached orgasm.

She waited until it rose and whispered, “Mistress. I am Yours.”

As she listened to her Mistress climax and cry out, she shut her eyes and let the tears steep.

Toshie sighed, and seemed to be curling around the phone. Hikari smiled, and considered how she would tell Toshie about her daydream of being Queened herself. Maybe Toshie would like a little cos-play, and let Hikari dress as a narikin.

“Mistress?”

“Hmmm?”

“What—did we just do, exactly? To Hajime?”

“Mmmm. We embarrassed them very badly, Hikari. The brainwashing left no physical trace, and the girls will not remember anything about meeting members of our Smile Team. Their minds now share a memory of a sex-cult they formed together, all surrounding excessive fan-adoration of that unfortunate singer. Masturbating together before her posters was no longer enough, and their girlish passions darkened. They will say they wanted to worship her in front of the world and free her to be their queen.” Toshie laughed and sighed, turned on by what she described.

“Hajime will deny any involvement, and disown them. There may be questions, at least, about how Hajime did not somehow sense something wrong about the girls. But in the end, most sensible people, if asked, will say they believe Hajime. After all, what reason would there be for them to do this?

“Still. All anyone will associate with their name, for the next several months, will be that poor pop star orgasming helplessly in the clutches of Hajime girls. No one will say anything—it is not a logical thing or anything that makes sense. But it will cripple them. They may be asked to leave their keiretsu.”

Hikari touched herself, looking forward to watching it later, naked by Toshie’s side in her penthouse. It might last more than months.

“Mistress? Is there anyone who could suspect Your mind control?”

“I have heard some even suggest our Smile Team are brainwashed. It is said as a friendly joke about Yasumu, and I think that some people are rather fond of the idea of such a group of tame, smiling sex-bots. But even if they really believed that, it would almost respectable.

“Not a public spectacle like this, with disorder and an unwilling celebrity.” Toshie’s voice thickened, partly with suppressed laughter. “Whoever may have caused it, if not these ‘perverted’ young women, will not even matter to many people. Only that it happened to Hajime.

“But do not be concerned, dear Hikari. No one knows about the technology in the cellphones. The woman who developed it is as helplessly devoted to me as you are.”

“That is wonderful, Mistress!” Hikari hoped Toshie could tell she meant it. She wasn’t jealous—it was good to know that no one could suspect her Mistress of a part in this. And to know there were other women who served Toshie as loyally.

“Thank you, Hikari. But know that whoever serves me, she is only a tool. Her devotion makes me hot. Yours make me—happy. You are mine.”

Hikari bowed her head, her mouth open. In all the ways Japanese could convey painful gratitude, there was still no way to say how she felt now.

Mistress spared her. “And our pretty Natsumi? Did she perform well?”

Hikari rose and walked to crouch again beside her. “Your newest slave,” she licked the words as they came out, “obeyed all commands brilliantly. She also responded off-program, and helped to snare another woman whom I think You will enjoy turning into Your toy.” She trembled, proud of how easily Natsumi had let herself be used to help enslave someone she hadn’t even been conditioned to target.

“You will tell me later, Hikari. When I can taste how wet it made you.

“Right now you will reach down—you are near her, aren’t you?—and turn Natsumi-chan’s keitai back on for her.” Hikari obeyed, letting her fingertips slide along the fabric of the hotpants tight on Natsumi’s hip, then the flesh of her thigh. It thrilled her to feel it, and even more to see that Natsumi was too deeply hypnotized by the monitor to react.

“Your power over her—!” she gasped to her Mistress, unable to say more. She worshipped the soft-spoken, iron-willed woman who had turned brilliant free Natsumi into this obedient plaything.

Hikari stopped even noticing the ripe girl in front of her as she realized—again—how much power Toshie had over her. And what her friend and lover had turned her into.

“Yes, Hikari. I trained you to feel how erotic it is to see girls enslaved, although I made you much more vulnerable to it.” Toshie sighed lightly. “Of course, that means you can enjoy it much more intensely than I can afford to. But it can still be lovely to watch you writhe as you describe it to me, in trance. You can be quite poetic when you are aroused.”

“Mistress.” The joy made her throat hurt, her legs ache. It was as agonizing and wonderful as wanting Toshie.

“Tell me, my Hikari.” Toshie’s command sounded low, almost sexual. She knew what was happening to her samurai, and graciously shared it.

“Mistress, I remember everything. Hope that I could save Natsumi, horror at seeing her mind flattened, my . . . pathetic resistance to You . . .”

“It was not pathetic, my beautiful sword. I control you and I have made you crave it. It took a great deal for you not to submit to me as easily as you wanted to.”

Hikari wanted to cry again but swallowed and went on. “I can feel it—but now it feels good.

“I loved her, Mistress.” She was on her knees, staring along Natsumi’s thighs to her lycra-sheathed crotch, and saw only Toshie. “And I would give her to You again.”

“I know. And because you did, Natsumi is mine, another powerful narikin for me to move on the board.

“But I promised to give her to you, and I shall. She will be easy to reprogram to serve you. She will still obey me, of course, but so will you, and the main thing will be that she will live to please you.”

“Mistress?” Hikari felt her will slipping from her. The image of obedient Natsumi kneeling before her, hers for the night, started to wash everything else away.

“One thing . . . please . . . let me ask . . .”

Toshie let her ask it, and listened, and spoke to her quietly. As Hikari blinked awake afterward, she no longer remembered what it was, but put her keitai away, content to know that Toshie’s will would control.

Then Natsumi’s keitai woke her with the Yasumu jingle, and after listening attentively she stood and came back to Hikari, as Tanya had come to her on the trip out. Hikari couldn’t resist, and didn’t want to, as the girl straddled her and looked into her eyes.

12.

Undercover at the Yasumu Smile Team, Sakai Eriko practiced standing.

There was a full-length mirror on one side of the tiny chamber, and next to it a life-size poster of the unbearably sexy Kei-chan at attention in a silver bikini, which Eriko tried to emulate. The last training session still rang pleasantly in her head, and it was easy to feel compelled to put herself on display. Her trainee outfit was all in white, even the boots and beret, but otherwise the girl in the mirror was looking like a very good candidate for the Smile Team’s cute black outfit.

Eriko so wanted to earn that. She kept thinking of a lovely girl named Natsumi wearing one. She’d met Natsumi at that auto show where the singer had been assaulted by her own backup dancers. Natsumi had had a cellphone, and recently Eriko had been able to remember that the girl had used it to do something to her head. Eriko didn’t mind. It made Eriko feel good to think that she might have wanted to fight something like that but it made her forget to want to.

Mmmm. The singer. Assaulted. Eriko’d tried writing a new piece that night that she could sell right away, about what she’d seen right there when it happened. But the next day when she’d awakened, she’d only been able to think of coming here to Yasumu and (submitting completely to their hypnotists) going undercover so she could (serve and obey forever) write an even bigger story. She’d had no doubt that they would (brainwash her into a helpless slave) believe her story about being an office lady bored with her own corporate rut. And they’d (easily lulled her into the initial mindfuck) bought it.

Eriko looked at the woman in the tight white Race Queen uniform, and trembled with the pleasure of realizing she no longer really knew or cared how long it had been since then. Whatever Natsumi’s owners had told her to do to Eriko’s mind, it had worked.

Now it was making her want to be Kei-chan. She looked longingly at the poster.

It’s not really fair, she thought with an effort. That picture of Kei-chan from the TV show—one of my favorite episodes, when the alien worms captured Space Lieutenant Kimiko and brainwashed her into one of their human slaves. Of course she looks so beautifully mindless.

For a moment she tried to recall when she had seen that episode. Other than now, when she and the other girls watched tapes of the show and masturbated.

But then Eriko looked at her own body in the tight hotpants, and watched her own widened eyes glaze over a bit, and felt her pussy clench as she imagined the worms swaying hypnotically before her, their droning song boring into her thoughts to blot out her free will.

Yes—I can be just as brainwashed as she can! For a perfect instant, she was.

Eriko grinned at herself. She was really getting sucked in, with all the ludicrous “slave” symbolism Yasumu trained its girls with. This would be a fun expose to write when she finished her undercover stint. She looked down at her body, her head spinning with how erotic she looked. What made it perfect, by making her into a labeled artifact, was the silver Yasumu logo.

It was so compelling to look at it, bright on the white lycra, curving across a slavegirl’s contours . . .

She shook her head. Oh, yes. A little hypnosis, well. No one could be expected to sit through all that “hypnotic” instruction and not slip into it now and then.

No, I’m good at what I do. I’m a skeptical journalist. If these Yasumu mad scientists can really turn me into a playtoy, then my name isn’t Smile Team Girl Eriko!

She felt dizzy.

Oh-oh. I, ah, meant—Sakai Eriko.

Now she giggled.

Besides, the way the other three airhead candidates seemed to be letting themselves be “entranced” was probably having some kind of herd-compulsion effect on her. And she did need to play along, as if she really were becoming some helpless pawn. It was fun, too, all of them acting so hypnotized and open together. They were so pretty and their voices blended so sweetly when they . . . chanted . . .

Thinking about how she’d write that, Eriko pictured herself back at her apartment at her laptop. The image was vivid, and she realized she was imagining herself kneeling primly at her table in her white Race Queen trainee uniform, feeling her bootheels under her ass below the hem of the microshorts.

Ohhhh.

But the idea of watching her computer screen slid slickly into the memory of staring at an instruction monitor here at Yasumu, letting the slow, pulsing spiral hypnotize her and softly repeating the words it showed her.

Yes. Repeating made her believe, believing made her obey, obeying made her easier to hypnotize. Yes.

Eriko gradually realized that she’d become Kei-chan’s twin. Not only was the mirror girl standing as rigidly as the poster girl, showing off an equally lissome body, but her face was just as blank.

Even seeing how brainwashed she could make herself look didn’t make Eriko break pose.

Even the slow, gentle orgasm that rewarded her didn’t do that.

I’ll . . . need . . . to . . . find . . . a . . . way . . . to . . . ex . . . plain . . . The rest of it got away from her. Thinking at all was difficult, and thinking of something as irrelevant and dull as her freelance writing career was not even worth the effort.

Vaguely Eriko recalled she’d been back to her apartment. Once. She’d planned to return there after training each day, but somehow she’d agreed to the overnight plan to stay here at Yasumu and she just hadn’t—well, ever left. Not on her own. Then someone had suggested it to her, and she’d nodded without looking away from whatever had held her gaze.

Her trip home was like a dream. She’d gone with one of the fully-brainwashed Smile Team Girls, and she’d been thrilled to be allowed to wear her white Race Queen costume even if she had to hide it under a short dress. They’d been able to strip down to their costumes once inside, and she’d lost count of the orgasms as the other girl kept giggling and showing her something that put her to sleep. It had felt odd even to recognize the place again when she woke, and they finally dressed and left.

Here and now there was a chime. Eriko made a small passionate sound as she actually felt the posthypnotic response take hold of her body. She walked out of the chamber into the bright main room.

Then she stopped dead. A Smile Team Girl stood at attention, looking through her—eyes wide in hypnosis, a look that Eriko was learning to recognize and dampen to. It might even have shocked her back to full awareness, if the deep arousal she felt hadn’t melted her.

It was Kei-chan herself!

Kei’s hair was in a crown of braids under her beret, the way she’d worn it in Eriko’s favorite episode of her show. Space Lieutenant Kimiko had been tricked into putting on a haunted bracelet that turned the wearer into the willing handmaiden of an evil ghost-empress, and she’d been mind-controlled into nearly taking over the ship.

She seemed to wake up and focused on Eriko. She smiled and bowed deeply. Eriko bowed back, feeling more reverent doing so than she had in years.

“Hello, Smile Team Trainee Eriko! I am Yasumu Smile Team Girl Kei, but please call me Kei-chan!”

“Oh, thank you, Kei-chan!” Eriko heard herself twitter back. “I am so honored to meet you! When I saw you I wanted only to be a Yasumu girl!”

Kei’s eyes shone emptily as she nearly sang her congratulations. Eriko blissfully let go and listened to herself burble on like her airhead fellow-trainees, turned on, this time, to be discussing the joy of being brainwashed with the girl she dreamed of becoming.

“And the spirals are my favorite part of the conditioning!” Kei shared breathlessly. “Do you enjoy staring into spirals, Eriko?”

“Very much, Kei-chan! I always try to find the center, and then—well, by then I’m hypnotized and I just look where I’m told!” They both laughed at how silly she was.

“Next time, Eriko, you can try to look at the edge,” Kei suggested solemnly. “And let the spiral pull your mind into its depths!”

“I can try,” she murmured, dizzy at being able to talk about hypnosis with her heroine, “but . . . I don’t want to resist even that much. Yasumu—wills that I must look deeply and succumb, so I can obey!”

Kei smiled at her and suddenly looked aware, as though something in the brainsmoothed girl’s mind had briefly reawakened. “Oh, Eriko. Errrrikohhh.

“When you finally learn that there is no resistance for you anymore, then Yasumu owns you. And it’s so much fun to fight it when you know you will lose.”

13.

They both turned as two of Eriko’s fellow-trainees marched in from some other activity, bodies moving in lockstep with identical grace in the brief white lycra. They were both still deeply under—they didn’t even blink when their gazes swept across Kei-chan in the flesh. They didn’t blink at all.

Kei smiled at them, in the evil way she had in the episode where the rogue supercomputer had flashed its displays to hypnotize Space Lieutenant Kimiko into letting it possess her body. She kept smiling at the third woman who’d come in. This new Race Queen’s hotpants and strapless bra was iridescent grey, like liquid metal cooled to sheath her loins and breasts, and even as she simpered at them there was something in her eyes that looked wrong.

“There you are,” Kei purred. “I had hoped to see you, Hikari.”

Eriko blinked. Hikari? She fumbled for a memory of Hikari as the crisply dominant girl in the stylish leather dress and boots at that auto show. Eriko lost herself in Hikari’s silvery curves, trying to remember.

Somehow Hikari had slipped into the same delicious trap that owned Eriko now. But she was something different, neither a virginal trainee nor a full-fledged Smile Team Girl like—

“Kei-chan.” Hikari hesitated in a way that made Eriko feel worried and hungry at once. “You are exceeding your programming. You must—”

“I must obey,” Kei intoned, and watched Hikari go blank for a moment. Eriko whispered it to herself too.

Kei recovered first. “But Mistress reprogrammed me, Hikari-chan. To trigger you.”

A beautiful fear lit Hikari’s eyes. “What? But—”

“Listen to the poem, Hikari-chan.”

Hikari swayed as though in a strong breeze. “Listen . . . to the . . . poem . . .”

“Painted eyelids close

“Writhing on futon’s wet spot

“Dreams of her Mistress.”

Hikari stared into space.

“Help me with this new slave, Hikari.”

Hikari stepped toward them like a zombie.

“Eriko is going to sleep with her eyes open.” Even as Kei said it Eriko felt it happening, wonderfully beyond her ability to resist. Kei said something else, and then more.

Hikari sank to her knees in front of Eriko, her gaze rigid, and Eriko almost felt it as it slid down her body. Kei’s voice was soft but its words made no sense to Eriko now. But that was as it should be, this deep in trance. Eriko found herself looking down, seeing Hikari reach up, feeling the other girl’s hands gently open her shorts, the other girl’s . . . breath . . . soft . . . so warm and . . .

Kei’s voice pulsed and Hikari kissed Eriko’s nether lips as tenderly as a new bride. Eriko couldn’t even hear herself scream inside her head with the awful pleasure of it. Hikari held her hips and Kei her shoulders, and she tried to stand as her pussy drew her hips to thrust toward Hikari’s mouth.

The orgasms blurred Eriko’s mind. She was looking down at Hikari, and Hikari stared at Eriko’s mons as though it were her hypnotic focus.

That made Eriko think of spirals, and the more urgently her cunt spasmed the more the throbbing whirlpool owned her.

Later, she lay somewhere, naked, kissing Kei-chan and tasting both of them on the other Race Queen’s mouth. She glimpsed a tangle of silvery fabric nearby and felt a hand in her hair.

A keitai came on and someone speed-dialed.

The words flowed around what was left of Eriko’s consciousness as Kei began kissing her way down Eriko’s body.

“Mistress . . . Mistress. Yes. Being a Race Queen was everything I dreamed it would be, and then to be helplessly obeying Kei-chan.” It was Hikari, and she laughed. “So deliciously humiliating, Mistress. Thank You.”

Eriko idly touched Kei’s braid crown, but neither that nor hearing her name roused the other girl from her quest for more of Eriko’s honey.

“Yes, Mistress. Thank You. I will not ask to play often. But this does feel so wonderful.” Hikari didn’t sound nearly as hypnotized now, but Eriko was too sleepy and aroused to care.

“Yes, Mistress.” Hikari sounded more wistful, and Eriko tried to move her head to comfort her, but Kei slid a small cool breast against Eriko’s cleft and made her forget everything.

“I am happy for Natsumi now, Mistress.” Hikari seemed happier, when Eriko had a moment to think between waves of what Kei’s mouth was doing to her. “If this is how it feels to be one of Your narikin, I’m sorry I ever questioned Your choice to convert her. I only wish she could remember what You have let her surrender.”

Eriko purred, as Hikari and Kei each happened to stroke her, very gently, at the same time.

“Yes, Mistress.” Hikari’s voice darkened, but the smile was still audible. “I do have some ideas, now. You have helped me see things in the only correct way.”

She cupped a hand on Eriko’s cheek from above. “And You will have just the girl for that.”