The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

1.

Paula enjoyed the sudden cool breeze, out here by Maeve’s pool. She wasn’t used to these moody, equivocal East Coast summers, but between the days of humidity there were delightful little surprises like this.

She must have made a noise or wriggled on the lounge chair, because Sharon laughed quietly, and when Paula turned to her she was shaking her head. With long practice Paula hid the pang she always felt when she knew Sharon was looking at her, not feeling anything but affection.

Rolling her head, she looked over to where Maeve lay regally supine in her copper maillot, smiling. Maeve knew she was a lesbian, and Maeve had a cruel streak, so Paula couldn’t tell exactly which irony she was savoring.

But she held Paula’s gaze for a moment. “I’ll need an answer soon, Paula.”

It was Maeve’s Process again, the brilliant atrocity she’d been putting together for years. Paula sank back against the towel, realizing the affected fatigue was a stall and Maeve knew it. So hard to play mind games with another psychologist. She decided to preempt with sincerity. “It all comes down to mind control being wrong,” she said.

Maeve blinked like a cat rebuked for mousing. “It’s a technique, Paula. Right or wrong is about how it’s used. Its purpose.”

“Not just how but whether to use it, Maeve. This is about the human mind and free will. Controlling them’s not a neutral act. It’s not like any other process there is. It’s why I’ve stayed away from experimentation. Too many slippery slopes.”

Maeve tilted her head slightly. “Stayed away from a Ph.D., too.”

Paula looked at her without speaking. She heard Sharon sigh; Sharon, from the University’s economics faculty, hadn’t known Maeve nearly as long, but long enough to know she could be this way, especially when crossed.

But Maeve reached a hand toward her. “Sounds cliche, Paula, but I do respect that. I know how much you value a doctorate, so I have an idea how much of a sacrifice it was. Is. I’m offering you a way to come in that doesn’t compromise you. You can compromise it, in fact.”

“You mean if I’m coopted, I can work from the inside?” Paula tried to tell herself not to let Maeve get to her, if only because Maeve was so much better at this kind of fencing.

“Using loaded words won’t promote understanding,” Maeve said, instead of following up. She was serious about this. She raised herself to look over Paula. “Sharon, is this starting to bore you?”

Paula turned back to look, wondering what signal Sharon could have sent, since this was the part of their shoptalk the pretty economist usually seemed interested in. She sat up on her lounger and grinned at them. “Well, I never thought mind control could be boring, but hanging around with you two has been eye-opening.” Sharon stood, and Paula forgot about the other woman’s interest in mind control as she silently drank in her lithe lines, the way the bikini didn’t so much cover her breasts and crotch as cup them tenderly. “Or eye-closing, wouldn’t that be ironic.

“Anyone else want something?” She half-turned as she walked across the long patio, and what it did to the muscles on her back and hip made Paula glad she’d crossed her legs. They’d come here to Maeve’s tenured-professor’s house on a lark, an afternoon when they’d all been free and had nothing keeping them on-campus. Maeve had picked out suits to lend them, and Paula was really starting to hate her for that.

“No, thanks,” Paula said, relieved to hear it come out evenly. Maeve just waved. They watched her pass through the sliding doors.

“How long have you been wanting her?” Maeve was looking at her again.

Paula ignored the bait for an argument, the one about it not being hers to ask, and stared her down. “First sight. She was playing tennis. Made me wish I did.” She closed her eyes, anticipated the next question. “No, I haven’t, not a thing. She’s straight-arrow, not even curious. She thinks I ‘m pretty, but just admires it. Not . . .”

“Does she know?” It was unlike Maeve to be so personally concerned, not to say intrusive, but Paula was one of the few people she even opened up to. Paula wished she hadn’t picked that particular nerve to rub against, but Maeve was still her friend.

Maeve seemed to sense it and backed off. She sighed. “Paula, I need you. I’ve got corporate funding, and they like what they see. But if you’re—weak on research, I don’t have the theoretical perspective you do. Or talent in that area, frankly. Or the clinical track record.”

“Well . . .” What could she say? Clinical? I’m glad you’ve grasped that this involves human patients, not two-legged lab rats?

“I know.” Maeve’s smile softened. “I remember Vasquez telling me I had the bedside manner of a tarantula.”

Paula rolled her head on the lounger. “I remember too.” In front of the whole section. It was true, worse luck. “And he was way out of line.”

Maeve looked at her. “You told him so, too, in front of everyone. I don’t think I ever thanked you.” Then the smile was back. “I did take it as a complement. But that’s a side you’d handle much better anyway.

“Of course, I can do it alone. That is, take on someone not as good or insightful as you. But it won’t work as well.”

Paula sighed. “Maeve, controlling other people is wrong. I don’t want it to work. I’m sorry.”

“What if,” Maeve nodded toward the house, “you could control her?”

Paula smiled, closed her eyes, and leaned back. God, what would Sharon think about that remark? “That’s sick, Maeve.”

When nothing happened, she turned back again. Maeve was still looking at her.

“It’s not even funny as an idea.”

The door slid open. Sharon stepped out with a water bottle and started to close it.

“Sharon,” Maeve called, still looking at Paula, “may I make a suggestion?”

Sharon stood expectantly. “Sure, Maeve. What?”

“Why not play waitress? Two glasses of white.”

“Sure, Maeve.” She grinned, winked at Paula, and stepped back inside.

Paula sat back. “Under the circumstances,” she said, “I’d be pretty foolish to drink it, wouldn’t I?” Sometimes you just had to push back when Maeve was in a mood like this, especially one of her elaborate, sometimes quite unfunny “jokes”. Sharon had winked, hadn’t she?

Maeve settled back, looking up at the house. “You’re not likely to be as brilliant if you’re drugged,” she said patiently. Paula waited for it. “Besides, it could have been in the sunscreen.”

Paula laughed, letting herself sag on the chair. At least Maeve hadn’t lost her admittedly tarantula-oriented sense of humor. Maeve’s whispery chuckle was almost inaudible, but it was there.

Sharon came out, complete with tray, towel, and dazzling smile. The tray held two goblets, but there was no sign of the water she’d almost brought out for herself before. As she stepped carefully, gracefully around the pool, Paula tried to fight the power of seeing her beautiful friend, naked and servile, accessible, obedient . . .

She grunted quietly and saw she’d almost drawn blood in her clenched hand. It was on the side away from Maeve, to her relief. But Maeve was looking at Sharon anyway, and when the economist came past the glass table she said, “Sharon, what kind of waitress are you?”

Sharon stopped cold but deftly balanced the tray to avoid a spill, then set it down on the table and the towel with it. She reached back, undid the bikini top, and tossed it upward and behind her without looking. She was already swaying toward them again with the tray, her nipples almost photographically in line above the glasses, when the scrap of fabric plished into the pool.

Paula swallowed. This was farther than Maeve would usually go, and she had no idea Sharon would play along like this. Sharon had to know how this display made her feel, not just sexual frustration but the betrayal of seeing a friend willing to do this, mocking her desire, knowing it would hurt. Did Sharon have that much of a problem with Paula platonically lusting after her, and no way to deal with it but to rub her nose in what she couldn’t have?

Sharon stepped between the lounge chairs and flowed to her knees. She offered the tray first to Maeve, who held her eyes while taking a glass. Even this close view of her exquisite back was lost on Paula, the way she felt now.

She wanted to jump up and run to her car and just write them off, hoping in a few years to understand how badly she’d misjudged them. She couldn’t bring herself to run away, not yet, so she clawed for something to analyze. Why didn’t she, as “guest” of the “mistress”, get the first glass, and the chance to choose it? Had they not anticipated her crack about drugs in the wine?

Then Sharon turned to her, her thighs curved under her, bare breasts out, back straight, head bowed to look up meekly, her suppliant hands under the tray. A single glass now, offered to Paula by a well-trained slave girl, who looked at her over it with guileless eyes.

Hopeful eyes.

For you. Just for you.

Paula breathed in, trying to do it silently. Had she gotten it completely wrong? Was this Sharon’s way of seducing her? Had Maeve, in her eerily intermittent understanding of other people’s feelings, agreed to provide the setting? Did they both think that Paula really wanted a slave, even as a fantasy?

She didn’t dare ask herself if they were right.

2.

Sharon hadn’t moved. She knelt as if her life was now reduced to waiting on Paula’s pleasure. Oh . . . Paula forced herself to whisper, “No, thank you.”

Sharon blinked and nodded, then rose fluidly to her feet, still balancing the glass, and stood still, looking quietly over them to the privacy fence.

“On the table,” Maeve ordered her softly, and Sharon turned and went to set the tray down. She stood by the table, faced outward, and put her hands behind her back.

Paula looked at her, but for all the beauty of that body, she couldn’t keep looking. She did want a lover, not a slave. Sharon was a talented young instructor in the difficult Dismal Science, not a mindless house menial. Even as a game, this was bent. Maybe it wasn’t betrayal, but it just left her feeling bad.

Maeve broke the silence. “Sharon, you need to stop being a waitress.” Despite herself, Paula listened. She waited for praise, for something. Maeve just said, “Take a dip in the pool and put your top back on.”

The economist obeyed instantly, stepping forward and diving in with aching grace, then swimming around to retrieve the top and treading water while she got it on. A moment later she was out and reaching for a towel, grinning and bright-eyed.

Paula almost wanted to go over and pass her the towel, dry her, protect her, unable to get the helplessly submissive Sharon of a minute ago out of her thoughts.

She went with an impulse instead. “Um, Sharon?” Good; at least I can still talk. “May I make a suggestion?”

Sharon briskly toweled herself and went to work on her hair. “As long as it involves me lying down there, suggest away.”

Null response. But she didn’t seem embarrassed, or even playful, about what she’d just done. Hypnotic amnesia? Was that trance real, but only triggered by Maeve’s voice using the phrase? Or was the phrase anything but a bit of drama from Maeve? Had Maeve really put her in the pool just so a wet bra, by itself, wouldn’t confuse her?

Shit. “Sharon, did Maeve hypnotize you?”

Sharon looked at her and frowned. “No. Where’d that come from?”

Paula ignored the cold feeling she was getting and pointed to the wineglass on the table. “Where’d that come from?”

The economist shrugged, tossing the towel onto her chair. “Mind control humor,” she said. “Another contradiction in terms.”

Paula sat up, swinging her legs over to balance. And be ready to run for real? “Sharon, please. I’m not kidding about this.”

Sharon looked back at her, recognizing the real concern, and smiled. “It’s OK, Paula. I know you don’t get upset over nothing, but don’t worry, OK? I ‘ve never been hypnotized in my life.” She grinned, and it was such a free and healthy thing that Paula almost couldn’t look at her. “Economists are very very hard to put to sleep, you know. We do that to everyone else.”

Paula swallowed again, closed her eyes. She saw Sharon looking at her with concern of her own. Sharon flicked a glance past her at Maeve, but it was neither guilty nor gleeful (thank God for that). “Then how do you explain what you just did?”

Sharon looked at the pool. She visibly swallowed yet another crack, perhaps about learning to swim as a child, and turned back. She seemed to be getting annoyed.

“If you two are going to set me up, be a little less high-concept, OK?”

Paula turned to Maeve, seeing nothing in her friend’s eyes but measurement. “You didn’t.“

“Didn’t what?” Sharon asked, swinging her gaze between them, letting the irritation seep into her voice.

Paula turned back to her, having no answer but suddenly feeling urgently someone had to speak to Sharon, not treat her like an object. But she couldn’t even begin. She breathed a few times and held Sharon’s eyes, hoping the effort by itself would serve for now. She turned back to Maeve.

“I think—I think—you’re still my friend. But . . .”

“Sharon.” Maeve, again, was speaking to Sharon but looking at Paula. “I’m not sure Paula really understood.”

“Apparently.”

“Sharon? I respect that you’re completely resistant to any form of hypnosis.”

Sharon came to attention, staring calmly through Paula.

Maeve snapped her fingers, and Sharon left her own chair to resume attention at the foot of Maeve’s. Now she stared at nothing. Another snap, and she undid her top again. This time she reached down and released the strings on her bottom, which slid unheeded to her feet.

Paula watched her. This was no laboratory, though as Maeve’s territory she couldn’t call it a home, but she tried to diagnose whatever had happened to Sharon. She’d given up thinking this was a joke, since Sharon would have lost patience with it long ago. Sharon’s affect was different, not so much subdued as it had been in the “waitress” role, but almost suppressed. She was empty, drained of what was vital and free about “Sharon” but not filled with anything else.

Maeve’s Process.

“You did.“

“I did.” Maeve was unperturbed, and Paula found herself back in an earlier mood. Who was this woman she’d thought was a distant but trustworthy friend? “Introduce yourself.”

“I am subject 1/A/001-F,” Sharon reported. “I am research material. My reason for living is to obey the Doctor.”

“Jesus,” Paula whispered.

“You can speak to her, Paula. I’ve programmed her to imprint on you.”

Paula shook her head. “Change her back. Change her the fuck back.“ She wanted to glare at Maeve, to see what face this friend was wearing, but she couldn’t take her eyes off Sharon, nude and obedient, waiting for someone to tell her what to think.

Maeve was shaking her head in turn. “I can’t,” she said quietly, and Paula prayed she sensed something there in that quiet, a trace of remorse. Something.

“You mean it didn’t work?” Paula shrank from the implications of the word damage, and what it meant for what lay behind Sharon’s beautiful blank face, her lovely empty eyes.

“Oh, it worked. I can’t change her back because I designed and executed the Process as a one-way sequence.” Maeve’s eyes were worse than empty now. “Thus it’s very much the product of a pure empiricist. If it’s to be expanded, made adjustable, even reversible, then we need a theoretician to change our whole model. Teach us the paths we don’t see now. Not just any theoretician, either. Someone with the kind of intuitive reach that scared Vasquez and Wells.

“You.”

Paula sank down to the lounge chair, seeing Sharon standing there as she was discussed, wondering if she heard. Could care.

“If? If it can be reversible? You did that to her and you don’t know?”

“As I said. I’ve taken it as far as I can.” Maeve sighed as she did when impatient. “As you saw, Sharon’s still Sharon. Completely functional as herself, and so far with no recall that she’s subject 1/A/001-F unless, and only as long as, she’s triggered.”

“So far?”

“When I give her to you, Paula, Sharon will awaken to herself as a slave. Your slave. I’ll still have override, and that’s not entirely because of you. This is still an experiment. But she’ll realize that what makes her live, what fulfills her, is pleasing you.”

Paula already knew what she was going to do. It calmed her as she said, “She’s not a slave, you . . . she’s a professor of macroeconomics. She’s a person.”

“If you want her to be, Paula, that’s fine. I presumed you might, so I’m counting on her as a source for data on high-end performance. I don’t mean the Process to produce drones. Not just drones.”

Paula got up and started walking toward the glass door.

3.

Maeve sighed again. “All right, I’ll say it. ‘Why, where are you going, Paula?’”

Paula kept walking. “Clothes. Car. Police.” She tried to walk out the sudden tremor as she wondered if Maeve was about to trigger some assassin program in Sharon’s mind, send her running across the flagstones after Paula like death’s angel, but she didn’t look back.

“Paula, think about who you’re dealing with.” With Maeve, that was always a reasonable request. “If you just walk away, I’ll understand, and she just goes to the inbox of whoever I get to replace you on the team.

“But if you go to anyone with this, or try to deny me access to Sharon now or later, she’ll be dead before you get off the phone.”

She looked back. Sharon still stood in her trance, Maeve still sat at her ease in her slave’s shadow.

My slave’s shadow, Paula thought. She’s trying to gift me with a human being. Or maybe that’s the point, the sad fucking point about my friend Maeve. She really has been faking it all this time, and there are no human beings for her.

Maeve met her gaze effortlessly. “Oh, I won’t do a visible thing. She’s programmed to self-destruct.”

“Self-destruct is for machines, Maeve.” She wanted to add something about clinical lessons, that real patients are the ones who scream and bleed and need you, but Maeve was clearly just too goddamned dangerous to provoke. She walked slowly back to the chairs, and the two of them.

“For humans it’s suicide,” Maeve agreed. “She has discretion; she’s not entirely a robot even now. But the imperative’s irresistible. She’ll obey.

“Won’t you?”

“Yes, Doctor.” Sharon spoke, still gazing into the distance. “I understand that if program security, program requirements, or your command at any time direct my death, I will kill myself. I am programmed to recognize the need and act at once. I will not disobey the program.”

“What’s your default for that?”

“I must return to my home.” Sharon’s tone was still even, matter-of-fact. “I must draw a bath.” She wasn’t breathing hard, or trembling, or sweating, or even blinking. “I must plug in the hair dryer.” She wasn’t showing the slightest sign that she might be fighting even the idea of destroying herself at another’s command. “I must turn the dryer on, step into the water, and bring the dryer into the water with me.”

Paula looked at her, seeing it happen, and this time could not look at Maeve, who she knew would let it happen, make it happen, just as calmly as Sharon—subject 1/A/001-F—recited it. But Maeve hadn’t had to have the human instincts Processed out of her.

No one spoke. Sharon had not been told what else to say. Maeve seemed content to let Paula mull it over. Paula was just trying to wake up.

This couldn’t be happening. She couldn’t have heard one friend say that she’d raped another friend’s mind so much that the other would engineer an ugly, painful death just as a security measure. She couldn’t have heard the second friend recite it all like a school assignment.

But when she tried not to think about it she found herself staring at Sharon’s clean-limbed nudity. The almost-violet nipples she’d never seen and only fantasized about unveiling in candlelight, from behind lingerie she ‘d bought. The lush thighs Sharon was always worrying about—needlessly, in Paula’s opinion.

If Sharon was so obedient she’d destroy her own life without hesitation, then . . . what lesser orders would she obey?

God! I am NOT thinking that! I’m NOT!

Her gaze settled on Sharon’s small, unruly thatch of pubic hair. I could have her shave it.

Or I could have her keep it, so if I were ever to lean down I could remember . . .

“Maeve, if I do anything, I won’t be trying to improve—what you did. I’ll be trying to cure her. I’ll be trying to bring her back to normal, and fuck your Process. Does that get her killed?”

Shaking her head, Maeve looked up at Sharon. Seeing another two-legged lab rat? “No, Paula. That’s the whole idea. I knew you needed a purpose, and you don’t share mine.

“This way, we have the same objective. You’ll use project facilities, and report data to me. Whatever help you need, you’ll have. If you help her, you help me improve the Process. If you actually reverse it and restore her will, it’ll be a quantum change in our understanding of the whole mechanism of the human will. It’d be win-win-win.”

Maeve stood, walked around Sharon, rested a hand on her side, under her ribs. Sharon remained still and quiet. “Of course, finding out how to reverse it, and actually deciding to, are two entirely separate things.” She looked Paula in the eye, and Paula waited for her to fondle Sharon somewhere else, but she didn’t.

“Does she remember anything about being . . . Processed?”

“Most everything,” Maeve said, and Paula wondered how it must feel to remember losing your will to someone else, to have been free but to be free no longer. Perhaps she could only recall it on command, when triggered.

Or maybe part of the Process was the constant, soul-crushing reminder of losing the struggle, until one tired of remembering and submitted completely. God. She had no choice. She had to pull Sharon out of that pit, as soon as she possibly could.

Submitted completely . . .

For a moment anyway, she was actually glad for the distraction when Maeve snapped her fingers again. Seeing how simple these signals were, how little room there was for change, Paula was chilled to think how confident Maeve must have been of the outcome.

This time, the trigger dropped Sharon to kneel in front of Paula, as supple a movement as when she’d played serving girl, but painfully soulless now. Her eyes were clear, and lacked the false note of desire they’d had before. Then Maeve said something, nonsense words in a singsong tone, and Sharon closed her eyes.

Reopened them and smiled.

Wanting Paula. As Paula had dreamed.

For you. Just for you.

Sharon leaned forward, and Maeve stood up and left them, walking slowly toward the other end of the pool. Paula watched Sharon reach for her bikini bottom and undo the strings to free her pussy. Maeve had chosen that suit for her. She didn’t even have to move.

No. I should move. I should take her and we should go. But Sharon was here, and her look was too . . . Paula leaned back and felt Sharon delicately, reverently start to worship her.

This is wrong. She doesn’t really want this. I . . . don’t . . . really . . .want . . . She bit her lip and levered herself up, and reached forward to touch Sharon’s warm hair and push her gently, gently away.

Sharon cooperated as soon as she sensed Paula’s desire. She settled back on her heels and looked up serenely at Paula, waiting. The submission in her eyes was almost unbearable. Paula couldn’t tell how much of her reaction was horror at how Sharon had been violated, and how much was avidity at what if offered . . .

“Do you want this to happen? Do you want to do this?” she asked Sharon, her voice still husky, carrying a tremor that began down in her denied pussy.

“Yes, Mistress.” That almost sent Paula over. She clenched her fist again. I can’t let her call me that. Not for long or I won’t want her to stop.

But when she spoke she asked, “Why?”

Sharon smiled. “It’s my programming, Mistress. I love you and I want to please you. And you’re the most attractive woman in the world.” She said it reasonably, in tones that should have carried words about real love, about her own feelings. Maeve’s atrocity of a Process was atrocious precisely because it came so close to what was real.

Paula closed her eyes. “Please come up and sit by me.” She felt the air move, and then she felt Sharon’s warm skin against hers as . . . her slave . . . moved against her, fitting her body to Paula’s at so many places. Sharon held her lightly, and there was more comfort than arousal in the way she did.

Well, only one of us needs it right now, Paula thought. She opened her eyes and stared into Sharon’s. She touched her cheek.

“I accept you,” she said. She simply could not make herself finish “as my slave”, but she saw the glow in Sharon’s face anyway. “But I’m going to help you. That’s why I’m doing it. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Mistress. I understand. Thank you for accepting me.”

“And for helping you to be free again?”

“I want what you want me to, Mistress. I don’t understand not being a slave, but if you wish to make that happen, you have my obedience as in all other things. I hope you know that, Mistress.”

“Count on it,” Paula said. Then, she leaned closer, touching her forehead to Sharon’s, submerging in the other woman’s nearness.

I’m saving her. I’m doing this to free her.

“Sharon, I wanted to say this some other way. In another world. I would give anything to say it to the free woman you used to be. But . . .

“I love you, and I will set you free. If you walk away from me I will know I’ve succeeded.” And I’ll die inside—but that’s the last thing I’ll say to a slave who lives for me.

Her slave looked back at her. “I don’t understand, Mistress. But I know I have something to thank you for. And I love you, too.”

“Yes. I know.” Paula kissed her.

I want her to be able to say No to me.

Don’t I?

I can give her dignity, I can keep her teaching. I can tell her to sleep in her own bed. Paula looked over to where Maeve sat at the pool’s edge, kicking her feet slowly and watching the ripples. She looked over at the TV Maeve had wheeled out earlier, with its long cord. She thought about hair dryers.

Maeve looked up at her and grinned. Right. Self-destruct.

Paula looked back, then shifted her gaze to her slave. To Sharon, who was resting her head on Paula’s shoulder, her breath running lightly over her chest.. I can do all that, but this will take years. Years with a beautiful obedient woman who exists to please me. Who’ll deny me nothing.

Years. Years of . . . always yes.

Paula bleakly wondered whom Maeve was really conditioning, and how many evil Processes she was running.

“Sharon.”

Her sl—the other woman—looked up.

“Here is a . . . command. Each day you will remind me, at a time when you can see that I’m paying attention, that I need to know that as long as your purpose in life is to obey me, my purpose in life is to free you.

“You will do this even if I am obviously working on that very thing. Or obviously not wanting to hear it. Each time you do tell me, you will then say to yourself, ‘It’s my right that she does that for me.’”

“And if—” Paula’s breath caught, and she closed her eyes on the caring she saw in Sharon’s face. “If I ever, ever tell you not to remind me, or stop you when you do, then . . . obey that command, but say ‘You told me to say . . . Paula didn’t think you’d be able to do it.’

“Can you . . .?” But of course a Processed slave would remember a command.

Sharon looked at her. “Yes, Mistress. I will obey.” I’ll have to get her to stop calling me that.

Please let me want to.

Paula looked deep into Sharon’s eyes. Years of always yes.

Oh, no . . .