The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

A flash of sheet lightning in the dark. A momentary violet strobe-shadow on the dark outer boundary wall. A woman frozen in the act of running, a silhouette of a statue, graceful, limbs spread like a dancer; then an eerie negative afterimage, and a sharp instant of silence before the blast wave hit.

I’d expected noise—steeled myself for it—but the sound of the explosion was still overwhelming. Thunder rolled over me as I pressed my hands to my ears. I was pretty sure I was screaming, but if I was it was inaudible amidst bedlam. The instant seemed to last forever. I lay on the ground, breathless, hardly daring to move as the storm of debris blew past.

The noise quickly died, the last of the wreckage clattering down around me, and I gingerly stood up, instinctively checking myself for damage. The air was full of dust, and from the hole in the wall a few faint shafts of light shone. Something moved, half seen in the wind, twisting and swirling; fleeting shadows against shadow as the traumatised structural tendrils of the facility wall sought each other blindly, trying vainly to knit back together.

Hurriedly, I checked my heads up was intact. Check: all present and correct; a faintly luminous overlay of augmented reality, ghostly against the dust, constantly connected by the thing in my head.

A portion of the wall squirmed on the ground beside me like a squashed cat on the highway, still half alive, some inbuilt instinct trying to drag itself back towards the hole in the wall. The wounded biotech revolted me. How had the world come to this so quickly?

Buildings that grew. Cars that were practically animals. Shapeless mole-like creatures that burrowed blindly beneath cities, laying cables; things that lived in the sewers and grew healthy and fat on our waste; chairs that shifted around you and embraced you like flesh. All that was just the beginning, they said. And they were right.

There was salt in the air, the sound of waves crashing far below on the other side of the building, far below the clifftop on which it sat.

A distant alarm began to whine, universal signifier of trouble.

As far as I knew, nobody in full possession of their faculties had ever tried to break into this place, and certainly nobody like me. Well, I thought, there’s a first time for everything. Looking around, a superimposition of fragmented images; fractured memories blurred against the clarity of my intention. My sister was here, somewhere, in a featureless room, one of many; every anonymous story identical in the end.

And grey everywhere, endless grey.

The room was pale grey and windowless, with a nacreous organic sheen to it, and her head hurt.

There was a statuesque blonde woman standing in the doorway, watching her, expressionless. She wore a simple grey one-piece with a zipper up the front. It seemed very tight, a little small for her curves. Her eyes were grey.

“Where am I?” she asked. Her mouth was dry. “Am I in hospital? What’s happened?”

The woman looked at her, expressionless. “You are here. Nothing has happened. You have been asleep, here.”

She sat up in bed, suddenly alarmed. “What do you mean, here? Where is ‘here’?”

A tiny frown creased the woman’s clear forehead. “Here. That is where,” and she waved her arm, indicating the grey room and the grey corridor outside.

Her head swam with confusion and frustration. “And what, exactly, is ‘here’?”

“Here is the place where we are.”

“Then I shouldn’t be ‘here’. I don’t belong here. How did I get here?”

“There is nobody here who doesn’t belong here.” The woman paused. “Are you hungry? Thirsty?”

Yes, I am, she realised. She nodded. A thought tickled. There was something she’d forgotten; something important.

The woman indicated the grey wall of the room she’d woken up in. From its otherwise blank surface dangled a single tentacular grey pipe. “Then you should take nourishment.”

She stood up unsteadily, wrapping the thin grey bedsheet around her. She eyed it suspiciously. “What is that thing?”

“This is an umbilical. A feeding tube. All rooms have a feeding tube. For your convenience.”

The woman held out the flexible tube invitingly. There was a nozzle of some sort on the end, a nipple-like mouthpiece. She took the tube gingerly, but made no move to use it. It wriggled slightly in her hand, snakelike, its end stretching itself out towards her mouth, questing. She regarded it with astonishment and horror, and let it go. It flopped back against the wall, twisting slightly, still seeking its goal.

“Isn’t there a cafeteria? A vending machine?”

The woman shook her head slowly. “That is unnecessary. We have the feeding tubes.”

She just stared, dumbfounded. This is a dream, she thought. What a very strange dream.

With a brief smile, the woman turned and walked away.

I picked my way carefully through the twitching hole in the wall, ignoring the glutinous sap now leaking from the damaged structure. The floor underfoot was slightly soft, fleshy to the feel, a faintly nauseating sign that the building was, in a strictly limited sense, alive. Biotech was everywhere, here, as it was in so much of the world now. I’d heard they were growing the tallest building in the world right now—five sheer kilometres of vertical autonomous living stuff, plunging its taproots hundreds of feet deep into the ground, unknowable, indestructible and unkillable—in Kuala Lumpur; or was it Seoul? And if not there, coming to a city near you soon.

The room inside was dusty; some kind of disused storeroom. As my ears began to recover, I could hear sirens and shouting. Time was of the essence. I quickly called up the building’s floorplan on AR. The floorplan was as accurate as could be got from Takeshi’s hacks, and knowing Takeshi I thought it was probably both reliable and up to date. A tiny green dot, blinking, told me where I was, a tiny abstracted symbol of ‘me’ amidst a labyrinth of corridors winding around the phantom outlines of rooms with innocuous labels like ‘administration’, ‘processing centre’, ‘intensive correction unit’, ‘physical enhancement centre’, and so on.

My heartbeat spiked with anger and a residual tingle of fear. I knew all too well what these labels meant. What had they done to my sister, in these blandly labelled rooms?

A pang of chilly uncertainty: would I be able to find her? Would I even recognise her?

And would she recognise me in return?

Something moved in my peripheral vision. Takeshi’s subroutines kicked in, the thing in my head sparking into life, and I swung instantly, hands raised and ready to fight; my still vaguely unfamiliar reflection stared at my fiercely from the cracked glass door of the room. Nothing more than a reflection. I relaxed in relief and lowered my fists. I put my hand to my cheek, reflexively checking it was still really me underneath this new skin. The touch was comforting.

The one thing they hadn’t ever figured out how to change was the eyes.

But this was no time for self-indulgent thoughts. Things were as they were. I scanned the heads up, picked a direction and set off down the corridor. Some deeply embedded instinct for trouble told me that wherever the alarms were loudest, that was exactly where I should be heading.

On the wall by the ‘feeding tube’ was a mirror, unless it wasn’t. She goggled at her reflection in shock.

That was not her face. Her face did not have those full lips, that nose, those cheekbones. And the eyes, although still hers, were subtly different too, wider somehow. What trick was this? She stared, unable to comprehend what she was looking at. Those were surely not her breasts…

For a moment she was paralysed, gaping comically at the strange woman gaping comically back at her. She raised her hand to her cheek, and her reflection did the same. Except for her eyes, she looked exactly like the woman she’d seen earlier.

She felt panic begin to rise in her chest; struggling for breath, she couldn’t take her eyes off what she saw. What had happened, here?

There was something she’d forgotten. Something important.

From behind her, a male voice. “You appear stressed. Do you require stress relief?”

She span, instinctively pulling up the bedsheet to cover herself. There was a man in the doorway of the room. For a long moment all she could do was stare.

“Stress relief? What do you mean?” she finally managed to say.

“It is also good practice. Practice makes perfect.”

Unaccountably, she felt her nipples stiffen, and an unexpected wet heat rising against her will. She drew the bedsheet tighter around her.

“Well you can forget about that,” she snapped. The man made no move to leave.

“Practice makes perfect,” he reiterated, in that odd monotone. “Please remove your covering.”

“What? My covering?”

She felt the sudden urge to drop the sheet and go to him. The desire for sex was suddenly overpowering. She felt breathless and flushed.

“Yes,” he said. “Please remove your covering and lie on the bed so that I can penetrate you and achieve relief. It will be good for you.”

Yes. She wanted to do that so badly. That was the whole point; what else was there in this world? Surely that would be the best thing to do, best for him, best for her, best for everybody. Her eyes widened in confusion. The logic seemed inescapable. Yes, of course. It was obvious. She needed to smile at him, encourage him, take him in her hand, in her mouth, take him inside her, let him take her, and take her pleasure from him in return. It would be so good to…

“Fuck you!” she snapped.

Without reaction or acknowledgement, the man turned and walked out. She heard him walk a few soft steps down the corridor and stop. Still breathless with illogical lust, she poked her head out the doorway. The man was standing in front of another doorway, diagonally opposite.

“I require stress relief,” he said to the occupant of the room. “Practice makes perfect.” She saw a woman step towards him, utterly naked, facing him in the doorway. The woman was identical, except for her brown eyes. They made no move towards each other.

“Yes,” the woman said flatly. “Please.”

The woman backed slowly into the room, beckoning with a blank-eyed coquettishness, and the man followed her inside.

She wrapped the bedsheet around herself and returned, panting, horrified yet fascinated, to the unsettling sight in the mirror.

There was something she’d forgotten. Something important…

With a shock she realised she couldn’t remember her name.

Through the dust I glimpsed the shadow of a figure outside the door, the blur of someone reaching for the handle. Instantly I was flat against the wall. The door opened, sticking slightly against the debris. A man stepped into the room; an administrator, I saw, not a guard. Sandy haired, bespectacled, not as tall as me, staring in bemusement at the wreckage and the writhing hole in the thick organic wall. The look of surprise on his face almost made me laugh. I didn’t breathe as he took a step forward into the room. One more step; then he was down, unconscious. I leaned down, checked his pulse to be sure. Alive—but he’d never know what hit him. Or who.

The corridor outside was full of dust and smoke and bits of twitching structure now. Good: CCTV would be blind. I moved fast, hugging the walls. The lighting in here was nightlight-dim, but in the middle distance I could see hints of brightness. Checking Takeshi’s pirated floorplan, I saw ‘administration’ was next up, and that’s where security really started. I sensed, rather than heard, the distant sound of footsteps, running, gradually getting louder, and pressed myself into the dark safety of an alcove.

Two black-clad guards trundled down the corridor, weapons cocked, boots thudding on the gunmetal grey floor, eyes fixed in front of them with distant intent, heading for the site of the damage.

Takeshi’s avatar blinked pale in my peripheral vision; her voice like dry leaves in wind: Weapons.

As the guards passed at a trot I swung out of the alcove, rolling fast and soundless, reaching up with my left hand and grabbing the Taser from one of the guards’ belt. They noticed nothing; they didn’t break stride as I straightened silent behind them and stepped catlike back into the shadows on the other side of the corridor, pocketing the Taser in a side zipper pouch.

I risked a glance round the corner. People were beginning to swarm now.

I ducked back into the alcove, breathing heavily. What had Takeshi said?

You have the advantage of anonymity. Your best and only protection.

Anonymity. Interchangeability. Commodification. Identical, indistinguishable things.

Mister Talv, of course, had no truck with the mass market. He found such things distasteful and entirely offensive to his aesthetic. He found the idea of this place and its products tantamount to, as he put it in his characteristically florid turn of phrase, a low-grade copy shop.

Quantity does not equal quality. Mister Talv had been most emphatic in this, and although my perspective on the matter was a little less objective, I couldn’t help but agree.

Creeping fast from shadow to shadow, I edged closer to the small crowd. I subvocalized Takeshi: “What do they know?”

They know somebody has blown a hole in the wall from the outside, and they know it can’t repair itself. They suspect an intruder #statethebleedingobvious. Industrial espionage, that sort of thing. There is a window of opportunity.

“CCTV at the perimeter…?”

Hazy. You were a ghost, going in. A shadow, #invisible. But care: the smoke is clearing, and as of now, within the perimeter proper, you are not.

Crouched in a doorway, I listened, deciding on my next move. More guards passed, boots clumping with the gracelessness of men.

“Any sign of intruders?” said a male voice.

“Searching now, sir.”

Anonymity. Identical, indistinguishable things.

I took a deep breath, squared my shoulders, lifted my chest into best display position, assumed the requisite expression of blank, doll-like compliance, and stepped out into the corridor.