The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

I walked out of the maintenance room and into a line of women who looked exactly like me, all moving like clockwork down the corridor. I locked step effortlessly, blending in seamlessly, just one of the crowd. Safety in numbers. The thing in my head made it easier than I’d thought, and again I felt the pull of the void, the blankness of the ingrained routines straining to be free from wherever in my skull Takeshi had imprisoned them.

The heads up told me we were heading for the central holding zone. Behind me was the programming centre. This group of women must be new, I thought; freshly processed. I chanced a glance to my left; it was like looking in a mirror, like looking at myself. Identical, anonymous, interchangeable.

Talv’s avatar flashed for attention in the heads up.

“What is it, Talv?” I subvocalised. “I’m busy. I need to concentrate.”

Too busy for me? After all I’ve done for you…?

I stifled a grin. “Never. Tricky moments though. Stressful. I can’t give myself away right now.” I pushed myself back into blank-faced mode, letting the rhythmic lull of synchronised footsteps carry me along, willing myself to calm, slowing my heartbeat.

A weirdly organic quasi-steel door opened at the end of the corridor, and my heart briefly fluttered with anxiety. The tracery of Takeshi’s augmented reality floorplan still glowed, but even without the helpful little labels, I knew exactly where it led. Without breaking step, the women walked through the door, and so did I. An unbidden shiver; I heard the door whisper closed behind me with a terrifying finality.

Everything was grey; matt grey floor, high grey ceiling, pale grey walls. The lighting was indirect, a soft grey glow suffusing the world. The air was dead, anechoic, muffled by the organic walls. In spite of myself I felt the warm calm lull of the place, the grey settling over me, embracing me like fog.

Give me some colour, I subvocalised. Takeshi’s avatar blinked once in my right hand field of view, and to the left a vibrant bunch of flowers appeared, purple and yellow and deep orange, luminous against the grey, in what looked like a crystal vase. There was even a little label: Love always, KT x.

“A nice touch, thank you.”

The small crowd of women dispersed, each heading for the nearest available room. The identical little rooms were not numbered.

Fit in, I told myself. Don’t draw any attention. I found an unoccupied room, and lay down on the bed. I stripped off my bodysuit and stowed the Tasers under the pillow. The heads up told me it was ten p.m. exactly, and at that precise moment all the lights went out. In a neutral voice, a single word came over whatever PA system they had here: Sleep.

My eyelids fluttered in suddenly drowsy autonomic response. Residual programmes flickered within me, pulling me towards the grey, towards uniformity, towards oblivion. Talv was good, and Takeshi was good, but so was the programming. There was ever-present danger, here, and God alone knew what the place might do to people while they slept.

I felt the urge to sleep, forget, forget, forget; I forced it down. I would not sleep. I would not forget.

“Make yourself useful for a change, Talv. Tell me a story.”

The assistant manager’s room was as grey, windowless and empty as all the other rooms she’d seen. The assistant manager was sat behind her grey desk, and did not look up when she entered. She coughed, discretely, then louder. At length the woman looked up from the papers on her desk.

Without waiting to be invited, she sat down opposite her and folded her arms. They regarded each other across the desk. Her head felt a little woolly. What was she here for, exactly?

“How may I help you?” said the woman.

“I shouldn’t be here,” she replied, after a moment’s hesitation. “I don’t even know where ‘here’ is, and I want to go back.”

“But you volunteered. Are you unhappy in your duties?”

“I didn’t volunteer.” She hadn’t, had she? No. Surely not. “And no… it’s not that, I just shouldn’t be here.”

“We all volunteer, do we not? There is nobody here who doesn’t belong.”

“What is this place, exactly?”

The woman behind the desk didn’t answer. She bit her lip in fuzzy-headed frustration. “Is it another prison?”

Still the woman was silent. Then she bent and opened one of the drawers in her desk, fished out a form, and passed it to her. “If you have concerns about being part of the programme, you will need to fill out this release form and return it to somebody in a position of higher authority. Somebody in management.”

She took the form. “Fine. Can I have a pen?”

“I do not have a pen.”

With a rising trepidation she saw the papers on the woman’s desk were all completely blank.

Once upon a time there was a young woman, whispered Talv in the silent darkness, and she’d got herself in trouble, as usual. She was in jail, along with her sister. And she and her sister volunteered for something.

An experiment, they said. Nothing dangerous. Just a little experiment in the cutting edge of neuroscience. It would accelerate their release, they were told. And the young woman and her sister had thought about it, and thought how they could do with that, and they’d said ‘sure, why not?’ and signed on the dotted line.

She couldn’t remember doing that at all.

Something went wrong. The young woman woke up in a strange grey place, not knowing what was going on. She’d been changed, somehow; she didn’t look the same any more. There were new memories in her head, strange and inexplicable new cravings. And her sister was nowhere to be found.

She was confused, frightened. She couldn’t remember volunteering for anything. She didn’t know why she was there. There was a hole in her mind, filled with unfamiliar pressing desires.

“Yes,” I whispered. “I was confused.”

But the young woman got out. She escaped. How did she get out?

“She couldn’t remember,” I murmured in response. “I can’t remember.”

Talv’s avatar blinked bright in the darkness, a faraway constellation of comfort.

No, he continued. The young woman couldn’t remember. But get out she did. Perhaps their processes didn’t work properly. It was, after all, an experiment. Now there were blanks in her memories everywhere. Takeshi found her, angry and lost. Takeshi keeps a watch on things.

So Takeshi reached out to the young woman, and the young woman came to a man named Karsten Talv, and he offered to help her, if she wanted, like he’d helped many others achieve their hearts’ desire. Just like her spirit guide; her guardian angel.

A quiet static giggle, laughter in the dark. Takeshi’s avatar pulsed quietly. Always listening, always watching. Don’t forget your #fairygodmother.

Don’t interrupt, Takeshi, snapped Talv.

“Tell me more,” I whispered. “Please.”

She found a room and sat on the bed, reading the form she’d been given, and carefully considering her responses.

• NAME (IF KNOWN)—I can’t remember. Why can’t I remember? Some kind of amnesia?
• NUMBER—I don’t have a number. I don’t know what you’re talking about.
• DATE OF BIRTH (IF KNOWN)—none of your damn business
• WHAT IS THE ISSUE YOU WISH TO REPORT?
  1. An issue with the feeding tubes
  2. An issue with practice
  3. An issue with the standard of accommodation or other facilities
  4. An issue with the fulfilment of your duties
  5. An issue with something else (please write in below)

‘The issue I have is that I don’t know what this place is or how I got here. I know I shouldn’t be here. The last thing I remember is going to sleep in my own cell, counting down the weeks until release. The next thing I remember is waking up in a grey windowless room in this place, in a different body, whereupon I begin to discern that the aforementioned place appears to be in the business of manufacturing human sex toys. So what IS this place, and how did I get here? More importantly, how do I get the fuck out?’

These were the exact words she would have written on the form, if she’d had a pen.

She returned to the workroom. The assistant manager was sat at her desk, in exactly the same position, poring over her blank papers. She threw the form on her desk.

The other woman looked carefully at the form. “You have not filled out the form,” she said. “Unless you fill out the form, there is nothing I can do.”

“Give me a fucking pen, then!” she shouted, although for some reason she found it hard to be truly angry, because however random, everything here was starting to seem quite unnervingly consistent and logical.

“I do not have a pen,” the woman replied, utterly unfazed.

The young woman spent time in Mister Talv’s apartment, he continued.

Takeshi knew about the thing in her head. She was very up to speed with biotech; they’d even started to toy with building computers with it. Takeshi had ideas; she tapped into it, repurposed it, gave it new algorithms, rebuilding elements piece by piece, trying to filling the blanks. Takeshi was very clever. But Takeshi’s fixes couldn’t remove the thing, or dislodge the programmes completely, and one night the young woman instinctively went to Mister Talv to serve him. They became lovers.

Lovers? interjected Takeshi. Is that what you’d call it? Like she wasn’t halfway programmed, already? Programmed to serve men? Like there was an actual choice involved? #freewill?

“Lovers,” I murmured in the dark, remembering his touch. “Yes.” Remembering myself in the sweet warm dark of his bedroom; wondering: was this a programme, or was it desire? Wondering: did it matter?

They became lovers. She couldn’t help it, programme or no programme, what did it matter? The feeling was real. The passion was real, the irresistible heat of it all. The urge to be whatever he wanted, whatever she wanted, the urge to lose herself; that was real.

There was a secret garden on one floor of his building, a few levels below his apartment, and she visited it often. As above, so below; there are always hidden depths.

Being in the garden was like being in the middle of an ancient, nameless forest, a forest of myths. It was breathtaking and strange. Trees and undergrowth, brambles and briars, crowded in from the sides. She couldn’t see the walls.

In a single spotlit clearing right in the middle of the room was a large wooden chair-like structure. Twisted wood, wrapped around by vines. It was named Blodeuwedd’s Perch, he told her, after a much older story than this one. It seemed to be growing out of the floor, like trees intertwined. The young woman spent time in the chair, lost to pleasure.

There was a room of invisible mirrors, reflections to infinity, where she could forget her own name. It felt like a daze, a dream, a fog of dislocation.

There was a room of darkness, where voices whispered in the void. There was nothing else to think about there, no stimuli to be had. Touch was the only thing, and after a while touch would be the only sense that would matter. The mind would never hear the voices, but the body could not help but respond. Simplicity. Freedom. Instinct and impulse. The programmes began to fade a little, the blanks gradually becoming replaced by something else: herself. But there was no way to get rid of the thing completely.

“Tell me again about the thing in my head.”

An experiment. Biocircuitry: grown from a single tiny seed, spreading its tiny tendrils through the young woman’s skull, putting down its epiphytic roots for good. A living neural lace, sending its tiny feelers deep into her brain, meshing and entangling its fractal synaptic branches with hers until nobody could say where her thoughts began and the other’s ended, and it could never be killed or removed.

Very clever, said Takeshi. Kill the parasite, kill the host. Part of you, now, forever. Simple thoughts, simple programmes, permanently grown in. But everything has its uses, does it not?

“Yes. Everything has its uses.”

One day the young woman walked through the secret garden, downstairs through the room of mirrors, somehow negotiated the darkness of the void, to the stairway door marked ‘Escape’, and found her way down to the floor below.

“What was on the floor below?” I whispered. “I can’t remember…”

That’s the point, said Takeshi. You don’t need to know everything.

On the floor below the young woman became slowly stronger, almost whole again, while upstairs Talv and Takeshi hatched up a plan to help her, to give her what she wanted, to make her into what she wanted to be—what she needed to be.

Because that’s what we do, said Takeshi.

She’d cropped her hair short and dyed it black to get rid of that stupid vacant sex doll look. But as they plotted and schemed, working their troubleshooting magic, the young woman grew her hair back, luxuriously long and blonde again. So that she would fit in again, when she went back to get her sister out.

“And they all lived happily ever after,” I mumbled, sleepy and alone in the dark.

Maybe. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, he said.