The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

Good Copy, Black Site

“Sergeant, you will stand down NOW.”

It was a woman’s voice. Women give orders in the army? Or maybe this isn’t really the army. CIA and them. Anything goes. Spy on our own damned people, everybody knew they did. Especially on patriots.

“He’s just about to break,” the sergeant said. “All I need—“

“All you need is to obey the lawful order of a superior officer. Now.”

The guy with the black gloves, wet across the knuckles, hooked at the cuffs of one with the forefinger of the other, facing her, When he had both gloves off, he waited just long enough. Travis recognized the pause. He used to do it in school, when the government could still make him go. Let them know you don’t give a shit for them, don’t matter what they think.

The sergeant finally brought his fingertips to his brow in a stiff, very formal salute.

“Yes Ma’am,” he said. “Permission to speak frankly, Ma’am.”

The woman sighed. “Briefly, Sergeant.”

“What if your way doesn’t work, Ma’am?

“It always works, Sergeant.”

“With respect, Ma’am, I’ve done this for ten years. Nothing always works.”

“All right, Sergeant. How many times have you seen my method succeed?” Black Gloves mumbled something. “Speak up, Sergeant. How many times?”

“I’m not sure,” he finally said.

“HOW MANY TIMES?” she demanded more loudly.

“Maybe a dozen.”

“Maybe a dozen, M’am,” she corrected.

“Ma’am.”

“And how many times have you seen it fail?”

“I heard that—“

“How many times have you seen it fail?” Steely voice on that woman.

“None. Ma’am.”

“None. But I’ll tell you what, Sergeant. If today, for the first time in the experience of either of us, then you can go back to torturing this boy. Understood?”

“Yes, Ma’am,” he said.

“You’re dismissed,” she said, and he gave her another salute, pivoted 180 degrees, and went through the steel door of the chamber.

She went behind him, just like them before they changed to some new way of hurting him. He felt his buttocks clenching and his heart pounding. His skin wanted to shrink away from the very air.

She came around to the front of him with a hypo in her hand. She looked into his eyes for a long moment, until he looked away, clamping his lips tight, as if to keep words from leaking out.

“Don’t worry, Ethan,” she said, the first person to use his name since they had asked him to confirm it on in-take, acting as if it was just routine, but his uncle had warned him about that. “Don’t you say shit, boy,” he growled, tapping him on the face almost lightly, twice, to make sure he was paying attention. “That’s the easiest thing to remember. Just don’t say nothin’.”

And he had said nothing. But now she had said his name .in a voice more like the nurse’s back when he had his appendix out, after an hour and a half in the truck, coming in to the hospital from the ranch. Soft voice.

“Don’t be afraid, Ethan. I’m not going to hurt you. Just the opposite; this will take away the pain. Then, when you start to feel better, we’ll just talk for a while, you and I.” She saw his eyes widen. “I told you: you don’t have to be scared of this. It doesn’t hurt. This will actually feel good; you’ll feel kind of warm and relaxed and drifty. It will help me to talk with a part of your mind that isn’t all bound up with all that nonsense your uncle’s friends have been filling your head with.”

“My uncle is a patriot,” he said, and then remembered that he was never supposed to say anything to them.

She caught his eye, her face close to his, and deployed a reassuring smile.

“I know that you believe so now,” she said softly, “and I appreciate your telling me what you really feel. That’s a start. It shows me that we can talk. All right. Just a little pinch now . . . “

She slipped the IV needle into the vein just below the crook of his elbow—both the vein and the muscles it fed big, for such a young one. He had probably been bailing hay since he was ten years old. She taped the needle into place. Now she could precisely control the release of the tranquilizer into his bloodstream, slowly at first, so that its very influence would make him less alert to that influence.

To distract him further, she took some antiseptic wipes from a kit just out of his view, and began gently to wipe the blood welling from the cuts on his face and dripping down from his nose. This variety contained a topical anesthetic to lessen the sting of the alcohol in it.

“There. That’s not so bad, is it?” she murmured. “Let me put this cold pack on that eye. Don’t worry; I’m not going to let him hurt you again. I won’t have to, because this medicine always works, so we won’t have to go back to his way.”

He didn’t say anything, but she noted the sigh that came out of him. Relief?

“Would you like some water?” she asked him. God, yes, he was thirsty. He wouldn’t let himself say anything, but his head nodded a little, all by itself, it seemed.

She smiled again, and held a plastic bottle of water up to his swollen lips. It stung, but he gulped at it even as his eyes winced from the sting. She brushed her fingers softly across the side of his head, close-cropped.

“You are a misled but very brave and strong young man,” she said. “You have withstood beatings, deprivation, for days and days, of everything from food to sleep. You probably don’t even know how many days it’s been; you haven’t seen the sun, have you? It’s been very long. Days and days. Days and days without sleep. You must be so tired.”

“I can take it,” he grated out. She saw his jaw clench as he suppressed a yawn.

“It’s all right,” she whispered. “I promise I won’t have to let them hurt you any more. Just relax. The pain is fading now, isn’t it? Doesn’t that feel better? You’re starting to get sleepy; just go with it, and you’ll feel even better. You can close your eyes when they’re ready, when they get too drowsy and heavy to stay open . . . And now you’re drifting down deep . . . deeper . . . and deeper . . . you have left the pain far behind you, way up there on the surface . . . it’s not with you now . . . you can just listen to what I have to say. I’m only going to tell you the truth, Ethan. Everything I say will be the truth, I promise. And I’m going to have a conversation with you, a conversation with the deepest part of your mind, the part that knows what’s right, the part that knows how wrong it is to kill children. There were three children in that building when your uncle’s gang blew it up. A four-year-old and two three-year-olds, killed. Do you know how many children lost their mothers or their fathers because of what your uncle and his friends did? Forty-two. They killed three children and turned forty-two into orphans. What did those little children ever do to anybody?”

He couldn’t explain it to her. It seemed that he had known, once, or maybe that he had only pretended to know. Now he was too tired to pretend.

“I dunno,” he said, his tongue thick.

“Of course you don’t, because they had done nothing to deserve it.”

As soon as she said that, he knew that it was true. He felt an ache building in his throat, and his eyes began to water under their closed lids.

“That’s right. You know this is true. That’s why you’re crying for them, for those poor little kids. They’re innocents, just like the children who are going to suffer when your uncle sets off his next bomb in a building full of people. But you can save them this time; it’s in your power to save them. You’ve always wanted to help people, really. And what better way to help people than to save them or the ones they love from death? You will save them by telling me everything you remember about where your uncle stores the explosives and detonators, and how he gets them to the buildings he’s going to destroy. You’ll do it, not just because the hypnotic drug is impossible to resist, but because in your deepest heart you know that it’s wrong to hurt the innocent. You never wanted to hurt little children, I know. Only cowards make war on children, and you’re not a coward, you endured a lot of pain, trying to be faithful to a bad cause, but now you know what’s right. Your mind is so relaxed and calm, so still and clear, that you can see everything clearly, so you don’t resist. The medicine says you can’t resist, and I know you can’t resist, and for the sake of the children you won’t resist. You don’t even have to do anything difficult now; it’s easy to listen to my voice, easy to relax and be calm, easy to tell the truth, because the truth is easy to tell. It’s just what happened, what is happening, what is so; you don’t have to exhaust your mind trying to make up lies. You can just tell the truth, and you know that’s the right thing”.

He sobbed. It was wrong to betray his uncle, his uncle was kin. But it was wrong to hurt kids. He remembered a man, a drifter, who had hurt a kid in a bad way, a kid that he know, and they had caught the drifter, his uncle and the other men his age had caught him trying to get out of town, and they hung him from an electrical power pole, because hurting kids was wrong, but he couldn’t figure it out. His uncle figured things out, not him. He was so tired.

“So tired,” he moaned.

“Sshh, I know, sweetheart,” her voice whispered back to him. “You’re so tired.; you can just let yourself drift off, your heart will tell me, all by itself. It wants to. You can just let your worrying mind, the confused part of you, go to sleep. It’s going to happen anyway; just let it happen. Just let that painful, confused part of your mind sleep. It’s so very sleepy now . . . It’s going to sleep . . . It’s fast asleep. ”

The boy sighed with a relief that she fully understood. Then she began her questions, in the same soft, calm voice, and he answered them all.

When she was sure that she had everything, she whispered,

“And now, Ethan, you’ve done the right thing, and I know you have done the right thing. I’m proud of you, but I know you love your uncle, and if you have any bad feeling left in you because you talked with me, that’s fading away now, it’s just drifting away from you, you don’t even have to remember it, in fact you can remember to forget that you talked with me at all if that’s what makes you feel better, but in your heart, Ethan, you will remember that you did the right thing. That’s all you need to remember: in the end, you did the right thing. Now you want to rest, I know. Go to sleep, Ethan. Just go to sleep. Sleep for me now.”

When the boy had been wheeled back to his cell on a gurney, still sleeping, David came up to her, a wry smile on his face.

“Sometimes I wonder why I even try,” he said.

“And why is that, Sergeant?” she asked.

“We kick these dirt bags around, beat them up, half-drown them, shock them, shake them up pretty good, and get next to nowhere. Then you come breezing in like some cross between Florence Nightingale and Naughty Nurse in a porn movie, and they spill their guts. Who needs Bad Cop?”

He laughed, but something grated in is throat; she could hear it, even before he said, “God knows I don’t.”

David’s mind, uninvited, put on a flash slideshow of people he had hurt and terrified during interrogation. When he was being recruited for this “special detail” within Homeland Security, they had told him that he would be taking interrogation “to the next level” sometimes, but that this level of “enhanced interrogation” would only be used when there was an immediate and tangible need to get information to save American lives. He would only be interrogating the worst terrorists, the very worst. Well, today he had hurt and frightened a thirteen-year-old boy tied to a chair.

Catherine saw the little facial muscles creasing under the tensions of his memories, his regrets. David won’t be with us for long, she thought.

“But I need you to play that bad cop, David,” She said softly, laying a hand on his forearm, right over his Marine Force Recon tattoo.

“Why? Why don’t you just do your thing on the day they’re brought in here?”

“Because it wouldn’t work as well. I’ve measured the effect. I have graphs and everything,” she said expressionlessly, and only someone who had spent as least as much time with her as he had would hear the weary self-disgust in her voice.

He raised an eyebrow.

“With respect, Ma’am, it sure looks to me as if it works. Has worked. Every damn time. Witchy Woman never fails.” His eyes widened, as if in surprise at what had come out of his mouth. He stiffened, stood to attention and barked like a second-week Marine boot in front of his gunnery sergeant, “No excuse, Ma’am.”

She shook her head. “I’ll overlook it for now, Sergeant. You asked a reasonable question. But. “ She raised a hand as if waving the question off, but she still answered. “You had the orientation when you joined this outfit. What they told you about hypnosis is true, in a way. It can’t make any of them do what they don’t want to do. There’s nothing very special about the drugs I give them, either: a fairly standard tranquillizer cocktail. But they don’t know that. So the drugs work, somewhat. But the drugs can’t do it alone, and neither can I.”

He shook his head. “Again, Ma’am, with respect . . . Why not? It looks like—“

“—It looks like I’m making them ‘betray’ their comrades through an irresistible combination of drugs and hypnosis,” she said, “I know. But the truth is that they really want my hypnosis to be irresistible. Because they’re scared. They’re scared of being hurt more. Some of them really are prepared, consciously, to die under interrogation rather than give up the information. But their subconscious mind has the job of keeping them alive and unharmed. It’s had that job for human beings much longer than any army, or ideology, or civilization has existed. If someone hurts them and scares them to the point where they really believe they might die, the subconscious is desperate for a way out. I’m that way out, with my “irresistible” drugs and techniques. But the real fanatics need to be isolated, hurt, and frightened in order for any of this to work. And that, Sergeant, is your job. I know it’s a very hard one.”

“I just think about the victims, M’am,”he said, with a fainter but detectable echo of boot camp again.

“Yes,” she said. “That makes it possible.—But not painless,” she added, while she thought about how many victims there were. An endless supply, it seemed. Innocent victims. Not so innocent but not so guilty victims. Victims who become victimizers. Defenders who become both. Like you, David.

She knew all about Sergeant David Edison, about his record in the Marines, about his special medical discharge—neither honorable nor explicitly tied to misconduct. About the collapse of his marriage within a year of his return from Afghanistan. About the rages. About the fact that he had moved out of his home, afraid of what he might do to his wife or his three-year-old son. He had tortured a civilian in Afghanistan to find out who had killed the nine men his unit lost in a village that they were supposed to be helping. The record of that fact in his file guaranteed that when he came to the V.A. for psychiatric help, he would disappear from the Marines and appear in her unit.

She noted his shrug, wry-mouthed, in response. A hiding place. She reached out a hand, laid it softly against the side of his neck and jaw. His eyes widened, surprised. He did not remember.

“David, Sleep standing up for me now, David.”

The eyes fluttered and closed; his chin fell on his chest.

“You’re deep down in your safe place now, David, and you know that I tell you the truth. When that day comes, the day when you cannot do this job any more, you will resign; then you will come to me after your final debrief. Not here, of course; you won’t be allowed in here. You will go to the lobby of Ritz Carlton Hotel in Pentagon City, You’ll book a room, under your own name, and wait for me until I meet you there. And now you can forget about hearing these instructions from me, but your subconscious mind will still carry them out.”

She wished that she could wipe away David’s memory of what he had done to the boy, but she knew that she could not do that before David had been thoroughly debriefed about his day’s work. He would have to carry it a little longer. All she could do was hope that he could.

The worst memory she had—and it was the worst of many terrible memories acquired since she took this job—was of the time two years ago when she waited too long, when she overestimated the ability of David’s predecessor to hang on for just one more week. She had seen some of the signs, but she told herself that they were not that severe. Then this young soldier, taken from the cream of Special Operations operators, had gone home one Friday evening. She had kept him on site late because she was sure that the subject was about to cave in, that she needed her bad cop there just a couple of more hours, not even to apply the scientifically brutal violence that was his job to apply, but just as the visible symbol, to the subject, of everything that the two of them had made the subject fear. She was wrong about that. In the end, she had to allow her soldier to do what he had been deployed here to do. Eventually, the subject had screamed, and moaned, and cried. Then she had hypnotized him and had sent the soldier home at ten o’clock.

His wife had cooked a special meal because it was their seven-year-old son’s birthday. The soldier had not told his boss about the birthday, but of course it was in his file, as were the birthdates of his, his wife, his mother, his aunts and uncles and cousins. He had gone home to his family and fought with his wife, and at the height of his rage and guilt and shame, he had told her why he was late, what he had done that evening, what he had been doing days and nights in an underground room with white walls, a special chair with straps and clamps and wires and sensors, tile floors with drains in them to catch the spills from waterboarding. And sometimes to catch body fluids.

The official lie was that no one knew why he had taken the Glock 17 out of his gun safe and shot—in the head, to minimize the pain—his wife, his little boy, and of course himself.

Of all the things she carried, that was the worst—that she had waited too long, continuing just a little too long to ask a good soldier—a good man—to do terrible things to another human being who had been rendered helpless. His country needed just one more week from her good soldier, she had decided, and that one more week had killed him and his family.

The need for her black-site horror did not go away, and she denied herself the luxury of resigning because after that day, staying in this job seemed like the worst punishment she could give herself. She was the Chief of Special Psi Ops for Homeland Security, and she would continue ordering good soldiers and good doctors to do terrible things.

But when David had come to her—her youngest recruit so far at twenty-two—she had sworn that she would never make that mistake again, and she had sworn more—that neither he nor any of his successors would have to carry forever the memory of what they had done, what they had been, for their country.

She knew how to prevent it, and she would. She had published papers on the treatment of soldiers morally injured by warfare, and she had published even more controversial papers arguing for the therapeutic value of hypnotically induced, selective amnesia for some soldiers who had incurred such injuries, for the careful planting of replacement memories to grow over the gaps the amnesia had left. Her articles had been attacked by readers of the American Journal of Psychiatry who argued that such traumas had to be “worked through,” which led to a great many billable hours for psychiatrists with the right specializations. Her articles had been attacked by readers of the Journal of Experimental Psychology who argued that permanent hypnotic amnesia of such a traumatic event could not be sustained in any case. And her articles had been attacked by readers of the International Philosophers’ Forum, who argued that to relieve the perpetrator of such awful crimes was morally wrong or existentially “inauthentic.” Looking into their biographies, she found no references to experience in combat. Professional philosophers did not often belong to the economic class that fought America’s wars.

Homeland Security used the information that she –and David—had obtained; they found the uncle’s explosives depot and by watching it found the uncle, late one night. He was not taken alive.

She got the call two weeks later; her cell phone showed her that it was David, but he had forgotten that he knew that.

“Hello?”

“It’s David.”

“Where are you David?”

“I’m . . . I’m in the Ritz Carlton Hotel. Room 417. Ma’am,” he said with some alarm. “I don’t know why I’m here.”

“It’s all right, David,” she said. “You are following your orders exactly. You’ve done very well. I’ll be there in half an hour. Just sit down, relax, and wait for me.”

David was not exactly asleep, and he was glad of that. This was better than sleep; it was restful, and he did not have dreams. His dreams had not been good lately, the ones he remembered. This was like a fog, except warm instead of cold. He could see through it, if he really tried, and he could hear through it, although it muffled things. He didn’t mind; there was not much that he wanted to hear these days. But then he heard someone knock on his door and call his name. He knew that he needed to hear that voice. He knew that he was supposed to go to the door, so he did.

Before she said a word, Catherine put her arms around him and walked into the room, backing him up. He could feel her chest shaking. That was strange.

Then she said, “Sleep standing up, David,” and he did, or maybe it was just that the warm fog got thicker, and the anxiety at the back of his mind about why he was in an expensive hotel room with his boss faded. “Everything’s all right, David; you’ve done just the right thing. Your work has been hard; it has hurt you inside to do it, I know. I’ve been taking care of you as best I could, letting you tell me your feelings without your having to remember it. Now, for a little while, you remember all those calls at night when you couldn’t sleep, when you needed someone to cry to, and you thought you needed someone to forgive you. I was glad to do both. Sometimes, when the night was too dark and long, and the dreams too hard to endure alone, you needed someone to hold you and love you, and I was glad to do that, too, although I couldn’t let anyone know and couldn’t let you remember anything but the relief from the nightmares and sleepless nights. I remember, though, and now you can, for a while. If you want to, kiss me, David,” she whispered in his ear, “You may. I know you have wanted to, for a long time. You can remember that now; it’s all right. I want you to.”

He did want to. Her mouth was closer, and his eyes fastened on it and noticed that she was wearing a dark red lipstick, that her lips were turned up in a smile of welcome, and after his arms went around, one arm around her waist and the other pulling her hips into him, she put her hands on either side of his face and she close the last inches of distance between their mouths, and hers was soft but hungry, too, her tongue searching the small gap between his lips, sliding across it slowly, coaxing it further open, and opened his mouth fully while his tongue went out to meet hers, while her fingers slid softly down his neck to his shoulders, where the muscles began to bunch and swell with his arousal. A few seconds later her right hand slid down to his chest, where the other hand joined it as they carefully undid the buttons on his shirt and peeled it back over his shoulders and down, and off him, and the hands caressed his cheek, softly raked finger nails down his belly while his own hands grabbed the two handfuls of her buttocks, kneaded and squeezed them, while her tongue flickered into his ear and licked down the side of his neck, and her teeth bit softly into the cord of muscle where his neck became his shoulder. The sharp sensation aroused him more, and he growled and drove his groin against hers.

Her hands were clawing at her own skirt now, peeling it off her, and then doing the same to the black lace thing underneath the skirt, which had a little wet spot on the front of it, down low. She jumped up and threw both her legs around his waist. He kept his balance and carried her to the bed, set her on her back. She put her arms around his neck and

“You’ve made me wet, David,” she whispered in his ear. “Do you feel that? I’m so wet for you, so wet and warm. And I can feel—“ here she reached deep between his legs and slowly, gently raked her four fingers from the lower rim of his anus, up his already swollen scrotum with its two swollen balls, then up the length of this shaft, which had thickened already and was curling toward his belly as it rose, “—I can feel that you want your cock to be there, to slide into me, yes—“ and he did it, pushing into her and groaning as he did, taking her buttocks in both hands to pull him into her tighter, and then slowly building up the pace as she encouraged him with moans and whispers, “Harder . . . harder, deeper, faster, oh . . . yes OH! You’re making me cum David, and now my pussy is going to make you cum; it’s going to suck your orgasm and all your creamy cum out of you, you can’t stop it, you just want to drive harder and harder into me, faster, you can’t resist so hard now CUM now CUM now CUM!”

He bellowed as he came, like a big man lifting a log, a heavy log, and heaving it in front of him, and then he sighed from the bottom of his lungs, rolled off her, and fell asleep almost instantly, as if he already knew that he could hold onto this night only in dreams.

Half-rolling toward him, she looked at his face, now relaxed as that of a sleeping child. With her far arm, she reached across and stroked his chest gently, rhythmically with her hand. She let herself enjoy that moment for a little, but then she began speak in that rhythm, softly, wooing him back out of sleep and into trance, because it was time to let him go.

“You’re still asleep, David,” she whispered, “but you can hear me perfectly, and you can even speak to me, without waking up until you hear the telephone wake-up call. All right? Say ‘Yes’.”

“Yesss,” he moaned.

“What would you like to do as a job, David, if you could have your choice?”

“Fireman.”

She wondered briefly if she had inadvertently regressed him, thinking of how often little boys identifying ‘fireman’ as their first job. Was she talking to the adult David now, or the little boy who didn’t know what she would one day turn him into?

“What do you have to do in order to become a fireman, David?” she asked.

“Get an EMT certification,” he said. “Work ambulances for a year as a paramedic. Then apply to the state academy.”

That certainly sounded like an adult.

“How will you pay for all this, David?” she asked. He didn’t answer, and his breathing sped up a little. Distress.

“Sshhh, David, it’s okay. I know what you’ll do. One minute after I finish talking to you, you’ll fall back asleep. A wonderful, deep sleep, a sleep that will wash away all the memories of working with me. You’ve done your duty, David, and you can forget all that. You deserve to forget; I know the memories hurt you, and now you can let them go. And I’m part of them, David, I know that.”

She carefully slipped out of bed then; raising her voice a little to make sure that he could hear her, she began to dress.

“So you need to forget about me, too, David. Just let that memory go with all the others; you don’t need it any more. This hotel room was part of a special medical discharge package from the Marines, a decompression treatment, and you won’t ever question that fact, but you won’t need to talk about it, either. And when you walk out of the hotel you’ll be thirsty, and you’ll go to the convenience store three blocks north of here and one block west, to buy yourself a soda, an Italian orange soda. When you go to the counter to pay for the soda, you’ll have an overwhelming hunch, in fact an urge, to buy a state lottery ticket, and when you order it, you’ll tell the clerk with the bushy beard, “The Lady sent me,” and he’ll hand you your ticket. When you check it you will see that you have won $500,000. You’ll tell the man with the beard that you want your winnings deposited in the bank account number on a piece of paper you’ll find in the right-hand pocket of the pants you’ll be wearing after I leave. Then you’ll apply to the paramedic training program at the community college in your home town. You’ll study hard and study well, and when you graduate from the program, you will immediately apply to the state fire-fighting academy. You will be accepted.”

She was dressed, except for her shoes, which she felt a strange reluctance to put on. She scolded herself. Neither she nor the world she lived in could be anything but bad for this young man. He deserved better, and she owed him every effort to make sure that he got it. So put on your damn shoes, candy-ass, she snapped at herself, and get out of this poor guy’s life.

“You will remember, and the records will show,” she said, as she put on her coat, “that you served honorably in combat as a Marine, were wounded, rehabilitated, and finished your duty with an uneventful but honorable tour of service as military police. And you will not remember me or what you did here, what was it? It doesn’t matter. When I kiss your forehead, you will go into a deep, peaceful sleep until the telephone wakes you in the morning. In your sleep, you will remember making love to a beautiful goddess who commanded you to go and be happy; you will remember her fully only in dreams, dreams in which everything is beautiful, and nothing hurts.”

She kissed his forehead gently and walked out the door, back to her world, where little was beautiful, and most things hurt.