The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

Helen Johnson yawned, and rubbed her eyes. This was not a thrilling assignment. The testing wrapper for this subroutine would be—she checked—her eighth today, and would take her to nearly twelve hours on the clock. The client’s documentation was sparse and badly written; it was in a language and framework that she cordially despised; and the small, sweaty and frontally bald client manager who rushed around his team trying to motivate them—and kibitz on what Helen and her buddy were doing—was incompetent and smelled bad. She wasn’t sure which was worse. Maybe the incompetence, since shower and deodorant was a cheap and easy fix for the other.

“Think of the money, Helen. Think of the money...”

Her contracting firm was keeping most of it, of course, but she was still retaining a decent fraction. As one of the top backend software testers in the region, her charge-out rate was somewhere between “expensive” and “you don’t want to ask”. Still, assignments like this with a business intelligence enterprise made her wonder if it was actually worth it. She could have made a high stable salary as a permanent employee somewhere, but the hours would have been fixed, and would have made her family responsibilities difficult to meet. At least with contract work she could arrange bursts of off-days where she took her kids to school, helped them with homework, and even go fix up their bedrooms when unicorn wallpaper started to be perceived as too “babyish”.

Her friend and co-worker Sally—actually named Xiuying, but she had long ago given up hope of having people pronounce it correctly—gave her a nudge.

“Hel, you nearly done?”

Helen stared at her screen. Finishing this routine to her usual standards would take an hour. Finishing it to something that looked plausible would take ten minutes. She hated this job. She hated the people. It wasn’t a difficult decision.

“Ten minutes, Sally. Then we are gone.” And Sally knew that Helen meant that duration as a hard stop.

Fifteen minutes later they were out of BizInt4U and in a dive bar down the street. Helen had taken an Uber to this location, knowing she’d be in no fit state to drive home even without a post-work drink, and that at least the transport cost was expenseable. Consuela, her paid-under-the-table nanny, would have the kids sorted out by the time she got home. Guilt briefly flowed through Helen. At least she had a free weekend coming up, though she knew that she’d have to spend a lot of that time with her 8 year-old on his science project.

Sally clinked her Tsingtao beer against Helen’s wineglass. “To contracting! The solution to all our problems—and cause of a lot more.”

“Amen, sistah!” Helen took a long gulp. “Dammit, this job is killing me. Glad you’re young enough to think it’s still fun, Sal.”

“Did you see the sweat rings under Murthy’s arms? Eugh.” Sally was fastidious about hygiene. “When he leans over your shoulder...”

“With me, he has to go on tip-toe, the short-ass.” The girls burst out in squeals of laughter.

“Hel, have you been checking out the internal opportunities message board?” Sally was suddenly serious.

“Not since a week ago—but I probably should. Why? Something juicy?”

“Check this out.” Sally slid over an unfolded printout. “Ror-Ex: An advertising exchange elephant, looking for initial one- to two-week contract, focused software testing, high quality coverage. Java and JUnit, right up your alley.”

“And yours, Sal.”

“Check out the contract rate,” Sally suggested, pointing at a number on the print-out.

Helen did, and whistled. “That would cover a lot of pre-school. Might not have to sell off one of the kids for spare parts after all.”

“We should go for it. We should ditch that creep Murthy and take this one instead. I’m sure they’d take you—and hopefully me too.”

“Girl, for JUnit, you and me are a unit.” Helen took a contemplative sip of her wine. “I think you’re right. We can get a substitute team for the last 3 weeks of BizInt4U. We’ve done the hard stuff anyway. I’ll get JoJo to sell me—and you—to Ror-Ex. Hone your JUnit fu, starting now! At those rates, they’re going to be expecting something special.”

“Get out!” Sally drained her Tsingtao. “Another one, Hel? The night is young.”

Helen looked at her Apple Watch and groaned. “Better not. Consuela would kill me. I’m still slightly suspicious that she has cartel connections, given how she got here. I’d end up in a bridge’s concrete foundations somewhere.”

“Can’t say I envy you.” Sally rose, swaying slightly. “You’re going to file that application, right?”

“Count on it.” Helen gave her a hug. “See you tomorrow. Hopefully we’ll be on the final countdown.”

Ror-Ex’s testing leader, Davinia, conducted a short interview over video with Sally and Helen to check their technical understanding. She was a middle-aged woman, pleasant to deal with, but with sharp eyes that were clearly not easily fooled. Helen knew from a couple of decades of work that incompetents covered for themselves by being assholes; if you knew you were competent, you could afford to be pleasant. After ten minutes of probing on test strategies, however, she seemed satisfied.

“Thank you, ladies. Your skills are acceptable. I will confirm with your boss Jonathan, but provisionally we’d like you to start at Ror-Ex on Wednesday, reporting at 9am. Two week initial contract, with option to extend to four.”

It was bad form to high-five each other on a call with a future client, so Helen and Sally held themselves back until they had politely agreed and exchanged final pleasantries with Davinia. Once the video call switched off though, there was no such inhibition.

“All right! Who’s my girl?” Helen crowed. “Unless JoJo screws up—and he usually doesn’t—we are done with BizInt4U and on with Ror-Ex!”

“Too early for drinks?” asked Sally

“For this, girl, I’ll buy you dinner. 4pm we are outta here. Find a good place for us, will you?”

They left the small video conference room in BizInt4U’s main office, and Helen spent the next couple of hours chewing through tests and updating documentation until she got an email from JoJo; excusing herself to the team, she ducked back into the conference room and called him up on video.

JoJo, aka Jonathan, her contracting section manager, answered on the second ring. He was beaming.

“Who’s my girl? Ror-Ex just signed for 2 weeks, option for 4. I’m giving you a big hug next time I see you!”

Helen knew that JoJo was quite serious about doing this, but as a “friend of Dorothy” he had absolutely no fear of a sexual harassment lawsuit from her. She was quite fond of him, in fact; he was one of the better bosses she’d had, and she trusted him not to screw her over unless he really, really had to. Though she really wished he wouldn’t wear the lurid Hawaiian shirts paired with chinos that he favored when not facing a client. Didn’t you have to have some kind of dress sense to be gay? She was sure that it was practically a requirement.

“For the rate you’re getting, I want a kiss on the cheek too!” she smirked.

“You got it, dear. Mwah!” He briefly switched to a serious tone. “You know, you and Sally are the first team we’ve got into Ror-Ex. They spend literally a billion dollars a year on contracting—they keep their core permanent team very small as far as we know. My contact network is extensive and I know no-one—literally, no-one, dear—in their permanent team apart from Davinia. Don’t screw this up, m’kay?”

“No fear, JoJo. When do we start?”

“Wednesday,” he confirmed. “I’ll mail you the details, and I’ll find two people to replace you at BizInt4U. Tell Murthy I’ll be giving him a call. At least he’ll be paying less for your replacements.”

“Try Liam, and maybe Gauri,” Helen suggested. “At this point, I think BizInt4U is well within what they can do. I’m happy to give them the low-down.”

“That’s why I love you, Helen, you’re always ahead. All righty; speak to you soon.”

Helen called Consuela to let her know that she’d be back earlier than usual, but possibly not in a state to be able to bathe the kids. Sally had reserved them a table at a tony sushi place two blocks away, and Helen was fairly sure that sake was going to be involved. High quality warm sake, and lots of it: On her dime.

“Good news, though, Consuela—I have a new contract from Wednesday and it’s a lot closer. Only ten minutes from home, rather than nearly an hour. And I’ll be at home all day Tuesday.”

“OK, Miss Helen. I’ll see you later. I’ll put some coffee on for you!”

“That’s a good plan. See you later. Give hugs to the kids for me.”

On Wednesday at 8:50am, Helen was standing outside Ror-Ex, looking up at the 10-story building. It was a of place about which she’d heard thousands of rumors, and very few facts. The most important facts, of course, were the contracting rate and the signed contract.

Sally joined her, trained by her mentor to always turn up early and ensure that the building location and access were as expected. If you weren’t supremely confident in being able to walk through the correct door three minutes before the appointment time, you had failed by Helen’s standards.

“So big!” The building occupied a whole block, of substantial dimensions; Sally was in awe. “And JoJo says we’re the first ones in?”

“Yes; and if we’re successful, this could open the door to a lot more contract work for the company. I know our division manager is a tight-ass for bonuses, but breaking open Ror-Ex should cause even him to go giddy with his discretionary fund. Trust me on this.”

“And, you and I are the invasion force—the spearhead.” Sally nervously straightened her jacket.

“No pressure, girl. You know this stuff backwards.” Helen hitched her messenger bag over her shoulder. “Let’s go slay them.”

The onboarding process was smooth; Ror-Ex had conducted it thousands of times, and relentlessly shaved off the rough parts. Well-cued exchanges of credentials, signed NDAs and equipment brought the two women into the legal and operational sphere of Ror-Ex. Within an hour, Helen and Sally were seated at adjacent desks in a vast room filled with rows of desks and seriously-dressed, serious-expression people.

Their client manager, Davis, was pleasant, but focused. He was apparently responsible for a good fraction of their floorspace, nearly a hundred test engineers who were almost all contractors. As such, he had a fairly quick script to walk through once he’d verified that they had successfully logged on and accessed the code revision system.

“Work all the way through the tutorial; it should only take 70-90 minutes. Take your first bug off the new starter queue, which is deliberately simple, and resolve it properly but as quickly as you can. That resolution will go to manual review from someone else in my team. If their review passes, you’re good to start taking bugs from the main queue. There’s a forum for common questions, link is on your desktop. Any questions?”

“How did you get this onboarding flow so well-tuned?” asked Helen, mostly joking. Davis looked confused. “Never mind—it’s a good briefing. If we run into any insurmountable problems, we’ll shout.”

Davis moved on, and the two women fired up the tutorial.

The materials required attention to detail, but were not particularly challenging for those versed in JUnit and the principles of revision control. Sally and Helen completed their work well within the specified time, and knocked off their first bug very quickly. They had 10-15 minutes of waiting for the review approval to come through, but then they were admitted to the production queue and started to work through the huge backlog.

After a couple of hours, Helen sat back and stretched. This wasn’t a bad gig, and well worth the money. The specifications were fairly well-written, the framework was standard and well-documented, and the workstation and remote build system were quite fast. She recalled a contract five years ago, working on a VAX machine that should have been put in a museum, where the client refused to pay $500 for a 1-year software license that would have let them do 90% of the work in 10% of the time on a PC. She wondered idly how that company had got on, and sighed.

“Keeping ye up?” A heavy accent from the red-haired lady sitting next to her got her attention.

“I’m sorry, I was just remembering a much worse contract.”

“Nae worries.” The lady reached across to shake hands. “I’m Anna—actually Annag, but nae-one can remember or say that. Who are ye?”

“Helen.” She smiled at the pugnacious woman. “Sally and I are on our first day here.”

“Welcome! Ah’ve been here a good two weeks.” Anna gestured at the screen. “It’s no’ a bad dev environment, d’ya think?”

“I like it.” Helen paused. “You’re not from around here, are you?”

“How’d you tell?” Anna burst out laughing. “Aye, I’m from Fife, Scotland. Moved here a couple years ago. Ah think my accent’s softening, but ye can probably still hear it.”

“Yes, just about...” Helen was curious. “How did you get here? Are you on an H1-B visa?”

“Nae, Ah’m an American.” Anna grinned at Helen and Sally’s reactions. “Really! Ma da’ was US Airforce, worked at RAF Leuchars. Met ma mum, got it on. Bastard left her and went back to Idaho, but left her with me, and me an American citizen by parent, see.”

“So you can work here?”

“Aye, just like ye. Grew up in Fife, went to Uni, did software. Plenty of jobs after, but most of them I had to work for bloody sassenachs. Not any more! And better money here, ye ken.” She eyed Sally and Helen. “Either of ye have bairns—kids?”

“I do,” volunteered Helen. “Sally has a life, instead.”

“Hah!” Anna grinned. “Best thing Ah ever did. Found an American guy, Tony, who wasn’t a bastard. He’s an author, works from home. We have three bairns, aye—Scottish-American, like me.”

“Three! I’m impressed. I have two and they kill me.” Helen paused and noticed the dirty looks they were getting from the others sitting around them, obvious intensely focused on their testing. “Want to get coffee later?”

“Aye, we’ll have a crack.”

The first two days passed in a blur as they got to grips with Ror-Ex’s more interesting testing problems. As Friday morning rolled around, Sally and Helen felt that they had found their feet and were starting to bang out good tests on a regular cadence, with very few of them failing during integration.

Around 9:30am, Anna pushed back from her desk. “Ah’m getting me some coffee, ladies. Ye wanna come?”

“We are so there.” Helen and Sally joined her. “But the break rooms are going to be busy. Don’t know if we’ll get a seat.”

“Aha! Fae that, ah have a cunnin’ plan. Follow me.” Anna led them in the opposite direction to the break rooms, to a door that admitted them to an emergency staircase.

“Ah’ve just found this oot on yon online map. Gae down one floor, which oor badges let us, and there’s hardly anyone there.” Anna opened the door to the floor below, and Helen had to agree; it was a similar space to the one above, but only 10% occupied.

The three women strolled across the mostly desolate floor, and entered one of the break rooms. Prominently displayed on the door was “NO FOOD OR DRINK IN WORKING AREAS EXCEPT WATER”.

“Guess they’ve had wankers spillin’ coffee in their keyboards, no?” Anna pushed the door open. “Or mebbe Liquorice Allsorts bits in the keyboards.” As predicted, they were the only ones there.

The coffee machines in Ror-Ex were surprisingly good; they took a while to deliver the ordered beverage, but from the sounds of grinding behind the facade it was because it was being made properly via beans rather than from a sachet or pod. You could also batch-order a number of drinks at once, and although it was billed to your card’s account, the prices were much lower than the local Starbucks.

Anna ordered drinks for the three of them, by now very familiar with her friends’ preferences, and leaned against the wall as she waited for delivery.

“Ah don’t know what ye think, ladies, but tae me this looks like a well tight codebase. Ah’m challenged tae come up with good tests. These buggers know their stuff.”

“They’re good,” Helen agreed. “It keeps me at my edge. Good fun, really.”

“I’m glad I studied for this,” Sally piped up. “It’s very difficult—but I can do it, just about.”

The machine pinged, with three cups in the delivery area, lit by a pink light. Helen frowned, briefly puzzled—wasn’t it normally a blue light? She took the coffee anyway.

The three women took seats at one of the Formica tables. Anna popped a piece of nicotine gum in her mouth, then took a swallow of her latte.

“Tell me, Helen, what got ye intae this line o’ work?”

“I didn’t have a choice, really.” Helen sipped at her sweetened americano. “My husband vanished, taking his bimbo secretary with him. What a cliche! Left me with the two kids, and there was no way I was putting them in public school around here. Easier to work long hours and pay a nanny than try to do the school run myself and hold down a job.”

“Ah hear ye.” Anna shook her heads. “Ah don’t want tae say men’re all bastards, but sure as shite there’s a lotta bastards among them.”

“I agree.” The older women turned to look at Sally, surprised. “At college, they just wanted to get into my pants. ‘Sexy Chinese girl’, ha, ha.” She took a chug of her chai latte. “I can’t trust them.”

“Ye might find someone ye can, lass,” said Anna thoughtfully. “But ye’ve got tae be careful, for sure.”

Sally stood. “I need some chocolate.” She stepped towards the vending machine, then hesitated. “I... something’s wrong...” Her legs gave out and she collapsed on the floor.

“Sally!” Helen stood and started to move towards her friend, but her own legs felt odd. She sank to her knees, trying to keep her balance. “I’m coming, I...” She fell the rest of the way to the carpet.

Anna’s limbs were already turning limp, but with a supreme effort she made it to the break room door and tried to turn the handle. It was immobile, somehow locked. Despairing, she looked at her two friends slumped together, then her own legs gave up and she collapsed against the door.

Within a minute, a door that was labelled “STORAGE” opened. Six blue-clad figures entered, pulling three flat carts that resembled those used at home improvement shops. Each of the three women was loaded onto a cart, their limbs flopping uselessly as they looked up into the expressionless faces of their captors.

Helen’s head lolled as her cart was pulled back through the door and down a short corridor. They stopped outside a freight elevator for a while, and she tried to see what was happening with her friends but only Sally’s leg and Anna’s arm were in vision. Then the elevator ‘dinged’ for arrival, and the three carts were moved in.

The descent was slow, and took a long time. Helen tried to scrutinize the faces of her captors, but there was little to see; they did not seem interested in her, just starting ahead at the lift control panel. Shouting for help was right out, her vocal muscles had apparently taken a long holiday. Trying to stand was so far beyond possible that she didn’t even try.

At the end of their descent, the three carts were pulled out of the elevator into a bright white corridor, then into a room where three broad tables were prominent. Each woman was lifted by their captors onto a table, and then the blue-suited figures left. In their place, white-clad and masked figures approached.

Helen watched, helpless, as she was surrounded by the new people. This didn’t look good.

It took only a short time for Helen to be stripped, carefully, of her clothes and jewellry. Naked, she was unable to resist as one figure sunk a painful needle into her right elbow crook and established an I/V. Another unwrapped a urinary catheter and slowly, uncomfortably, introduced it into her urethra. The final indignity was a cold metal probe that was introduced into her sex, trailing wires.

Helen could only lie there and endure the violations. The masked figures did not make eye contact, apparently completely focused on their work.

Apparently satisfied, the figures removed a large black bag from its wrapping and pulled it over Helen’s paralyzed feet. Slowly they inched it up her body, careful not to disturb the wires and tubes, until it reached her shoulders; then they closed it around her neck, and tightened several cords and straps to fit it snugly to her body.

Above her head, two wires suspended from the ceiling swung into Helen’s vision. She noticed for the first time that there were tracks spread across the ceiling, from which the wires hung. Her attendants connected the wires to anchors on her shoulders, and as the table slowly sank into the floor she was gradually hoisted to a vertical position. One attendant held her head up while another fastened a strap around her forehead. She was unable to move as muscle as a motor powered up and the wires started to move her out of the room.

Out of the door, and down the corridor for a while, the conveyor brought her through a curtain of plastic strips into a high-ceiling darkened room. Helen felt herself lifted up until she was hanging high above the floor, then the wires stopped and she swung gently in the darkness.

A few faces were visible in the gloom: other women, similarly bagged and hanging. Some seemed asleep, others had their eyes darting around. An illuminated sign on the wall read: “SILENCE”. It was like the web of a giant spider.

Feeling was starting to return to Helen’s mouth. “What’s happening?” she whispered.

The other women frantically shook their heads. Distracted, Helen noticed a familiar face hanging next to her whose eyes were closed. She managed to raise her voice.

“Sally? Sally? Aaaaahh!”

The probe in her sex had suddenly sent a sustained pulse of electricity through her, abusing her most tender nerves. Helen sobbed, trying to avoid making a noise. Now she understood the signage, the signs of her fellow captives, and the silence.

Finally, the probe stopped its activity and Helen gasped quietly in relief, with a tear or two dripping down her cheek. She would not be making any more noise.

Time passed indefinitely as she and the other women hung there. Occasionally a motor would fire up and the wires would take a captive out of the room, or a new captive would arrive, but no-one dared break the silence. The suspended women made desperate eyes at each other, but there was no apparent way to communicate. Sally eventually recovered and made frightened eye contact, but seeing another woman suffer the penalty of loquaciousness prevented her from talking.

After many hours, suddenly the wires above Helen started to move. She was conveyed out of the dark room—she thought of it as the ‘larder’—and down the corridor. This time the wires took her into a small cubicle, maybe 12 feet high but barely big enough for her shoulders to fit, and the door closed behind her.

She swung there for a few seconds, unsure of what would come next.

Suddenly a pair of robotic arms shot out of the walls, seizing her shoulders and holding her steady. Above her head she heard a humming, and the mechanical noises of machinery descending. Something closed around her head, and there was a draft of cold air down her back.

She swallowed, afraid of what would come next.

What she didn’t expect was a bland female voice coming out of nowhere. “All dogs have four legs. My cat has four legs. Therefore, my cat is a dog.”

What? That wasn’t right.

“Alan can do his work in 14 days, and working together Alan and Ben can do the same work in 10 days. In what time can Ben alone do the work?”

She found herself reflexively computing differences and ratios.

“The day before two days after the day before tomorrow is Friday. What day is it today?”

She started to work through the nested clauses in her mind.

This went on for maybe fifteen minutes, without Helen vocalizing anything, before the mechanism detached from her head and retreated into the ceiling. She wondered what would happen next.

Suddenly a green light illuminated the cubicle; she was turned around and brought back into the corridor. Now she was brought much further down the corridor, all the way to a larger space at the end. She was pulled through a curtain of strips and brought face-to-face with a giant video screen, maybe 96 inches across.

The screen powered into life, and the face of a 25-year-old mixed-race woman appeared.

“Hello, Helen. I am Rori. Welcome to Ror-Ex.”