“Vertigo”
It’s not real. She knows that. Even as she stares helplessly into the bottomless depths, watches the ribbons of color unspool endlessly down into the void at the speed of gravity, she hears the quiet little voice in the back of her head reminding her that it’s nothing but an image on the floor. They put a screen on the floor, that’s all. And they restricted her field of vision with this hood so that she can’t see the perfectly ordinary floorboards or carpet or whatever it is around her, and her subconscious is filling in the gaps between a silly looping gif of a roiling vortex and a bottomless pit because that’s what brains do. She’s not really staring down into infinite darkness. She’s not in any danger at all.
She tells herself that. It doesn’t help.
It’s the way she spins that makes it hard to resist the sensation of dizziness. She thought that maybe if she stopped struggling, she’d stop spinning sooner or later, but even when she stays completely still, the hook that she’s suspended from rotates ever so slowly. Or at least she thinks it does. She thinks she’s holding still, she thinks the hook is moving, she thinks the unspooling threads of twisting color on the floor are just a picture, but...but her inner ear keeps telling her that one of those things is wrong. She can feel the motion, confusing her sense of balance and giving her just enough vertigo to combine with the looping gif to make it seem like she’s lost in perpetual freefall.
Struggling makes it worse. When she wriggled and writhed and tried to slip free of the ropes suspending her in place (there are ropes, she reminds herself, she’s not falling there are ropes there are ropes there are ropes) she just wound up getting...getting wound up. The ropes twisted around themselves until the stored energy released itself in a rapid counterspin that sent her in dizzying circles for what seemed like hours. She had to close her eyes for a little while when that happened, but she didn’t want to do that again if she could avoid it. That suggestion has already taken a little bit too well.
Closing her eyes means she’s sleepy. Being sleepy makes her suggestible. Being suggestible makes her obedient. It’s a theme they keep returning to, again and again as she continues her endless fall. She’s not sure if it’s a recording—if it’s a person, they’re somewhere outside her limited field of vision—but they keep circling back to those same suggestions. Staring makes her eyes exhausted. When her tired eyes feel heavy and exhausted, they have to close. She knows it’s a trick, she knows the whole thing is a trick, but she’s too dizzy to think about it properly. If she could just stop falling for a few minutes, long enough to clear her head, she’s certain that she could push aside that stupid voice and...and...
The thought trails off into fatalism. She doesn’t know where she is. She doesn’t know how long she’s been here. She can’t get out of the ropes (the soft, comfortable, perfectly anchored ropes) because she can’t struggle. She can’t get the hood off because she can’t struggle. She can’t ignore the voice or the buzz between her legs because the illusion of constant freefall makes her too dizzy to concentrate, and she can’t shut out the bottomless void below her because the voice slips into her head whenever she closes her eyes and programs her dizzy, confused mind even deeper.
She has to keep her eyes open. She knows that. The voice keeps reminding her that heavy eyes are sleepy eyes, and sleepy eyes make sleepy minds, and sleepy minds accept and obey. She can’t accept and obey, not if she ever wants to escape her captors. So she has to keep her eyes open. But that means...that means she has to stare right into the heart of the swirling vortex below her. She can’t look away—the ropes (they’re so soft that it feels like they’re not even there) hold her suspended directly over the infinite void, and it’s too much like work to resist the way that the colors constantly draw her eye back down to the darkness at the center. She tried; she keeps trying again and again, when she notices that she’s been staring vacantly into the heart of the spiral without even blinking for ages. But her will to resist that endless tug always fades sooner or later.
That’s when she gets really dizzy. When her stare fixates completely on the very center of the spiral, the swirling colors and the weightless support of the ropes (there are ropes, she can feel them when she struggles even if struggling would be such a mistake right now) start to confuse her sense of gravity entirely. She starts to lose track of what ‘up’ and ‘down’ even mean, and it becomes just as easy to believe that she’s endlessly drifting forward into a sea of unfolding streams of light. The voice and the pleasure pull her along, deeper and deeper into the infinite vortex, and she knows she can leave all of her thoughts behind her as she lets that tugging bliss carry her further into relaxation. Weightless. Floating. Thoughtless. Obedient—
She blinks heavily. Reality crashes back with a jolt that makes her whole body shudder, sending her into another slow spin that causes the vortex of color to rotate at strange and impossible speeds for a moment. She feels another wave of vertigo crashing in on her, her inner ear convinced that she’s tumbling end over end even as her eyes tell her that she’s floating in perfect stillness. She closes her eyes tightly, trying to banish the phantom sensation, but the after-image of the spiral behind her eyelids makes her feel so profoundly exhausted that she immediately forces herself to open them again. She can’t stop looking now, not with the swirling colors so deeply imprinted in her mind. They would capture her so easily. She’d never escape. She’d never be free.
She has to keep fighting, she knows that. She can’t just close her eyes and let the voice carry her thoughts away into obedience. She knows that if she ever gives in, they’ll never let her mind break free again. They’ll keep her lost in pleasure, lost in mindless bliss, lost in the heart of the spiral until the idea of free will erodes into dust. They’ll keep her forever, her mind trapped in endless ecstasy while her body obeys without question. The buzz between her legs will build and build until she cums, and she will never stop cumming as long as she surrenders to their inexorable, inevitable control. The voice told her all of that, and she believes it.
She struggles with that thought for a moment. She’s supposed to shut out the voice. If she listens to the voice, she’s accepting their programming. If she accepts their programming, she becomes more obedient. If she becomes more obedient, it becomes more difficult and exhausting to resist until she can’t fight her captors any longer and she sleeps forever in their will. She has to keep her eyes open, staring into the spiral and closing the voice completely and totally out of her conscious thoughts. It’s the only way to escape being brainwashed into obedience.
But...
But the voice told her that. The voice kept describing all of that to her, over and over until she learned how to tune it out and stop listening. Every word painted a picture of inexorable obedience with only one possible escape—stare unblinkingly into the spiral, stop struggling against the ropes (there are still ropes, aren’t there? She’s been so still for so long that she’s started to feel like she’s floating into the colors again) and don’t think about anything the voice says to her anymore. It suddenly occurs to her that passive, silent acceptance doesn’t feel very much like she’s resisting at all.
But even as the thought appears in her head, it subsides under a tide of slow, numbing resignation once more. She’s tried everything. She shouted herself hoarse trying to drown out the slow, methodical voice in her ears. She squirmed and wriggled against the ropes (if there are any ropes—she knows she could find out by trying to struggle again, but her body doesn’t seem to want to move anymore) until her muscles went limp with exhaustion. She squeezed her legs together, trying desperately to wring an orgasm out of the constant buzz of stimulation that continually teases her clit. She tried closing her eyes and drifting in darkness with the words of her captors as her only company. None of it worked. There’s no escape. All she can do is hold out a little bit longer and hope that something will happen to rescue her.
So she stares at the colors until gravity ceases to have meaning, and she begins to drift endlessly on into the swirling vortex that draws her eyes to the infinite depths at the center. She lets the pleasant thrum of the vibrator become a continuous pulsing bliss that drowns out her thoughts, leaving her mind empty with arousal. She lets her body relax, sagging into the weightless (ropes? were there ever ropes? did she dream it?) void that surrounds her. She allows the voice to insinuate itself into the back of her mind, her consciousness captivated by unfolding colors that pull her along deeper and deeper into darkness. Her breath becomes slow and shallow. She convinces herself once again that this is resistance, that she’s still fighting her captors even as she surrenders to helpless passivity.
The dizziness returns, and this time she lets it flow over her and through her. She’s lost track of whether she’s floating or falling or rising; she’s almost completely disassociated from her body now. There’s only the void at the heart of the spiral, and she always goes deeper into that no matter which direction she moves. Everything is spinning now, the sensation of vertigo numbing her mind into placid acceptance as she gives in with a sigh and lets her mind simply stop. It’s the only thing she can do. It’s the only answer she has. She needs to stop thinking and drift into the vortex. She needs to stop thinking and let the voice tell her unconscious mind what to do. She needs to stop thinking and...and...and she needs to stop thinking. And she needs to stop thinking. And she needs to stop. Thinking. Stop. Stop. Stop.
By the time she closes her eyes, she doesn’t notice that it’s a command anymore.