The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

Cardiff-by-the-Sea, California

My Saab roadable safely and efficiently followed the curves of Manchester Avenue as it skirted the shoreline of the lagoon and turned northward at the coast. The sun was descending toward the Pacific horizon. I was only a few minutes away from the Kallenburg house, and I was being careful to maintain a low profile. That’s why I’d used my own roadable rather than booking a commercial flight.

Buying a roadable had been an amazingly simple process. All I had to do was select what I wanted through the network terminal, authorize the purchase with a biometric scan, and wait a few hours for the “car” to deliver itself. I suppose that if I’d wanted options that weren’t in stock at a nearby warehouse, then I might have had to wait a day or two for my vehicle to be assembled, but my Saab showed up in my driveway about three hours after I’d bought it through the terminal.

Since it appeared that either Pamela or Hugo (or both) wanted to keep the fact that she used to be Pamela McGuire a secret, I thought that someone might be watching to see if people from her past ever booked commercial transport to Cardiff-by-the-Sea. If they were watching, then I was probably near the top of their “people she doesn’t want to see” list. That’s why I bought the roadable.

Initially I’d thought of going with something more generic like one of the midrange Ford-Grumman models that were everywhere, but I reconsidered when I saw the Saab. The more upscale vehicle would blend in with the traffic in the expensive neighborhoods around the Kallenburg home. The Saab was also quite a bit faster than the more middle-class vehicles from Ford-Grumman and Northrup-Pontiac. It could use the high-speed corridors above the local traffic and the heavy freight roadables, and that was how I’d gotten from Michigan at 6:00 AM to San Diego a little less than 13 hours later.

I’d programmed in San Diego as my destination out of paranoia. Everything I’d read said that the movement of roadables was completely private and not viewable by anyone, but I wasn’t taking any chances that Pamela might get tipped off and run away before I could get there. Once I got to San Diego, I put in my new destination, selecting a house down the street from the Kallenburg house. After a quick zoom up the I-5 corridor, the Saab had exited and descended onto Manchester Avenue. My stomach tightened as the roadable turned into the community of cliffside mansions that was my destination.

I heard her before I saw her. The Saab was almost silent and I’d turned off the infotainment system back when I was still on I-5. Her shouting was clearly understandable as the roadable approached the house. She was pissed off at someone and she was doing her best to get that point across. With the windows tinted to blackout, the vehicle continued slowly up the street and finally she came into view. I was shocked.

She looked exactly the same! No, she looked even better than she had twenty years earlier. Her hair was longer and her body was just slightly more lush than it had been. She hadn’t aged a day. I was stunned. Had she figured out how the Temporal Singularity generator worked and put herself into stasis while I was gone? She was standing in the driveway next to an expensive De Havilland roadable, shouting at the unseen occupant of the vehicle.

“Why now, Mother? Why do you have to leave right this minute? Daddy wants to go to counseling, but now you’re running away all of a sudden. Why?”

Mother?!? What was Pamela’s mother doing there? The Saab continued up the street and finally I could see into the open door of the De Havilland. The occupant was Pamela. That made the girl in the driveway her daughter. Given the rate the virus spread, she must have been one of the last people born.

Pamela had aged, but she was still stunningly beautiful. She looked at least ten years younger than she actually was. My heart ached. I wanted to jump out and run to her, begging her to forgive me and let me explain what had really happened. I watched as she turned to the girl in the driveway.

“Shannon, honey, I don’t have time to explain. Something has come up and I have to go right now.”

I blinked. It looked like someone had been watching for me and had tipped her off. I knew that Hugo Kallenburg had money (more than I’d had twenty years earlier, but nowhere near what I had was now that my “investments” had skyrocketed) but I didn’t know that he had the kind of clout required to get supposedly private, secure-government-access-only information relayed to him. Shannon’s hands went to her hips in a posture of defiance.

“It’s another man, isn’t it? That’s why you filed for divorce last week, right? Is he rich? Grammy used to say that you were a gold-digger who trapped Daddy after another rich guy turned you down. Are you trading up to a richer guy again?”

“Don’t be that way, Shannon. It’s complicated. You wouldn’t understand. I’ll send for you after I get to where I’m going, honey.”

“Don’t bother, Mother. I understand just fine. I’m not a kid any more. Remember my 18th birthday? That was fifteen months ago. I’ve been an adult for fifteen months and I make my own choices. If you leave, then my choice is to never see you or speak to you again. So what’s it going to be?”

The Saab had moved too far away for me to hear Pamela’s response, but it was obvious what it was. Shannon spun on her heel and marched into the house without looking back and the De Havilland backed out of the driveway and headed rapidly down the street away from me. The navigation system chimed to indicate that I’d reached my destination, two houses past the Kallenburg residence, but I barely noticed that the vehicle had stopped.

The girl was nineteen years, three months old. I’d been in stasis for twenty years and a month. Add in the two weeks I’d been out of stasis and the numbers didn’t work out. Shannon wasn’t my daughter. Assuming a normal 40 week pregnancy, she’d been conceived three or four months AFTER Harrison had hijacked my life in Morocco.

Pamela had lied. She hadn’t waited for me to return for our wedding, like she’d said in her letter. Our wedding date was still months away when she’d not only found another man, but gotten pregnant with his daughter.

Was Shannon right? Had Pamela only been looking for a rich man so she could live in luxury? Had I been that rich man until I’d been downstreamed? It had always seemed like we had such a close, loving, deep relationship. Had she really just tossed that aside and moved on to another target? I’d never have believed it if I hadn’t been there to see it.

I don’t know how long I sat there, looking out over the ocean as the orange orb touched the horizon and slowly descended before finally disappearing. Maybe it was cathartic, or maybe I was just stunned into numbness, but I felt as if the setting sun took my hopes for a renewed relationship with Pamela with it and lifted a great weight off my shoulders. I had the infotainment system book me a hotel room on the harbor in San Diego, then sat back as the Saab’s turbine came online and it started back toward I-5.