The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

Alisha’s throat started hurting on Friday afternoon. It was bad, of course, but not as bad as it could have been. The client had paid her company quite a lot of money to fly her down here as an expert, and if she’d tried to take sick days off in the middle of the trip her boss would have torn her a new one for it. As it was, she silently toughed it out, took a heavily honeyed tea instead of more coffee at her mid-afternoon break, and bought a litre of orange juice and a box of cold medication on the way back to her hotel. Hopefully it would just be a 24-hour bug and she’d be fine by Monday again.

Her hotel room was bare and unhomey. There was a little dresser in it but all her clothes were still mounded in her suitcase on the floor; there was a minifridge but it was empty until she stuffed the orange juice in it. She washed down a capsule of the cold medicine with a huge swig, got into bed, and texted her boyfriend, two time zones and three thousand miles away.

“Hey. Feeling under the weather. Thinking of you ♥”

She lay on her side, looking out the suite window at the city beyond and below her. The hotel room, for all its tiny size and lack of amenities, had a much nicer view than her third-floor walk-up back home. As the medicine kicked in, the view turned into an unparseable abstract of colours and shapes. She looked at it wonderingly. Across from her, some blocks to the left and a little down, a large screen apartment tv was angled almost towards her window. She couldn’t tell what it was playing—if the green and blue blur in her eyes hadn’t changed avery few seconds, she wouldn’t have been able to guess that it was a tv at all—but it was pretty and she watched someone else’s tv across town for an unmeasureable length of time before sleep claimed her.

Alicia felt worse—much worse—Saturday morning. The soreness in her throat had spread to her whole upper palate and her head pounded. I didn’t even eat anything last night, she thought, I’ve got to take better care of myself if I want to get better. But was hard to get out of bed. She just laid there for a long time, and when she did get up she just drank more orange juice with another dose of cold medicine. When she got back into bed—and she felt bad about that, she needed to eat something, but orange juice had calories, right?—she noticed that the tv was still playing across the way. It was just playing some kind of green and blue light. Maybe golf? she thought, a little light-headedly, while the cold medicine dragged her down again. She kept watching the tv.

She awoke again well into the afternoon. “I can’t go on like this,” she said out loud to herself, trying to will some effort up. She kept lying in bed anyways. It took her a while to realize the tv was still on and she was still facing it. Finally she tore herself away from the pretty light to hit the bathroom. That got her moving again at least, and after another swig of orange juice—straight from the bottle this time, she couldn’t care to find her glass—and put some clothes on. She made it as far as the mini-store in the hotel’s lobby. She bought a box of dehydrated chicken noodle soup. Don’t need to go outside, just need some food, she thought.

Back in her hotel room, she started boiling some water in the suite coffeemaker. She sat on the edge of the bed, knowing that if she lay down she the blood would rush to her head and she’d pass out or throw up or something. The tv was still on. She watched it. The perc finished dripping boiling water into the pot and she sat on the edge of the bed, watching. She was, she thought to herself, sick and lethargic, but couldn’t work up the effort to move for a long time. Finally she got up. The hotel room had no bowls, nor spoons for that matter, but that hardly stymied her for long. She just dumped two sachets of soup into the pot and drank straight from it. She checked her phone. Her boyfriend had been texting sympathetically. “Yeah, feeling pretty awful and sleeping a lot. Thinking of you ♥” She wished he was here to take care of her.

Then she took another cold capsule and went back into bed. In her blurry, sick, drugged haze, the tv seemed to be saying something to her. She stared, trying to learn its secrets.

Her dreams were awful, thick black tendrils chasing her endlessly through a dark forest. Alicia awoke before dawn on Sunday, drenched in sweat. She was woozy from fever and hunger. Her joints ached, her head ached, her throat ached. It was all she could do to look at the tv in the distance. Its colours soothed her head. She kept having the hallucinatory idea that it was telling her something. She stayed in bed for hours, slipping uneasily in and out of sleep, but she kept watching the tv. It was the only thing that helped.

By midmorning she was a bit more lucid. What would actually help was more food and medicine. She hadn’t cleaned the perc but hardly cared: she ran another pot of boiling water and poured more soup into it. Another round of soup and orange juice and cold medicine and then she was back in her damp, sweaty spot in the bed. The bed was large enough that she didn’t have to lie there, but she somehow couldn’t be bothered to roll over. The bed was gross but she could see the tv from here. The medicine must be helping, she thought, giggling weakly. I can see what it’s telling me. It was telling her—it was telling her -

The light was in her dreams now too. It was what she was running towards as the roiling blackness of her fever pursued. She knew she’d be safe in the light. Alicia would be safe there.

She was there.

It was sometime in the early morning of Monday. Alicia had been sleeping, in and out, for almost a day. When she awoke she watched the light until she slept again. When she slept she dreamed of the light until she awoke again. Her eyeballs had joined the general cacophony of aching. The light soothed them. Her head had passed through headcold to hunger headache and back to feverish illucidity, but the light soothed that too. She needed food, some tiny part of her was still protesting, but it was easier to watch the light. She tossed the soaked, filthy bedsheet off of her—that was a step towards taking care of herself that didn’t involve looking away from the light. She tried to roll out of bed without looking away, but couldn’t manage and hit the carpet beside the bed painfully.

The light was gone and her head throbbed—along with her ribs where she’d fallen—but she could think clearer again. She needed more food. She needed more orange juice. She needed more medicine. She got up, her head hollow and her limbs unsteady. She washed down another cold capsule with the last of the orange juice while the perc ran. The pot was disgusting, crusted instant soup all over the bottom, but she could barely think about that. As it dripped in, she stared across the room out the window. She could see the light. The cold medicine really did help. She could see the light. Could tell what it was supposed to do. It was telling her about her Mistress, and she shuddered as the word moved through her brain for the first time. (She was shivering almost continually from the fever as she stood, naked, next to the coffeemaker, but she knew deep down that this shiver was different.) Alicia was so lucky. So many people must have glanced at that window, not realizing what they were looking at; only she had had the right combination of bed time and heavy medication to keep her attention on it, for hours and hours, letting her understand the secret message it was broadcasting to the world. It was so wonderful.

She rushed to the bathroom to puke up her almost-empty stomach.

It was Monday morning. Alicia knew she was in no state to go to work. She managed to call in and the client’s manager had no doubt she was too sick too, as Alicia croaked out her apologies through a throat practically swollen shut. Her phone was full of worried messages from her boyfriend, trying to convince himself that her nonresponsiveness was just sleep. She texted back “I’m still alive. Thinking of you ♥” automatically, even though she was barely thinking of him, or anything at all. The whole time she was staring out the window at the light.

There was no food left in the hotel room, nothing to drink, and while she almost automatically took another dose of the medicine she knew it wouldn’t help enough. She couldn’t take care of herself well enough—she was too sick, she’d been trying and failing all weekend. Some memory suggested her boyfriend but he was too far away, in another city. She was alone here, friendless, helpless. Except for one woman.

She knew her Mistress would help her.

She threw on her pants and shoes, not bothering with socks or underwear after her numb, clumsy fingers refused to handle the delicate work. It was all she could do to get the front button of her jeans done up. She similarly failed to find the clasp on her bra, the holes in her tee-shirt, and ultimately pulled her jacket around her naked torso without even sticking her arms down the sleeves.

She stumbled out of the hotel room, to the elevator. There was no one in it but she got some strange looks as she crossed the lobby, and even more as she went out into the street. Her face was grey and her eyes bagged, she was clutching her jacket around her and staggering. She looked like she was dying. She wasn’t, quite. She didn’t think so.

She had some time to think as she wandered down the unfamiliar streets of the city, trying to find the building the light was in. She didn’t know her Mistress at all. Didn’t know what she would do. She wasn’t supposed to have been programmed, after all. Maybe her Mistress would nurse her back to health and send her back to her boyfriend, happy and unharmed. Maybe she’d fake her death after emptying her bank account, turn her into a mindless slave. Maybe she’d give her another jug of orange juice and kick her back out onto the street. (Alicia hoped it wasn’t that last one.) But here was the building. She recognized the brickwork, in a vague, unfocused way, and someone was coming out the door so she was able to get in without loitering outside like a burglar. Not that she looked like a burglar, shivering and wobbling as she walked.

She fell into the elevator, leaning against the mirrored wall. She really did look awful. But her Mistress would help her. Her Mistress would help her. The light had been on the fifth floor from the top. She couldn’t count, her head was stuffed with cotton wool, so she just hit the top five buttons and got out the first time the doors opened. The light had been at the end of the building, but her sense of direction was gone and she didn’t know which direction to turn as she stumbled out into the hallway. She had to keep moving, towards her Mistress. If she stopped she would be lost. She started walking down the hall at random, one arm bracing her against the wall. Her Mistress had to be this way. She didn’t know if she could go on a second time.

She reached the end of the hallway. Turned to the last door. Tried to knock, instead fell hard against it, her shoulder banging the door. She lay there, against the door, breathing shallowly and painfully through her sore throat. Her head was pounding. She needed her Mistress so badly.

“Who is it?” asked a voice from inside the apartment. Oh, God, yes, that was her Mistress’ voice, she knew it without a doubt. She tried to answer but couldn’t, couldn’t even move to get her face in front of the door’s fisheye lens. “Hello?” asked her Mistress. “Is someone there?” She started to open the door and Alicia rolled bonelessly through the gap to the floor of her Mistress’ apartment.

“Oh my God,” said her Mistress, in horror. “Who are you? Are you ok?” It was a dumb, rhetorical question. Alicia was clearly very, very unwell. But Alicia was ok now. Her Mistress would make everything better.