Olivia’s Investigations — Backstory
The Internet chatroom was a place for long-time friends to hang around, chat, and maybe invite others to join their group. It didn’t need flashy animations to attract new users, because if you were their kind of person, you’d find it sooner or later. So there weren’t pictures of the people you were talking to, or profiles, or even a model of who was standing where in the virtual room. But you could tell the group if you were smiling, frowning, or hugging someone who’d received bad news, and most of the regulars had enough of a mental image of the place to imagine it pretty well.
So when Livvy Durden blustered in with only a perfunctory greeting, and Doctor Darkside greeted her with “Hey Livvy, how’s the lessons going?", most of the people there imagined her breezing quickly through imaginary doors because she didn’t have much time to chat today, and pictured her in a too-tight school uniform. Well, that might not be so much their skill at visualisation, but the types of men who most often frequented a fetish based chatroom.
“That name seems kind of familiar,” Chantelle raised an eyebrow, “Do I know you from somewhere else?”
“Probably not. Livvy Durden is one of the ninjas in the Lesbian Vampire Hunters soft-porn series, you could probably call her a role model or something. I don’t use this name anywhere else.”
“Cool, yeah, she turned up in the one where they go to Scotland and then she shows up in all the ones after that, right? I might have seen those movies. A few dozen times, you know?” Everyone grinned at that. They all had interests of some kind that they were used to keeping secret, they were in the habit of denying interest in hypnosis, or bondage, or porn. It was a great relief, the first time you denied something like that and then realised you didn’t need to be so cagey around here. “You’re watching porn in school, then?”
“Nah. It’s ages since I even watched it. I’m just popping in quickly today, first day at college and I just had lunch, but there’s still half an hour before my afternoon lecture, so I thought I’d see if I can connect here from the library computers.”
“Isn’t that a bit risky?” callmecandy was a little concerned, “I mean, coming on a fetish site from college, where anybody can look over your shoulder?”
“It’s a white screen with black text on,” Livvy just shrugged, “If anyone actually comes close enough to read the words, then I’ve got no trouble switching to something else. I’ve already got a little homework.”
“No porn until you finish it, then,” Chantelle gave a wicked grin, “Or we might have to find out if there’s anyone on the site close enough to cane you.”
“Now that’s an idea I can get right behind,” Doctor Darkside chuckled, “How long do you think I should give her to get it done?”
“Don’t even think about it!” Livvy pouted, “My back’s still sore from last time! I mean, it was incredible, but I’m so worried somebody’s going to find out. There’s two people today who guessed what we’ve been doing, and I don’t want everyone at college to know about the freaky things I’m into.”
“Two?” the Doctor was immediately concerned, “Anyone I should worry about? I mean, I hope I didn’t go too far…”
“Don’t worry, I loved it. But my back needs some time to rest. One of my housemates is working at the college now, we walked down together, and he kind of noticed I was in pain. I was so worried that the whole house would know, but it’s okay.”
“And the other one? Your Mistress said there was some guy she was worried about who you both met last week, who she thought might have some kind of guess.”
“Yeah, that guy,” Livvy shrugged, “He’s sat right next to me in the US Culture seminar, and he was staring all the time. He seems like a pretty nice guy, but I knew he’d figured out something was up. Then on the way to lunch he comes right out and asks me.”
“Do you trust this guy knowing so much about you?” Darkside was clearly concerned, dropping the mannerisms and facial expressions he normally used online in favour of terse lines of text.
“Well, I think so. He told me his big secret, too. Turns out the name everybody knows is his middle name, he’s got a first name he’s really embarassed about.”
“His parents were hippies?” Chantelle guessed, “Name like Moonchild or something?”
“No, classicists. But that’s almost as bad, I think.”
“Wait, you have a Mistress?” the shadowy figure who went by the name of Someone Else had presumably been looking away, and just now caught up with the conversation in his absence, “I thought you were like, Darkside’s slave in the real world, or something.”
“I’m bisexual. That means I get a Master and a Mistress, to tick all the boxes.” Livvy decorated the answer with a whole variety of little smiling faces, to make sure nobody took it too seriously. Then she turned back to address Dr Darkside, “Is she not online? I wanted to tell her about what happened, but she’s not here.”
“Her and your neighbour already went out. They have a special lecture, doing all the safety stuff before they’re allowed in the theatre. Has she created an account here, then? I’ve not noticed her yet.”
“Cute Librarian. Say hello next time you see her, she’s finding it hard to get to know people online.” Livvy took a while to type that answer, because her mind was on other things. If the person from the next room was on campus too, then that meant her enigmatic new friend wasn’t Someone Else, or anybody else who was currently chatting. Livvy knew that person was on the chatroom, and quite often, but not what their name was here. And perhaps more importantly, she knew that repeating that name in person was a post-hypnotic trigger that would allow for instant seduction.
“Will do. Anyway, what was it you wanted to tell her about this morning? This guy figured out you’re a painslut?”
“Yeah. It stopped him hitting on me anyway. Maybe that’s a good thing, not entirely sure. He said he’s got an older cousin who’s into that kind of thing, and he walked in on her by accident doing some pretty heavy stuff when him and his parents came up to visit them, and now he can’t get that image out of his head. Like any kind of S&M stuff makes him think of his cousin, and that’s an instant turn off for obvious reasons.”
“You should offer him a trance,” Lady Emanuelle pointed out, “Say it’s purely therapeutic, you can remove the weird connotations, and then you’ve got a slave for like, no effort.” Livvy mentally crossed another name off her list of suspects, though that still left an awfully large pool of people.
“You wouldn’t really do that to someone, would you?” the newbie, callmecandy, seemed more than a little nervous.
“Oh, don’t worry, Candy,” Emanuelle treated the room to a radiant, charming smile, “I only do things that will make people happy. If you want to talk about people who didn’t realise they’re slaves, though, I had one who I wasn’t even expecting to ensnare…
❧ Some time in the dim mists of prehistory (Christmas 1997)
A young man called Lance sat in front of his computer. It was still new enough to give him a little chuckle every time he connected to the Internet. Most of his friends didn’t really use it, and those who did were the inveterate nerds who used the online communities as a substitute for real life. It wasn’t an escape for Lance, though, it was a release. Here, he could find people who shared his interests, people he had things in common with that he’d never imagined he could share.
There was one particular website that he had to check every day. If anyone was tracking what pages he viewed, they’d probably think it was pornography from the title. Nobody else used his computer though, so his secret was safe for now. And he wasn’t lame enough to need Internet pornography. The quality was so low, it wasn’t worth the effort. If he was really that desperate to look at naked women, he could always dig out a handful of videos like ‘Nymphomaniac Lesbian Vampire Hunters 2: The Vampire Viscount of Venezuela’—his current favourite due to a scene in which Alicia Strokes was mesmerised and enslaved by the titular viscount.
That was why he was here; that was why he was spending time talking to people who were little more than words on a computer screen when he could have been at a bar with his buddies from work. Lance loved the idea of mind control, he liked to imagine some helpless girl finding that she couldn’t tell the difference between what was real and what she was told. And this one website had stories by the dozen, a new batch posted twice a week. Some of them were really amazing, and he’d found that as well as the excitement of the control, he found himself caring about the characters. The story he was reading now was one of his favourites, with a new chapter available every week or two. Over the last year, he felt like he knew the characters as well as he did anyone in the real world. Their lives and loves were as thrilling as anything in a big budget movie, and the special effects his imagination could create were as good as the new breed of computer-generated visuals on TV.
He wasn’t sure if it was just his obsession with mind control—and he could admit to himself that’s what it was—or if it was just the quality of the writing, but he could really imagine how it must feel for the main character, Tracey, every time she found herself naked at a party, or chained to a tree in the woods with no idea how she’d got there. There was a real sense of the progression of her slavery, until something she’d done once for a bet was coerced into an obsession every bit as strong as Lance’s own.
If he was willing to admit it, he liked the idea of being the slave more than the controller. But in his video and story collections, he always went for tales where there was a woman under someone’s spell, so he could keep on telling himself that he was fantasising about the strong, alpha role, being the man in control. Reading stories about a man would be too much like gay porn, and that’s not an image he wanted in his head.
The usual chain of introspection stuttered to a halt as the familiar page finally finished loading. (Is it “uploading” or “downloading”? he muttered under his breath. His cousin, the black sheep geek of the family, kept on correcting him for using the wrong one, so now he just stuck to saying it was “loading”)
The day’s update was a bit later than usual; there wasn’t a new chapter of Taking Tracy up yet. Still, he could re-read last week’s to remind him where it was up to. It was just as enthralling as must of Mistress Emanuelle’s work; when the evil genius hypnotised Tracy, he could feel just how the heroine felt, imagine her willpower draining away. The controller slipped into a monotonous, rhythmic style of speech and explained how it woud feel to enjoy the words so much that the difference between hearing the words and imagining the feelings he described just faded into nothing. Lance loved these stories, because he could imagine just how it must feel.
When he got to the end, he realised that next to the author’s name, instead of an email link for comments, there was a little icon bearing the words “Talk to me on Controlspace!”
He’d probably seen it before, but he hadn’t really wondered what this Controlspace was. He has nothing better to do until he saw the update, though, so he clicked the link and waited for his computer to respond. It appeared relatively quickly; a list of names down one side of the screen, and what looked like a conversation in the middle. It was an online chat, something he hadn’t previously tried, but he could get the hang of it well enough to choose a name for himself; MassiveLance would do.
“Hi,” he typed nervously, “I’ve been reading Taking Tracy, and I wanted to stop by and tell you how much I loved it.”
His words appeared on the screen, with his chosen nom de plume beside them. Then a second later, another name—Joanna—commented: “I don’t think I known that one. Is it a sequel to Seducing Suzanne?”
“No,” the third name to appear was Lady Emmanuelle, who Lance could only assume was the same as Mistress Emmanuelle on the story site, “It’s a kind of homage, I think you could say.”
Lance hesitated, wondering if he should repeat his earlier praise for the story. Luckily for him, Emmanuelle spoke to him first: “You liked my words, then? I’m more experienced in doing these things than writing about them, but I felt that some of my fantasies would be a little too extreme to be a comfortable experience for a real subject.”
“Oh yes,” he found his nervousness quickly evaporated when he had something direct to comment on, rather than just telling her how awesome he thought she was. “Especially those three little words, where the controller guy says them, but Tracy just feels her mind going blank and we never quite find out what they are.”
“Now that is very interesting,” Emmanuelle pursed her lips, fighting with her conscience for a moment. “You really should learn to distinguish better than your imagination and reality, sir. I’m sure I mentioned those words enough times in the text.”
“You did?”
“You really don’t remember? I think you’re getting too close to Tracy.” She paused again for a second, then Lance could really imagine her leaning close to his ear to whisper the next words he saw on screen.
“Obey me, slave.”
Lance responded, typing as quickly as he could. He didn’t remember later what he’d said, but Mistress seemed to be impressed anyway. And, much to his embarrassment, he still couldn’t remember those three little words.