The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

There was another short, stunned, pause, but the individuals around the table recovered quickly. All of them had seen, ordered, done worse things in their lives.

“You have proof that this recording is genuine?” O was the first to speak. “Senator St. Clair’s political opponents, particularly Ingersoll and his vile little Reconstructionists, would not hesitate for an instant to fake such a scene, if they felt they could get away with it, since it would of course destroy her career if it were to become public, and was believed to be real.”

“I’m deeply hurt that you would think of such a thing, Mr. O. My reputation...”

“The Corporate Councils back the Reconstructionists, Mr. Smith. They have very deep pockets, and a burning desire to reclaim what they feel the founders of the UE stole from them.” O parried blandly. “It has been my personal experience that money, when applied in sufficient quantities, offers a wonderful salve when one’s... reputation... has been injured.”

“I have in my possession the remains of the original Orion datacore from which this recording was taken. It can of course be tested for authenticity by the purchaser.”

“Not good enough, Smith.” M snapped. ”If this is the real goods, then whoever gets it will pay through the farking nose. Fair enough. But until we have proof that this isn’t some Reconstructionist scheme to use us to do their vomit work, you either give us something better, or..”

“Or?”

“...Or you can expect a significant reduction in your fee. Destroying the illustrious senator’s career, while... an interesting notion in certain respects... is not worth a fraction of the price of controlling her.” O finished. He glanced at something or someone outside of the range of the holofield at his end of the meeting, and frowned slightly. Shook his head.

“I see. And Mr. N?” He looked at the dark, blank-faced figure who sat silently, inscrutably. “Do you agree with this sentiment?”

The armored giant remained motionless a moment longer, then nodded, once, silently, his mask shimmering.

Smith sighed in an exaggerated fashion, then clasped his hands in a purposeful manner.

“Very well. As I see it, there is only one way that we can prove to your satisfaction that what I offer is on a true vector. It is risky, and rather complicated, but with your gentlemen’s resources and connections, I think...”

“If one did not know better, Mr. Smith, one would suspect that you were prepared all along for our skepticism, and that your previous protestations were a dishonorable attempt to reduce your expenses.”

“I...” Smith again broke off and looked down as something new beeped in the depths of his case, with a greater sense of urgency than before. He silently studied whatever had made the noise and frowned. “I see again. Unfortunately, gentlemen, it appears that we will have to reconvene this meeting at a later date.” He looked up, his face hard. “And it also appears that one of you will not be present at that meeting. This is of course regrettable, but I have standards to maintain.” He pulled the lazdis out of the slot, and casually crushed it in his hand. The silvery slip crumbled to powder, which began to turn to smoke and drift away as Smith rubbed it out of his fingers. He tapped the top of his case, which smoothly closed up.

“I will be in touch, gentlemen. Good day.”

He and the case left the room, moving quickly but confidently. Somewhere off in the distance, something began to wail, a noise that fell almost instantly into the general category of ‘siren.’ The sound began to grow louder, as if others were kicking in as well.

The three at the table exchanged a final set of glances, and disappeared from the room, almost simultaneously.

M turned thoughtfully in the middle of the spherical chamber, the green smoke twirling around his painfully thin body and streaming slowly off his dangling, useless, legs. (Apart from his coloration, and his shrivelled hands and feet, his resemblance to an Orion was actually quite pronounced. His eyes even bulged in the same way.) He took a last, long, puff of weedgar and then weakly flicked the butt away from him, his fingertips pointed and sparkling. From the (figurative) corner of the room, something long, thin and grey lashed out through the shifting micro-gravity fields, neatly hooked the discarded object with a set of delicately nailed finger-tendrils, and reeled it in. Compared to the purple monstrosities that M had just been watching with his T-beam relay, the grasping tentacle looked almost cuddly. On the other hand, the weedgar remnant, still smoldering, was flipped down into a circular mouth lined with interlocking teeth that made an Orion’s smile seem actually pleasant and subdued. Those teeth went to work, and the tentacle retracted to rest.

M turned again, so that his oddly mild blue eyes passed over some of the multitude of active holoscreens that lined the ‘walls’ of the room, blaring color. A shot of a seemingly endless field of weedleaf, meticulously tended by a roboharvester under a sky that was tinged an unpleasant orange-red color. A corporate duelling field with robot hovertanks blasting one another into smoking rubble. A small dark-haired man ‘wearing’ nothing but a grin and a crudely-chromapainted sign reading “LivE from NeW tokYo”. A scene from the popular interactive holosim soapera ‘Ring Around The Sky.’ Finally, a screen that showed two large semi-transparent Zill, both with the usual four arms and clusters of glowing green eyes, engaged in an activity that resembled a cross between a ballet and a chainsaw duel. M stopped here.

If he had wanted, none of this was really necessary, technologically speaking. He could have had a single biocircuitry implant installed in his skull, and be able to flip through all of these channels, and more, right inside his head.

But data can flow both ways in such an arrangement, and he was not a man to take chances. (Moonbeam, in fact, made its dollarbytes with its technologically-outdated holo-confrencing equipment, by specifically catering to individuals like M.) His mind and the sea of interstellar data remained separate, and, further, he remained locked in the damaged body he had been born with, not for a moment trusting the Nanosurgeon’s Guild enough to allow any of its members to inject their microscopic healing robots into his wasted frame.

He wiggled his fingers at the Zills’ screen in a seemingly vague fashion. The scene abruptly shifted, zooming in close on a grim, bald human, his face and body covered with scars, biocircuitry inserts, and tattoos. The tattoos moved and flickered oddly in the light of the transmission, giving the man the distinct appearance of having maggots crawl over large portions of his skin. His silvery cybereyes looked up from whatever he was working on, and he rumbled:

“Yeah, Boss?”

M lolled his enormous head (almost as bald as the man on the screen’s, but not as a fashion statement...) so that it was looking at yet another nearby display, filled with words, numbers, and other, less identifiable, symbols. He silently watched the data flow, layer on layer. A phrase lit up in red. His weak neck rotated back.

“Jerves. What do we have on Sirius Station 3 in the way of negotiation teams?” As witnessed in his conversation with Smith, his voice was surprisingly forceful, deep and focused. It seemed impossible that his body could hold and use that voice without exploding.

The tattooed man glanced sideways for a moment, not looking at a screen but pulling up the needed information from its storage place somewhere inside of himself. M did not use such things, but he had no objection to his employees doing so.

“Esherick and his bunch, Boss. N’Gota, although he’s sorta busy right now with that merger with...”

“Yeah, yeah. Never mind. Esherick will do.”

“Who’s the target, Boss?”

M sighed and looked ‘upward.’ Another flexing of metal fingertips, more data flowing, and another sideways glance from Jerves. The underling’s eyes widened for a moment, then narrowed. The shifty caution showed, even through the lack of pupils. “You sure, Boss? You know he’s done us right in the..” He broke off upon seeing M’s expression. “I’ll get right onnit, Boss.”

“You do that.” M waved a fragile hand one last time, and broke the connection. The Zills resumed their activity. He clicked his fingertips in a impatient fashion, and something long, thin and grey darted towards him, holding a new, lit, weedgar. M took the offering, and spun once again, now looking at another, much larger, field of data, bright and multicolored and tightly-bunched, masses of dollarbytes being lost and made. Lives, fortunes, empires, rising and falling in the sea of raw information. The self-stranded castaway stared out across that sea, his fetus of a body curled up in the womb he had caused to be hollowed out of rock, and set adrift among the mingled stars and tachyons...

There was a melodic buzzing, and the thin, prim-looking woman looked up from her Spartan desk, in the middle of her broom-closet of a room. She delicately pushed her wide glasses back up on the bridge of her narrow nose, their deeply mirrored surfaces hiding her eyes. As well as the tightly-packed masses of biocircuitry that lurked inside the lenses.

“Yes, sir?”

A sardonic, cultured, voice spoke out of the thin air near one of the blank walls.

“Ah, Miss Thurnton. It would appear that the game is, as they say, afoot. You’ve confirmed the target’s location?”

Miss Thurnton looked down at the blank table before her, seeing something that wasn’t there. Stroked a long, pointed, fingernail across a few centimeters of polished wood in an almost sensuous fashion. Returned her sparkling gaze to the empty place on the wall.

“Yes, sir. About three kilometers to the east of our present location, just as you suspected.”

A mild sigh. “Some individuals are not nearly as clever as they think they are. Give our friend the needed data, and tell him that he and his associates may begin.”

“At once, sir.” The woman flashed a feral smile and again outlined the woodgrain with her darting fingers.

The figure in the Voidmask broke the holoconnection, and the ‘table’ he had been sitting at splintered away to nothing, except for a small curved piece directly in front of him. A short phrase blinked redly in the space that remained: “Sirius Station 3. Module 4. Section 35a. Block 231.” He slipped a finger of his gauntlet through a sideways groove in the mask’s control unit, which was mounted on his suit’s chest. The featureless, eye-watering, surface of the mask began to blotch and crumble, melting away until only a framework of thin metal bars remained. Another groove set below the first was navigated, and the arm twitched oddly, sank down, came to rest on the arm of the heavy chair in which the figure sat.

The blonde woman behind the bars waited impassively as the chair started to rotate. The bulky suit opened like a giant black clamshell; the bars of the Voidmask sliding apart, the chest and legs opening so she could extract herself from within its interior. She uncrossed her slender but muscular arms from in front of her well-formed body. The jelly-like cyberganglic nodes that lined the inside of the suit made a wet sticky noise as she pulled her bare neck and shoulders free of them. Wearing only a silvery, single-piece garment that clung tightly to the slender contours of her body, she rose from the cracked-open remains of her disguise. Something peeped in the control panel, and a lazdis popped up from a slot. She took the slip, and left the small room on bare feet, her eyes cold and grim. Down a bare plasteel corridor two or three steps, and into another room, much like the one she had just vacated. The door closed behind her, and lights almost identical to the ones in the recently vacated conference room flashed on around its frame. The woman slid into a more normal chair, and powered up another communication unit by offering up a small sample of her DNA as a sacrifice. The device made a discrete gong sound, and she put the lazdis into a slot much like the one from which it had just been extracted. There was whirring silence for a moment, and then a relentlessly flat computer voice spoke:

“TACHYON CHANNEL OPENED. CHANNEL CONFIRMED. CHANNEL SECURED.” More silence, followed by: “TRANSMISSION COMPLETE. CHANNEL CLOSED. PLEASE STAND BY.” The lazdis disintegrated, and the resulting smoke was efficiently sucked away.

Not following the voice’s instructions, she rose again to her feet, and left the room, the lights winking off as the door slid open. The bathroom, and its utilitarian vibrashower, were just down the hall, and it didn’t take her long to peel off the silvery garment, unpin her hair and let it flow down her back, revealing the thin electric-green strand of permadye that streaked away from each temple. Entering the shower’s field, she scrubbed away the final remnants of the C-gang slime from her skin. Cleansed, she returned to the second communication room, wearing a austere black bathrobe, again sealing herself inside.

She seated herself once more, and waited. While true waiting is not something that comes naturally to most humans, a multitude of distractions creeping into the body and monkey-mind, it can be taught.

She had always been a good student.

Finally, the device again sprang to life, flashing lights and peeping in a peremptory manner. Once again, she stroked her fingertip across the DNA verifier. The device did not establish any sort of hologrammatic presence, or even a voice. After a moment, there another short tone. In reply to this, she slid her splayed-out fingers into a set of slots before her. More tiny C-gangs slithered forward, gently linked up with the nerve endings in her fingertips.

The basic resemblance of this to what she had just witnessed on her holoscreen did not escape her.

The woman in the chair, like M, did not have a biocircuitry implant hooked into her mind, and her reason was basically the same. Cut off from the cyberworld of humanity’s collected data, she was dropped back a step on the technological ladder, C-Gangs only able to touch her nerves, not her thoughts. But those thoughts were thus one step back as well, and that was the important thing. She twitched the tips of her fingers in a certain way, following a certain pattern, and impulses flew back and forth. Lights flashed. Noises softly sighed and pinged and hummed. Thoughts were exchanged at almost a telepathic level.

Emphasis on the almost.

The conversation was very short and, after translation, ran roughly along these lines:

-This is Central Command. Identify.—

-Captain Phelps reporting in.—

Short pause.

-Identity confirmed. Channel secured. Go ahead Phelps.—

-Holofootage received?—

-Confirmed.—

-Shall N attempt to re-contact Smith?—

-Unnecessary. No longer your problem. Counter-efforts already underway.—

-Understood. Any further orders?—

-No. Proceed with standard duties.— Another pause.—Unless Smith re-contacts N. If so, buy the datacore. Price no object.—

-Understood.—

-Central out.—

-Phelps out.—

Captain Angelica Phelps extracted her fingers from the C-gangs’ grip, powered down the communicator, and leaned back in the chair, still stretching the last of the kinks out her body. ISD Central Command had known. She of course hadn’t asked, and of course they hadn’t told her, but long experience had taught her how to read the nuances and pauses of the tone code quite well. They had already known, probably not about Senator St. Clair specifically, but about the Orions and their spies. (Plural. Presumably there had been others, since it appeared from what Smith said that the then-Lieutenant St. Clair had never gotten the chance to report back to her programmers before her Orion captors were all killed.)

While the prompt vibrashower hadn’t been just to remove the physical filth Smith’s scene had left her with, she wasn’t terribly surprised. It was well-known in UEDF circles that, during the war, the Orions had occasionally shown sudden bursts of either stunning good luck or brilliant strategic foresight, abruptly turning up where they could do the most damage. The thought of someone actually spying for the little monsters hadn’t occurred to most people, including herself.

But the ISD trained whole regiments of personnel, programmed bank after bank of biocomputers, to think of things that didn’t occur to most people; some of them right now would be trying to decide what ‘N’, a fictitious man who ran a real crime empire, would do next. It was just part of her duties, at the moment, to do N’s ‘public appearances’, when they were required. Maybe it would have been easier and more efficient to have him operate out of a central location, but tachyon links could be traced, and jumping him around to the four corners of UE space gave him that much more added mystique. Angelica knew that there were at least four other people who took turns being N, although she had no idea where they currently were, or even what their names were. The use of N had reeled in more lawbreakers and smashed more interstellar crime-rings than two dozen regular investigations combined, and the twisted genius (long retired now) who had come up with the idea of creating him was still something of a demigod in Internal Security...

She went to the bedroom at the other end of the cramped, one-person, bunker, and began to get dressed, pulling on underwear, rugged pants and blouse, gloves, red syntholeather boots, wide-brimmed hat. She finished by concealing various clandestine items around her person, items which all appeared even to fairly careful scrutiny to be more common, less lethal, objects. They lay in neat rows on a nearby tray, awaiting her grasp.

As she did these things, she wondered idly exactly what ‘counterefforts’ were underway. It probably wouldn’t be anything remotely pleasant. Presumably they’d try to get to Smith on Sirius S-3 before whoever had tripped the station alarm did. Failing that...?

She shrugged a trifle uncomfortably, and left to work her usual contacts down by the city’s waterfront. (If you could fairly call the acidic soup that filled Tarquain VI’s shallow seas ‘water’...) There were reports of another new batch of clandestine razorvine nurseries being set up in the hinterlands near Bridgehead City, and it was something that had to be investigated.

“All right, Smith, that’s far ‘nough.”

Smith turned away from the doorlock he was cracking. Somewhere in the distance, the sirens still wailed, signifying total station lockdown, sealing all doors between Modules and even Sections while the station security personnel (human and otherwise) searched for a dangerous, wanted, fugitive.

At least in theory.

Four or five figures stood in the pulsing light of the corridor-cum-alleyway behind him, arriving on the scene with the same suddenness as the three crimelords’ holograms in the Moonbeam meeting room. Something hinted, however, that the individuals now present were quite solid. Smith smiled blandly.

“Yes? Can I help you, gentlemen?”

“Goin’ the meetin’ in person was crack-brained, Smith, but even you wouldn’t be dreebish enough to carry it around withya. So you’re gonna to take us to it. Right farkin’ now. Or we get tah do it the fun way.” The speaker smiled, showing a set of teeth blackened by choco addiction. There was a flicker among the members of the group, and various lethal-looking items were unsheathed. Some were held in loose but professional grips, others floated smoothly up into the air under their own power, humming in an ominous fashion.

Smith looked at them as the station lights flashed, his brown eyes rapidly calculating the odd... probabilities.. costs...

A voice abruptly spoke up inside his mind, leading to a conversation that was much like Captain Phelp’s communications with UEDF-ISD Central Command, only shorter in real-time duration and in even greater need of interpretation...

-Bad news, Smith. You’ve just become redundant.—

-Oh?—

-The charming individual with the beady eyes and sloping forehead is, surprisingly perhaps, quite right. I wouldn’t have been... ah... ‘dreebish’ enough to take the activation codes to the meeting. Since I’ve seen the codes, that would include taking them to the meeting inside my brain. Ergo, you’re not Smith at all. Just an imperfect copy.—

-Oh. I see. I’m some kind of vatdroid?—

-Basically. With one or two special modifications. Me, for example.—

-And who are you, exactly?—

-I’m you, of course. Well, part of you. To cut a long story short, the two of us were packed into the same skull, and given just enough of Mr. Smith’s DNA, talents, memories and personality to ensure a successful negotiation. I was sent along... to keep an eye on you. And to conceal certain facts that you didn’t really need to know.—

-You call this a successful negotiation? Someone’s trying to double-cross you. Me. Us. Mr. Smith.—

-My dear fellow, I’d have been deeply disappointed if they hadn’t. After all, you did notice how carefully no one mentioned what was really for sale in that room, didn’t you?—

-I don’t understand. I was selling Marla St. Clair.—

-Ah yes. Of course you were.— (If the voice had come equipped with a hand, it would have absently patted Smith on the head as it said this.) -I must admit though, I expected them to at least wait for a little proof of authenticity before moving in for the kill. It appears Mr. M has decided to jump the gun. Only he would be so gauche as to sic station security and this bunch on us. A full report of the situation has already been T-beamed our... ah... heh... father. That duty complete, I now have only one more to preform: to point out to our dear Mr. M the error in his ways. You know what to do now.—

-You know, this sucks. This sucks big hairy Zill balls.—

-Zills have neither hair nor balls, but otherwise that is an excellent summary of the situation. Remember, Mr. Smith, in the most literal of senses, we are in this together. To the bitter end.—

The ‘droid surfaced from this internal dialogue, and again smiled at the man who had just spoken.

“Mr. Smith sends his regards.”

A couple of the marginally brighter members of the goon squad realized what this meant and opened fire, but it was of course far too late. The ‘droid simultaneously learned about and clicked a switch buried down inside his chest, shielded by special vat-grown tissue so that the ordinary street-level scanners, at least, couldn’t detect it.

The blast splattered debris across and through three cubic Blocks of the station. Even with total station lockdown already in effect, it took almost two days to stave off hull rupture of the effected Module. The station operation crew finally had to drain off the atmosphere to put out all of the fires.