The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

“Connor, wake up!”

He stirs in bed, a slow-motion replay of a tree-sloth uncoiling its limbs. His eyes gradually open. I stamp my foot in frustration, grab him by the shoulders, and shake him.

“Connor, you’ve got to snap out of this. Don’t give in to it. Fight it!”

Slowly, slowly, he shakes his head, and painfully drawls in a lowering voice. “Ouch, that hurt, Lela. Snap out of what? So I’m a little slow. Look at yourself, how fast you’re getting.”

“So what, I’m the problem here?”

The waiting is so frustrating. A million uninvited thoughts flicker through my mind as I wait for him to reply, his words forming in a slow tidal swell.

I think how stupid Connor seems, suddenly. How slow-witted.

I think how he used to be so clever, so sharp. How he used to be so quick.

I think of Connor’s handsome face, how all the previously unseen little fleeting micro-expressions that once made him seem so characterful and alive are starting to look like ugly, slow-moving fleshy distortions.

“You’re a lot faster than I am slow,” he finally says. “Look, I’ve worked it all out, I’ve been watching you, whenever you can sit still for a second...”

I sigh, and tap my foot impatiently. How long does it take to have a simple conversation round here?

“…and you are fast, Lela. Really fast...”

I pass the time trying to anticipate his words, with some limited success.

“…and I don’t know exactly how you measure these things, but you’re getting faster every day…”

I see a gelatinous tear forming in his eye. I watch it swell, the meniscus bulging, and at last it spills over and rolls gently down his face.

“…and I don’t know where this all will end, Lela.”

“End?” I yell, furious. “What do you mean, ‘end’? Connor, you—okay, we—have to fight this. There must be something we can do. Some kind of medicine you can take to speed you up. Something, anything!” I take a deep breath. “It’s like I’m watching you die!” I can’t help it. I am suddenly crying now, fast sobs of love and grief.

He shakes his head again, a comedically slow side-to-side movement. “I’m very much alive, darling. This is just the way things are, now,” he finally says.

“Oh Connor. What do you see, when you look at me?”

He is silent for a long while. Against the window, a raindrop splashes, the first of many today. It wobbles against the glass, bounces, bursts like a fat balloon of jelly, and begins its slow slide downwards.

“I see the woman I love. But you’re becoming a mayfly, a hummingbird. Here one moment, hovering; gone the next second.”

I force myself to stay still, to hear him, to listen. Somewhere in the house a door slams shut with a distant slow-rolling groan. The rain ticks against the window. It sounds like deep and gentle footsteps.

“You move like an angel. Next to you, I feel like my feet are stuck in mud. I feel asleep, useless, stupid.”

My heart cracks just a little. “Never stupid, Connor. You’re the smartest man I know, and I love you so much…”

“I love you more. But you’re becoming something different, Lela.”

Lightning flashes outside, a long slow crack opening in the sky. I watch the lightning creep across the clouds for a few subjective seconds, an electric flower opening, bright petals spreading; gradually its forks dim to darkness and are gone.

“But truly? What am I like to you, now?”

Connor looks at me for a long time, and then slowly drawls: “Beautiful. Always beautiful.”

In the evenings I sit and try to watch the news with Connor, but the picture is tortuously sluggish to my eyes, a series of still photographs. Madison’s graph is there, spreading wider every day.

I lose patience, and check the news sites on the web. Loading a page seems to take forever. CNN explains that the phenomenon is globalised and remains normally distributed around the bell curve. For the first time I start to understand the graph and its implications properly. Madison has now distilled it down to a single measure, the rate of personal time (RPT), defined as personal-seconds per clock-second. The larger the RPT, the ‘faster’ the individual, and the slower the world looks to them. The smaller the RPT, the ‘slower’ the person.

The article helpfully offers a summary analysis.

70% of the population remain within plus or minus five times standard personal clock speed; between five and one fifth of a clock-second per personal-second. Although extreme by prior standards, this RPT is still broadly within tolerances of ‘ordinary’ human interaction. This is the new ‘normal’.

There are long tails. At one extreme, about 0.1% of people are so slow as to be almost stationary to normal eyes.

At the other extreme, the same percentage—one in a thousand people—are running significantly faster than twenty-five times ‘normal.’ They perceive the normal world in extreme slow motion. Beyond that, there are probably a very few outliers, even more extreme and as yet unidentified.

The light bulbs in the house flicker. Fifty Hertz; fifty instantaneous ons and offs per second, light-dark-light-dark. I look at my watch, and count under my breath until the second hand clicks on. I calculate. My personal time perception must now be well advanced away from the ‘norm’; whatever normal is, now.

In numbers, I calculate an RPT of 0.08; put another way, a clock-second passes roughly every twelve me-seconds. This is edging into the long tail. Roughly one in five hundred people; people like me.

I time some of the little things Connor does, and work out his personal time is passing at around four Connor-seconds per clock-second; RPT 4. No wonder he is struggling to keep up. Finally, I begin to understand the full ramifications of what’s going on. Connor has been ahead of me all the way.

I hold him for a long time.

I press my lips against his and hold them there, waiting. Slowly, slowly, his mouth opens to receive mine, his eyes close, and we kiss, tongue inching gently against tongue.

Irrationally, I am suddenly viciously jealous of the normal, the slow. I know with a cold certainly that Connor will tire of me, if he hasn’t already, and that I have tired of him. I know he is lonely; he will find someone closer to his own speed, and with a crushing inevitability I know I will too.

A week passes, and things only get worse. I am getting gradually faster; Connor is getting slower. There comes a terrible point where we can’t interact, can’t even speak to each other. I imagine he hears my voice, if he hears it at all, as a cricket-like chirrup; his is like the deep subsonic rumble of a subway train. Connor can barely see me unless I sit still for a while.

I take to leaving Connor notes. As perceptions and experiences diverge, it’s the only way I can think of to communicate. It leaves me empty. We are losing touch.

I wander endlessly, not knowing what to do. The streets are full of human statues, creeping imperceptibly forward, and streaky blurs. I see Phoebe, moving as if through mud, and when I wave to her it goes unnoticed.

There is sometimes a note on the kitchen table when I come home, if I come home. Connor pours his slow-beating heart out: he is afraid, he misses me, Lela. He knows there is nothing we can do, but sometimes he sees me as a fleeting blur when we pass, and it breaks his heart.

It breaks my heart too.

And finally something finally snaps in me; the claustrophobic slowness of it all is intolerable. I have to get away. Home is no longer home. I retreat to my old empty flat, to the past, before I moved in with Connor.

The slow blonde newsreader has been replaced with a similar looking woman without comment from the network. I have taken to timing things as I go along, and I establish that the new blonde is ‘normal’, as are most people, albeit agonisingly slow to my eyes.

Madison speculates that the small number of extreme deviations from the mean will have as yet unknown sociological implications. He speaks so slowly that it’s easy to memorise his words.

“Much of the world will probably stay fairly ‘normal’. People will just have to get used to dealing with slightly different RPTs: being tolerant of others who are a bit slower; trying not to resent people who are a little faster. You all heard the President’s speech, of course.”

I did not. It was five subjective hours long, across all broadcast channels at once, and too slow to tolerate. However, I did skim-read it on the internet. It was, as usual, empty of meaningful content. “Togetherness” or “pulling together” was used eight times. “Social cohesion” and “rallying around our country’s values” were also repeated. “Tolerance” would apparently be the key. The word “freedom” was used numerous times, for no discernible reason.

Madison has more to say, about the nature and implication of the long tails. There is a long and technical panel discussion about evolution and natural selection, which leaves me fretful and disturbed.

I miss my simple ordinary life. I miss being with Connor. I miss talking with him like we used to, like normal people. I miss his kiss. Why has this happened to us?

When I was a child I visited the Yaddo Gardens in Saratoga Springs. There is a large memorial sundial there, to a woman named Katrina, and on the sundial I remember reading a beautiful elegiac poem, by Henry van Dyke. How time is too slow for the grieving, too fast for the fearful, and for those who love it does not exist at all.

I feel alone in the world, afraid for the future. I grieve for what was, and for what should have been.