The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

Laurie performed terribly at softball practice. She was way too preoccupied. No one gave her a hard time except for coach, who said, “You’re out of practice. You shouldn’t be skipping so many games! We need our third baseman!”

She apologized mechanically and tried to focus on what she was doing, but it was no use. Laurie’s mind kept coming back to what all she might have been doing because of the hypnovirus. How could she figure out what those things were?

It seemed these actions were each like infected programs on her computer. They could lay dormant and run in secret, and she would never know. She needed to run a scan on her brain. If only there were software...

“Laurie! You’re up!” and she stood in the batter box, swinging at a series of inside curve balls thrown by Angela. She hit about one in seven, which was pretty terrible, even for her. But she just kept thinking...

I don’t need software to run a scan of sorts. I just need to consider everything I’ve done lately, try hard not to leave anything out, no matter how innocuous or insignificant, and compare it to my ‘normal’ behavior, and to common sense. Don’t let anything slip.

So, as she struck out for the second time, she thought hard about whether there was anything weird about brushing her teeth, about taking showers the way she liked, about what she’d been eating for breakfast, about jogging or swimming laps every day, about going to softball practice, about taking part in flash mobs, about going to work, about swimming with friends, about reading and writing reviews...

Most things could be ruled out on the simple grounds that she was certain, as far as she could tell, that they were things she’d always done and hadn’t changed. Then there were things like jogging every day, which, although she’d just started in the last couple of weeks, made perfect sense. She felt healthier and she felt better about her body. It helped her to relieve stress. Sure, she could see where the virus might benefit from it as well... She probably looked better for the little web shows Nala was putting on... But... Well, even if it was caused by the virus, she liked it, and she didn’t plan to stop.

Then there were the one-time occasions, like watching a cheesy B movie at Ryan’s or going to that flash mob last Saturday. But they struck her as equally implausible, no matter how she thought about it. They were social events. Was everyone who went to that party hypnotized? Were all the girls in the mob hypnotized? What about the spectators? And what did her tormenters stand to gain from either affair?

By the time practice was over, Laurie was feeling a bit hopeful. Maybe there were no other suggestions to find. Maybe the pills were a unique instance—or maybe the other suggestions were harmless things, like dying her hair a color that she liked and might have done anyway, or getting herself into better shape physically. Still, Laurie vowed to police all of her actions over the coming days, at least until she was sure she was free of the virus.

Over the rest of the day and Thursday morning and afternoon, Laurie put off any non-obligatory activities. After practice, she went home, showered, went to work, and came home immediately afterward. She finished her book before it got too late, and then she wrote a very thoughtful review.

Laurie found that lately, despite her distracted state, her ability to focus at work and on work-related things was uncanny. She wondered if this was some form of escapism on her part, or if it was the virus at work in her. Maybe it wants me to get a raise so I can afford more disgusting toys, she thought with distaste. But whatever the reason, she was happy about it. She’d written a review she could be proud of, and her boss was happier with her at work.

Laurie spent the rest of the evening in her room. She knew Mikaela was worried about her, but Laurie was avoiding her. When she knocked on Laurie’s door, Laurie only replied that she was working hard and they’d talk soon. Then she went back to working on what she thought of as her escape plan.

This was the end game, Laurie was sure of it. Even if it cost her her job and risked her life, Laurie was putting a stop to this whole charade this weekend.

The biggest problem with her plan was that she knew that the next night, Thursday, would be another blackout. She was willing to endure this one final night, if it would give her a better chance at escaping the weekend. But Laurie wasn’t sure just how much Nala knew, or what all she was capable of. Did Nala remember being Laurie?

...Well, whether she remembered it or not, Laurie would simply have to deal with whatever obstacles might arise. In the mean time, Laurie did nothing that might arouse suspicion. Nothing was written down, not on paper or on her computer. She gassed up her car, she set her alarm clock before going to work on Thursday, and she glanced at a few maps online, but those were her only special preparations. She’d even continued taking the damnable birth control pills. It was a little distressing that Laurie had felt almost as if she had to take the pills; had felt downright compelled. She consoled herself that, should she lose (a caveat she was almost unwilling to consider), she certainly wouldn’t want to wind up pregnant (and she shuddered with revulsion at the whole cursed scenario).

Friday morning, Laurie woke to an old familiar sensation. It wasn’t the cool air on naked skin (although she felt that too); it was the feeling that she had over-slept. It was the feeling she got when she knew she’d set her alarm, and the sense that it should have gone off already stirred her from her sleep. Sometimes when she had that feeling, she woke to find she was five or ten minutes early; the clock would go off soon. Other times, she found she was right, and the feeling was all that saved her from being late to work or school (when she’d been in school). Then there were times when she woke to find she’d overslept by several hours.

So she opened her eyes with a deep sense of trepidation, and found that she’d only overslept by about twenty minutes. It was 8:22 in the morning, and it seemed Nala had taken the prerogative of changing the alarm time.

Laurie got up. She didn’t worry about the vibrator on her mattress or the various props and costume pieces scattered on the floor. She went to Mikaela’s computer, narrowed her eyes at the camera image looking out at her, her own face done up with orange eyeshadow and bright red lipstick. “I’m taking you down,” she said. She yanked the cable out of its port, grabbed the camera in her fist, and chucked it at the floor. It bounced heavily on the thin carpet and rolled under her bed, and she didn’t give a damn whether it was broken or not.

Laurie called the bookstore. She was scheduled to work from 1 to 5, but she faked her best sore throat and apologized sincerely for calling in sick. Her pangs of guilt were matched evenly with her joy of defiance.

Laurie washed her face, and then she debated within herself for a few minutes whether or not she should jog. Time was of the essence and the stakes were so high, so why couldn’t she shake the urge to work up a sweat for a while?

I suppose it must be a hypnotic compulsion, then. How odd, the way this technique of rational self-analysis provided such obvious and undeniable conclusions that didn’t jibe at all with the way she perceived her own actions. Governing her own behavior lately was like wrestling an eel.

Armed with determination and this new understanding, Laurie shrugged off the urge to go exercise. She didn’t even bother to shower—no time. She dressed, packed her old school bag with clothes, snack foods, breakfast bars and a bag of carrots, dug her old, dusty, disused camping gear out of the closet, and loaded it all into up the Beetle.

Before taking off, Laurie made one more pass of the apartment to make sure she wasn’t forgetting something important. On her way back through the kitchen, she bumped into Mikaela, who was looking groggy and disheveled.

“’Mornin’, ‘glory,” muttered Mikaela, who was still too sleepy to worry if her words didn’t quite make sense.

“Good morning, Mikki,” Laurie replied. She mulled over what, if anything, to say to her.

Mikaela’s eyes sharpened, then, apparently remembering that talk Laurie had promised they’d have. “What are you doing today?” she said.

“I’m going to my parents’ for the weekend,” Laurie lied. “Listen, Mikaela... I’ve been dealing with some shit recently.”

“So talk to me. You know you can tell me anything.”

But she couldn’t. The words were all there, but there was so much fear that Laurie couldn’t even remember how to speak when she thought of them. She felt her eyes going misty. “I know, Mikki, but... I just can’t. You have no idea how hard it is.”

And she cut off Mikaela’s next words with, “But I’m dealing with it. Ok? I’m getting my shit worked out and I’ll be back by Monday, and then everything will be fine, I promise.”

“And then will you be able to tell me what this was all about?”

Laurie hesitated. Would she be able? She didn’t have a clue how this would be resolved. It might be a longer process than just one weekend. “Maybe,” she said. “We’ll see.”

“Well...” and Mikaela clearly wanted to say something more, or to do something—anything—to help, but she appeared at a loss. “Call me when you get there, ok?”

Laurie had every intention of leaving her phone behind. “Ok,” she said, and she opened her arms, and the friends hugged, and Laurie left.

Laurie was on the open road again. She’d tried this before, but her mistake had been not giving herself enough time. This time, Laurie would get so far from the city and from civilization in general that there was simply no way her sluttier half could get back on time. Even if it didn’t cure her condition, it would save her from their plans for her weekend. And, it would send a strong message. She would not be controlled. Not anymore.

She’d looked up a map the day before and found the most vacant stretch of desert in West Texas. And in that stretch, more than sixty miles as the crow flies from the nearest town (and even the closest towns weren’t much more than a few trailers clumped together according to satellite view), she spotted a little plot of land designated a “Wildlife Management Area.” The satellite photography represented this patch as nothing but a few ripples of hills or low mountains in a lifeless brown expanse. And it was late July—hottest part of the summer. It was a dangerous trip to take alone. But it was worth it.

Laurie trundled down a dirt road, wincing at every abrupt dip and bump that rattled her car, threatening to knock pieces off entirely. According to her directions (which she’d committed to memory and sketched in her atlas that morning, so maybe they weren’t perfect), she was within a few miles of her last turn off. She was extremely nervous. Eight hours on the road, stopping only to refill on gas and stock up on water, with no phone, and now she was more than forty minutes away from the nearest paved road, which was over an hour off the interstate. If her car broke down here...

It was already after five. Laurie had been counting on finding a plot to set up her tent before Nala took over and got an eye full of her current circumstance, but it was looking less and less likely. She felt it in her gut. Nala was coming. She needed to get set up soon.

Ultimately, after making a few u-turns and trolling back and forth down the baking gravel road, Laurie turned off on a little trail that had been cut through the brambles. It wasn’t a road really; just a pair of deep ruts in the sand carved by the wheels of Jeeps and ATV’s. Where it would lead her, she didn’t know. But it didn’t much matter any more. She clearly wasn’t going to find her wildlife refuge. And as her car shuddered its way over yet another cattle guard, Laurie reflected that if she was caught trespassing, well, a jail cell may well have been a preferable alternative to camping out in this hellish desert.

Laurie came to a stop when she reached a bit of rough terrain she was almost certain her car couldn’t handle. It seemed a nice enough place to park—well out of sight of the gravel road, and she could walk a little further on to find a place to set up camp. It was getting on toward seven, and Laurie hoped the heat would begin letting up soon. She was half-tempted to stay in the safety of her car with the AC running.

With a shaky sigh, Laurie turned off the engine and exited the vehicle. A blast of hot air met her the moment the door cracked open, smelling solely of baked dust and ragweed.

Laurie gathered up the things she would need, determined to carry only what she couldn’t do without and to make only one trip out. She weighed herself down with an over-brimming backpack, plus her tent bag in one hand and her sleeping bag in the other. With that, she set off walking. She stopped a few yards from her car to hide her keys under a large rock. If she was lucky, Nala wouldn’t remember where she’d left them.

If she was terribly unlucky, neither would she.

Laurie wasn’t sure how far she walked. She stuck to the jeep path for about forty minutes. Then she spotted a shady-looking overhang a ways off up the side of a hill, and she cut off across the raw desert.

The sun was getting low and the air was dry, but it was still very hot out. A hot wind blew continually, bringing little relief but kicking up dust that was slowly caking Laurie’s skin and clothes, drying out her eyes and her lips and her throat and her skin. It was distressing how quickly she went through her water. And it was terribly irritating the way all manner of thorns and brambles dug into her legs as she walked along, embedded themselves in her socks and proved a constant nuisance. And the apparent distance of landmarks over expanses of long, flat desert could be very deceiving. Laurie walked for almost an hour to reach the hillside.

Laurie reached her overhang, and though she was completely miserable, it was a couple degrees cooler in the shade of the rock and it was a relief to stop walking. Laurie dropped her bag in the sandy loam, rolled her aching shoulders, and looked out across the desert. Her overhang was a few dozen yards higher in elevation than the plane of the desert, which was rimmed along the horizon with low plateaus and chains of rolling hills. There was so much space, so much empty space that seemed virtually untouched by human hands, and it was terrifying. Laurie never felt so utterly alone in her life.

Laurie tore her eyes away from the vista and set to work on her tent, which she’d set up only a couple of times during college camping trips. She doubted she would need the rain fly, which simplified matters significantly. And when she was done, she was pleased with herself for accomplishing her goal before losing control of herself. She sat on a flat rock and watched the shadows stretch across the flat desert, the thin, broken rows of clouds over head turning hot pink against pale blue, the far horizon deepening to violet. She couldn’t actually see the sunset; her protective overhang and the hillside it abutted prevented that. She thought of scrambling over the hill for a better view, but she was worried Nala would get lost in the dark and she’d wake up dead. Who knew what that hypnotically-planted virus of a personality was capable of, besides taking her clothes off?

Laurie had an unsettling experience then. A sense of indignation and fear was welling in her; feelings that didn’t seem to originate from her own thoughts or attitudes. The feelings only grew and fleshed out, and Laurie realized, just before losing track of her sense of self, that it was Nala waking up in her, and that she wasn’t very happy.