The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

Suuori’s pretty face looked worried, he thought, when she brought his supper, and this impression was confirmed when she spoke.

“Are you going to sell me too, Mister Talv?”

He thought he knew where this was coming from. Sergei had taken Sisyphus with alacrity. He’d thought the whole dancing slut routine was hilarious. Imagine: at a single voice command, your very own automated entertainment, springing to life like a hypersexualised version of the traditional girl in the music box. Sergei could hardly wait to get her home and play with her properly.

“I have no specific plans to sell you, at present.” He thought this was true, clear, and unequivocal, and that it should reassure her well enough; but strangely she looked even more worried now, and even started biting her lip in consternation. People really were impenetrable sometimes.

“Anyway, never mind about that,” he continued, “I’ve got a job for you coming up very soon.”

“Yes, Mister Talv?”

“Yes. Some troubleshooting. Details in due course.”

Suuori nodded, trusting.

“And meanwhile, a smaller task. I need you to go and collect the meme creature. I told it you’d go get it around ten p.m., and it’s nine fifteen now.”

Mister Talv was very happy indeed with Suuori. She was always reliable, and he remembered her training with great fondness. She was petite, Suuori, with a heart shaped face and eyes with a hint of Saami ancestry. She did as she was told, always, although she was not the brightest bunny in the box, and often got confused as to what she was doing.

“Collect a … meme, Mister Talv?”

He sighed. “I thought I’d explained this before. The meme creature; the disembodied intelligence. It can’t fly. It can’t just get here of its own accord. It needs touch, or it’s stuck.”

“So it will be inside me, Mister Talv?”

“Correct. All you’ve got to do is go to Raekoja Plats, by the town hall, and wait. It’ll find you, and when it does, you’ll know it.”

Suuori gave a small shudder, obviously not liking the idea of having a passenger. “Yes, Mister Talv.” And off she went.

He watched appreciatively as her small pert ass bobbed away. Mister Talv considered the concept of weakness, for a moment. Everybody had weaknesses, and weakness often went hand in hand with hidden desire. Shy simple little Suuori’s weakness was her sweet timidity; although he had helped her conquer that to a degree, she had conquered it largely by subordinating her will to his. Suuori was still like a forest dwelling child in many ways; innocent, sweet natured, trusting; afraid of the dark, of ghosts, of stories, of legends.

On the beach that first time she had told him about her loss, her first love, and in turn he had told her the story of the star, and she was captivated.

In the old story, there was a woman, Mister Talv had told her, and Helve knew this to be true. The woman was very beautiful, and she had her choice of lovers. She was wooed by the warm and constant Sun himself, who was always there for her. She was wooed by the soft romantic Moon with equal vigour through all his complex phases. She couldn’t choose, and instead she chose the Star.

The Star was as all stars are; bright, beautiful, cold, distant, inconstant. The woman tried to love the Star with all her heart, and perhaps she did. She wanted him, the Star, to possess her fully. But the Star abandoned her, whether cruelly or innocently she never knew; he simply went away one day and never came back, as stars do. Suuori had smiled distantly as he told his tale; it was archetypal, true.

The woman was trapped in torment, Mister Talv had said. Nothing could block out the nightmares. She cut herself with knives. She fled to the sea, and she cut herself with seashells, relishing the jagged comfort of fresh pain. She planned to drown herself there, to be free at last. But by the shoreline, something spoke to the woman in words that were not words. The waves washed her feet, and despair ebbed from her like sin. She looked up, and saw the sky was full of stars. She gathered her skirts and walked back to her home, and slept, and didn’t dream at all.

Afterwards, she still sometimes looked to the sky, and wondered where her Star was. But there were so many stars that after a while she couldn’t even remember what he looked like, and then it ceased to matter.

They watched a small starfish, trapped in a rockpool by the tide. You see, Helve, he had said, another metaphor. Now come back to Tallinn with me, and free yourself, and sleep, and you won’t dream at all.

Takeshi’s weakness had been a thoroughly modern compulsion, her empathy—her drive to seek to fully understand the other, and in the quest for understanding even to become, other people, to the point where her own self was no longer intact. All this had served him well.

Helena’s weakness was of a different stripe altogether. She’d always had terrible impulse control, and after a while in The Void, that was now effectively zero. She would become the ultimate sexually spontaneous woman. A succubus? Or just a woman with very clear desires, now amplified beyond convention’s ability to drown them out?

Yes: he would find the weaknesses and secret desires of—, and then he would find a way of acting on them, and he thought the meme would be able to help.

But what of the meme itself, he wondered? What kind of creature was it, really? It didn’t need food, money, shelter. It wasn’t susceptible to the standard temptations. If it got into trouble, it could just move on, to anyone, anywhere. It craved experiences, novelty, stimulation, new additions to its memories, and he could work with that to a degree. It seemed to like showing off; Mister Talv guessed it just got bored, otherwise; perhaps he could play to its ego.

However, its identity wasn’t fixed. He wondered if the creature was the same, now, as it had been yesterday; if it had collected new memories, then surely that would change it, subtly alter its personality? Perhaps its motivations would change tomorrow? He wasn’t sure. The meme creature presented as having a fairly coherent sense of self—but was this just an illusion, given it was just an aggregation of collected experiences, thoughts, and desires? And after all, the thing was a hitherto unknown life form, so who knew what it was really thinking? It did not seem to feel the need for a name. It did not seem to feel the need for a morality. Was it really even female? If so, in what way? So many variables.

And on top of which, if his instincts were right, the meme was mad.

Although he expected success as routine, and was always surprised if the world didn’t deliver, Mister Talv always had an eye on the worst case scenario. This creature was inherently unstable and unpredictable, but this was also its strength. Somehow it had adapted and survived over hundreds—possibly thousands—of years.

He doubted it could be killed. He doubted any of his usual methods would work on a shape-shifting disembodied intelligence built only of thought and memory. And the meme’s own capabilities were clearly considerable. This made it not only a useful potential weapon, but also extremely dangerous. He would need a fall back plan.

If the worst came to the worst, what was the meme’s weakness? Did it even have one?

Suuori was back after midnight, quite a bit later than he expected, and she was clearly not herself. She actually burst through the front door of the apartment, wide-eyed and dishevelled, without a trace of her usual calm decorum. Her eye makeup was smudged; it looked as if she’d been crying. Mister Talv noticed two buttons on her uniform were missing. She stood there panting, in obvious distress, looking around wildly as if something was chasing her, before finally slumping to the floor, her face in her hands. He saw her shoulders were heaving, and he surmised she was weeping again.

Mister Talv put down the file he’d been reading, the one Takeshi had sent him. It wasn’t that insightful, yet, and Mr—would have to wait.

He spoke to Suuori firmly, as always, as she expected. “Suuori. Get up. What are you playing at? Did you get the meme?”

Suuori raised her head from her hands, and he saw tears in her eyes. Good. He was pleased he hadn’t misread the signals.

Her pretty face twisted in—fear and/or anger, he thought—and she actually screamed at him. “Meme? Meme? It’s a monster, Mister Talv!”

“A monster?”

“In my head! The worst thoughts, ever, and oh—! It’s talking to me again! I won’t listen, I won’t listen! Please get rid of it! Get this thing out of me, Mister Talv!“

He walked over and patted Suuori gently on the head. “There, there. Meme, come here now.”

A bit of an overreaction, there, said the voice in his head.

Mister Talv ignored the creature. “Suuori, what happened to you?” She was gulping down sobs.

Why don’t you ask me?

“I’m asking Suuori. Indulge me.”

The voice was silent. At length, Suuori recovered herself and sat down on the big sofa. She poured herself a glass of wine from Mister Talv’s decanter—without even asking! He decided to let that go, for now; he could see her hands were still shaking.

“I waited by the fountain for an hour. I made sure to bump into people, touch them accidentally, just like you said. I was helping an old woman up from the bench, when it suddenly spoke to me. It was horrible, Mister Talv.”

“Horrible how?”

“Like the voice of the devil!”

This really is a bit over the top, interjected the meme. Mister Talv shushed it. He wanted to hear what Suuori had to say. He had a notion about this.

“And then, and then, there were thoughts I wouldn’t dream of having, ever, terrible thoughts, not my thoughts at all, right there in my head! Thoughts about running away, giving up my life here in Tallinn, running away from you, Mister Talv! Visions, nightmares! It’s a monster, it’s a demon; it’s not even human!”

“And you felt…”

“As if I was going mad, Mister Talv!” And she put her face in her hands and started sobbing again, uncontrollable.

Mister Talv suspected there were a couple of different things going on here. He addressed the meme. “And your version is…?”

It is as she says. I was in the old woman; she came over to help. She touched the old woman’s arm; I jumped over to her, and said ‘hello Suuori’, like any well brought up person would.

“And she lost the plot then?”

Not exactly, no. Let’s not waste time. Here, I’ll show you. And instantly, the whole picture was there in Mister Talv’s head, from beginning to end, in vivid multisensory detail.

Yes, Suuori had panicked, when it spoke, and Mister Talv could see the vivid images of the old legends from the North, the sort of thing simple Suuori still felt as deeper truths. The faithful servant who went out in the dark one night, on the orders of her domineering master (he perceived the metaphor at once). The place in the forest where she had come to gather the fruit he demanded. The spirit from the land of the dead, who appeared suddenly; how it had seduced her, then possessed her, a ghost of unfaithfulness; and how she had run from the spirit, but how could you run from something inside you? Yes, Suuori had run, stumbling through the square, trying to escape the voice in her head. But in the old story, it was not so clear what the woman was really running from, and other memories surfaced too.

The meme had tried to empathise, in its way, but its mad instincts were not those of a human. Its immediate compulsion had been to share—so you’re feeling like that, well this seems to fit—and what it had shared had clicked into Suuori’s head like one jigsaw piece into another.

Run. Be safe. Run, said one animal part of Suuori, Run from the voices in your head, said another. Run from your master, said a third, long hidden, but rising again now.

The meme had instinctively latched onto all this with its own experience-memory-dream of the poor little slave girl, another true story altogether: and there she was, the slave girl, overlaid onto Suuori like a double exposure on film; scrambling through the forest, exhausted, her breath ragged, the pounding hoofs of her master’s horse ever closer behind her. What’s that behind you, little slave girl? What’s coming for you?

Through the meme’s uploaded experience, Mister Talv smelled the tang of pines, felt the sharp stab of their needles in the slave girl’s bare feet, felt his own breath quicken at the sheer terror and incoherent panic of her flight. The slave girl had stumbled and fallen, in the forest; Suuori had fallen too, bewildered and terrified, there in the alleys behind Tallinn harbour, and in the meme’s memory her master had been upon her then. Alone in the alleyway, little Suuori had twisted and fought beneath the imagined weight of him, felt the sharp pain of his punishment, crying and lashing out at something that wasn’t there.

I couldn’t help it, said the voice in his head, with no hint of apology. It’s in my nature.

Another demonstration of its capabilities, thought Mister Talv, albeit accidental. He wondered about Suuori’s residual instinct to run from your master. He had thought that long gone. It seemed the meme stimulated even the most hidden thoughts, even the guiltiest, most deeply buried.

Another interesting insight, thought Mister Talv.

Suuori was calming down now. “I’m sorry, Mister Talv. I would never run away from you.”

“Shush. It’ll be all right.” He sighed, and petted Suuori, stroking her hair. After experiencing that, he was surprised and gratified Suuori had come back at all.

“Be careful with my property in future, meme,” he said.

The voice in his head was silent; but somewhere, fleetingly, he thought he caught the dry and distant echo of laughter.

In that instant, stroking Suuori into calm, things came together, and with a sudden clarity Mister Talv discerned the very weaknesses he sought.