The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

Gary Robertson watched the elevator doors close on his assistant Alice Wilcox, and nodded to himself. Getting rid of her had been easier than expected.

Not that he disliked her. Quite the contrary: she was smart, highly capable, and friendly. She was also more than easy on the eyes, something that was both a positive and a negative. He knew she was a recent hire—must not have been with ADCorp for more than six months—and he wondered whether she had been adjusted yet. Perhaps he would get to know Miss Wilcox much better in the coming weeks.

In the meantime, though, he had work to do. With Wilcox gone, he had the next two hours free.

He pulled out his ADCorp identification card from his wallet and slid it through the reader built into the elevator buttons bank. The leftmost elevator dinged; the doors opened. Robertson went in, and slid his identification card once more through the reader inside the elevator. He then pressed the buttons 1, 4, 3, in sequence. Each lit up as he pressed them, and they all went off at the end of the sequence. The elevator started moving.

On cue, he turned his head to the upper leftmost corner of the elevator, where he knew the camera was installed. He looked at it directly, so that the software and the security guards could identify his face and match it with the card that he had used.

The elevator went down, the numbers decreasing on the display before him. He passed the ground floor. The basement. The elevator kept going, the display remaining blank.

The elevator stopped. The doors opened.

Robertson stepped through them.

The hallway was as he remembered it, brightly lit, blindingly white, with low ceilings.

The phantom sub-basement of the Institute, known to few. Even Director Altman did not know of its existence.

A young male technician was waiting for him, looking like he was using all the energy he had to keep from pacing. Doctor MacKenzie’s assistant, he presumed. Robertson could not help but compare him with his own assistant, Alice, who was a model of poise and elegance despite her youth. This one looked like a puppy that had been told to sit straight but kept wanting to reach for a bone three paces away. That his hair was wild and seemed to defy gravity contributed to the effect.

“Mister Robertson, sir. It’s a pleasure to meet you.” The young man extended a hand.

Robertson grabbed it, more out of habit than anything else. “Thank you…?”

“Oh, Tardi, sir. Mitch Tardi.”

“Why isn’t Doctor MacKenzie here?”

“She’s in the video room, sir.” He started to walk down the hallway, and Robertson automatically followed him. “We’ve been… well, I don’t know if you heard, but there was a bit of an incident this morning, and Doctor MacKenzie has been following its development.”

“I heard. In fact, I saw. There was a video of that same… incident… redirected to our meeting room this morning. A nurse that went a bit crazy, started fucking the patients?” Robertson always enjoyed using vulgar language with unsuspecting youngsters, just to see their faces.

Tardi did not react, though. He merely nodded enthusiastically. “Oh, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The guy, Gutierrez, didn’t go crazy. He was conned. Beautifully, completely conned. We saw the whole thing, start to finish. Quite a soap opera. We even had a pool going as to whether it’d work. But Doctor MacKenzie I expect will tell you all about it.”

Robertson frowned, but followed Tardi down the hallway. Technicians and doctors walked the halls, some of them carrying equipment, some empty-handed. Robertson recognized some of the faces, nodded back to a few that said hello.

Tardi led Robertson to the video room, in the middle of which Doctor Sarah MacKenzie stood reading some printed out documents, her face impassible, deep in thought.

Robertson took a second as he passed the threshold to admire her—she stood straight, her blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail, her face more handsome than beautiful, her expression intent. She wore what Robertson had always seen her wear, a white lab coat that exposed a pair of well-shaped legs in high-heeled knee boots, her one admission to fashion.

“Sarah, good to see you again,” Robertson said, his eyes adjusting to the darker light in the video room. On his left, in the direction Doctor MacKenzie was facing, stood an array of video screens covering the walls. In front of them, three consoles with technicians manning controls.

Doctor MacKenzie turned her head towards Robertson, and smiled. “Gary, you old scoundrel. What are you doing here? Is it that time of the year again?”

Robertson snorted and took a step forward. “Ah! Like you don’t know. Like anything escapes that big brain of yours.”

Doctor MacKenzie closed the gap between them and gave him a kiss on both cheeks, the soft press of her lips on his face sending flutters of sensations all over his skin, as they always did.

To say that Robertson had a crush on Doctor MacKenzie would have been to miss the point. He was mesmerized by her, by what she did, by the fact that she could do it despite the risks.

That he thought Doctor MacKenzie was hot did not help matters in the least. The only thing he had never decided was whether he would prefer her to take control and ravish him, ordering him to eat her out and then take her, or whether he would rather dominate her, grab her by her long hair and pull her down before hiking up her skirt and taking her from behind, like he did with those girls back home. Whatever the scenario, it rarely veered toward the nice and romantic.

“Sarah, you look fantastic, as usual.” And she did. He let his hand linger on her shoulder, enjoying the touch, the fancy of things that might be.

“I’d take it more at face value if I didn’t know full well that you say that to all the female doctors,” she said, turning back towards the bank of monitors.

Sarah MacKenzie was not adjusted, Robertson knew—he had checked, several years ago—one of the few women within the Corporation that had not gone through the process. Robertson regretted it, of course, but he also understood. Given her position and the delicacy of her task, she was best left alone. Still, he thought, it was a fucking shame.

“So there was some excitement this morning,” Robertson said, by way of starting the conversation.

“Yes, you could say that. You saw the broadcast.”

“Indeed. And I thought I recognized the video-feed markings. Did you have anything to do with what happened?”

Doctor MacKenzie shook her head. “It wasn’t us. But you’re right, they piggybacked on our own surveillance system—their hacker, a patient named Allison Scaglia, originally connected to the Institute’s internal network, but Gutierrez had a way to disconnect the camera in the room, and so Allison switched to the secret network. Ours. I admit we didn’t know she had found it. We’re in the process of rerouting the feeds so that they are better camouflaged.” She sounded annoyed.

“Hold on: a patient hacked into your systems so that she could broadcast that guy Gutierrez getting it on with the two girls this morning?”

Doctor MacKenzie smiled at Robertson’s confusion, and nodded. “That’s the least of it, really. It was part of a general plan to get rid of Gutierrez. And I have to say, it worked beautifully.”

“Whose plan?”

“Hers.” Doctor MacKenzie pointed a finger towards one of the screen on the wall, that showed a woman lying in bed, sleeping, surrounded by medical equipment. A nurse—a male—was by her bedside, sitting in a chair, his head in his hands.

“Is that…?” He thought he recognized her, but he could not be sure.

“Yes. The girl from this morning, the one that Gutierrez took advantage of. At least, that’s what it was meant to look as. A patient called Jennie. No known last name. A rather intriguing case, that one.”

“I don’t understand.” Robertson was starting to get annoyed. He did not like confused situations.

Doctor MacKenzie was just staring at him, a little smile still floating on her lips, and Robertson made an effort to calm himself down and bite back his frustration.

She’s messing with me, he realized. Checking out my reaction, analyzing me. Studying me. Adding the data to the trove in her head. Doctor MacKenzie was a trained psychiatrist, he knew, and she never missed an occasion to study people.

For a second, Robertson fantasized about the blonde doctor groveling at his feet and begging him with her eyes to be allowed to suck his cock. Just to teach her a lesson. To regain some control.

And Robertson had a sinking feeling that Doctor MacKenzie could read those exact thoughts in his eyes, and further added that as data to her internal picture of Gary Robertson. If she was bothered by it, she did not let it on.

In fact, she patted him on the shoulder. “It’s okay, Gary. I’ll explain everything. And don’t worry, aside from the fact that Allison discovered our video network, none of this affects us. We were merely spectators.”

That served to reassure Robertson. After all, the need to create both Blue Ward and this research unit in a hidden sub-basement of the Craven-Wilford Institute stemmed from a massive cock up, and the last thing he wanted was to be at the root of a massive cock up deriving from the first. Davenham would have his skin.

“It’s actually a pretty interesting story,” continued MacKenzie, taking a step towards the back of the room. Her boot heels clacked on the hard floor, distracting Robertson.

“That tech you send to wait for me called it a soap opera.”

“I wasn’t referring to its entertainment value. It was a source of data that I don’t think we could have gotten otherwise, especially on that patient Jennie.”

“Okay, you mentioned her twice already. Who’s she? And what happened? And from the beginning, please, Sarah. It’s been a long day already.”

MacKenzie looked at Robertson for a few beats, as if gauging his patience, and then shrugged almost imperceptibly.

“From the beginning? Let’s see. That nurse that was much to his dismay the star of the little show you witnessed this morning—”

“Gutierrez.”

“Pietro Gutierrez, senior nurse assigned to Blue Ward, has for the past years been organizing little events every couple of weeks or so for a select group of his friends, mostly taken from the regional Latino community to which he belongs, though lately that regional community has been expanding somewhat to select out-of-state people with deep pockets.”

“Events?”

“For lack of a better term. Organized orgies? Rotating brothel? The business model is simplicity itself: Gutierrez gets a few of the patients from his ward, those that are yet not too incapacitated from the effects of what the doctors upstairs call the Degenerative Sexual Compulsion Syndrome, cuts their medication dosage, and when they are in the throes of whatever sexual lunacy the Specials that affected them pounded into them, Gutierrez brings them to a set of conveniently abandoned rooms in a basement wing and puts on little shows and then lets those selected friends that have paid good money to attend have their ways with the patients.”

Robertson’s eyes had widened as he heard the description. “And you knew about it?”

Doctor MacKenzie gave him a look of infinite patience. “Of course we knew about it. Who did you think arranged for those basement rooms to be abandoned and remain available?”

“Did you organize it?”

“That we did not. Pietro Gutierrez had that idea all by his perverse lonesome self. He recruited help, of course. He managed to convince a doctor, Kiyoko Agnieska to do his bidding—it wasn’t that difficult, really, let’s say that she’s very responsive to certain forceful arguments—and one patient, Cassandra Riggs, assisted him enthusiastically in exchange for getting some personal time with the girls. We’ve wired up the whole wing, and so we got all the footage, both from the ward and from the events. Some of the sessions are pretty interesting, if you want to peruse them.” Doctor MacKenzie said it clinically, but the little smile on her face was just suggestive enough.

Robertson was confused. “Okay, so this guy starts a little side business in here,” and later that night when Robertson would think about the conversation in the calm of his hotel room he would realize that that was the thing that galled him the most, that the man had metaphorically pissed all over his garden, “and you find out, and instead of stopping him, you actually help him?”

Doctor MacKenzie looked at Robertson as if he were a child that had difficulty grasping basic arithmetic. “Indeed. Aside from making sure that the rooms that he accidentally discovered were kept free for him to use, we also ran interference with the Institute whenever someone would get either suspicious or nosy.”

“You ran interference? How?” Robertson was worried he knew the answer to that question.

“Through the Corporation, of course.”

“You ran interference through my office? And I’m just learning about this now?”

Doctor MacKenzie shrugged. “I doubt your assistants bother you with every tidbit of employee movement within the Institute. Beside, we used a light touch—a doctor transferred here, an orderly promoted there—nothing that would really raise an eyebrow, nothing that anyone would seriously notice, but eventually it sort of became clear to the people that mattered that Gutierrez was untouchable. Which was perfect for us.”

“You overstepped your authority, Doctor MacKenzie.” Robertson was getting upset again.

“It was for the greater good, Gary.”

“But clearly the greater good wasn’t enough for you to protect him through this morning’s incident. He’s been fired.”

Doctor MacKenzie nodded her head and conceded the point. “As I said, Gutierrez had started to attract attention from outside his local circle of friends, and that sort of publicity would have become problematic fairly quickly, and we were getting ready to nip it in the bud, especially when he started making plans to sell one of the patients—”

“Wait a minute, did you say sell one of the patients?”

“Yes. One of the patients, Lillian Shepard, used to be a district attorney in DC before a Special, Bruce Cavanaugh, got his hands on her and turned her into his toy. She obviously made some enemies in her time in office, and it seems that those enemies discovered both where she was and under what conditions and decided that perhaps an interesting way to get their revenge would be to purchase her and… well, you can guess as well as I can what they might have done to her in her condition.”

Robertson could. “And where does that girl—Jennie?—come in?”

“Well, she struck up a friendship with Lillian Shepard, and during an escape attempt, she learned about Pietro Gutierrez’s plans to sell her friend, and decided to stay and deal with Gutierrez.”

“Escape attempt?”

“And a fairly well planned one at that. It would have worked, too, had we allowed it to go through. She managed to seduce a nurse, Richard Sanderson, and convinced him to help her escape.”

“She convinced a nurse of the Institute to help her leave?” Robertson’s head was starting to spin.

“She did. Quite a persuasive young lady. But when she discovered that Pietro Gutierrez wanted to sell her friend Lillian Shepard to folks that did not have the best of intentions, she figured out a way to get Gutierrez in trouble by roping in a few other patients, including Cassandra Riggs.”

“Wait, the same Cassandra who was helping Gutierrez?”

“The same. Turns out she has a soft spot for Lillian Shepard, and she did not know of Pietro Gutierrez’s newly minted slaver certificate, and when she learned of it she was eager to join the plot to get rid of him.”

“Incredible. I’m starting to understand why Tardi called it a soap opera.”

“Oh yes, our technicians ended up being quite taken with the whole thing. Most of them were rooting for Jennie, too, though many were eager to see her taken down a notch and taken advantage of because… well, Jennie’s intriguing, really.”

“You said that already. Why is she so intriguing?”

“Well, as near as we can tell, she was not turned by a Special. Or if she was, he was one unlike any we’ve ever met. She exhibits many of the same symptoms as typical Specials victims, however, except without the nerve degeneration. Her blood work is fascinating. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear she had been adjusted. There are traces of Serum in her blood.”

“But she was not adjusted?”

Doctor MacKenzie shook her head. “Not using our technology. The biochemical composition is all wrong. Unless Advanced Research came up with something different since the last time I visited.”

Robertson grunted. “Not that I know of. But I don’t spend as much time with Dee as I should.” Robertson was the public face of the Corporation vis-à-vis the Institute and the supervising administrator for the secret research laboratory it housed, and did not have as much contact with Patrick Dee, head of Advanced Research Division.

“Then you’re starting to understand why I might find her intriguing,” was all Doctor MacKenzie said.

“I’ll say. I’ll have to ask Control to see if he knows something about it.” The head of Investigation and Enforcement Division would know of any use of the Serum outside of Advanced Research, including any possible leak, a though which made Robertson shudder. There were rumors about leaks, of course, but then, there were rumors about pretty much everything, up to and including selling Adjustment technology to the Chinese.

“Let me know if you find out anything.”

“Of course. So are you going to bring her down here?”

“No need. She’s hooked up to enough monitors that we can check her out from here easily enough. And we can run any tests through our people up there.”

Robertson knew that Doctor MacKenzie had a few of her research doctors moonlighting as bona fide employees of the Institute, although he did not know how many or who they were.

The left hand that doesn’t know what the right hand is doing, he thought. The unofficial Corporation motto. Most of the time, it was a good thing. Sometimes, it was really a pain in the ass.

“Then again,” Doctor MacKenzie continued, for a moment looking far off into the distance, her gaze unfocused, “given that she collapsed after the events of this morning and is now in what looks like a coma, perhaps she’ll end up here before too long.”

“Coma?”

“Indeed. Somewhat unexpected, though she had been complaining about headaches for a few weeks prior. EEG shows cerebral activity, but something seems to have snapped the connection between her brain and her motor functions. Fascinating, really.”

The way she said it gave Robertson pause. He wondered, the way he did every time he visited her at the Institute, to what extent working here doing… what she did… might have distanced her further and further from her own humanity.

“Why the greater good?” Robertson asked, running through what he had been told and focusing on the bit that really upset him the most.

“Excuse me?”

“You kept that nurse Gutierrez around even when you learned what he was doing, and went so far as overstepping your authority—” and he emphasized the words to drive home the fact that this breach of etiquette was one of the things he considered unacceptable, “to protect him and keep him in place. You said it was for the greater good. How so?”

Doctor MacKenzie looked at him as if gauging how upset he really was. Robertson tried to keep his face as unreadable as he could, realizing that he could not do much against Doctor MacKenzie’s penetrating psychological acumen.

“Pietro Gutierrez would get many of the patients off their medications and turn them back into the mindless toys that they were when they were under the direct control of Specials, for a short amount of time, and without Specials around to reinforce the effects. That gave us access to data that we otherwise would not have been able to get. At least not since Davenham forbade us to bring patients directly here in the lower levels.”

Robertson nodded. He remembered the heated discussion that had followed the boss’s decision to keep all Special-affected patients up in the Institute, at least until their nervous system degeneration forced them to be sedated. Davenham had been unshakable on the topic, despite his clear desire to see a cure for whatever the Specials did to destroy their victims.

“So you just conveniently took advantage of Gutierrez doing something unethical to gather the data you wanted, all the while looking the other way.”

“We didn’t look the other way. We very carefully looked at what he was doing and what the patients were doing. Seeing them in a more… natural habitat proved invaluable.”

“Davenham won’t be happy when he hears of it.”

Doctor MacKenzie shrugged. “Gutierrez is gone now. And we have the data. And we made sure that the girls were not abused.”

“Except for the girl that was almost sold.”

Doctor MacKenzie smiled. “Oh, we would not have allowed that to happen.”

“Really?”

“Really.” Doctor MacKenzie looked him straight in the eyes. “Besides, what data would have there been in that?”

Robertson was speechless for a second, trying to decide whether Doctor MacKenzie had actually made a joke.

“Just… just get me a report on these events, will you, Sarah? And if you can get me a sense of the data you collected , it’ll help me shield you—us—from Davenham..”

“Of course, Gary.”

All of a sudden, an unearthly scream rang out, a sound not unlike that of a animal wailing in anger and pain, loud and reverberating, seeming to come from everywhere at once. Robertson jumped, and looked around in a frenzy. Nobody else in the room flinched.

“Jesus Christ! What was that?”

“That was Special Fifteen, who’s been causing no end of disturbance for the last few weeks.”

“That… didn’t sound human!”

Doctor MacKenzie looked at him, tilting her head to the side. “That’s right, I’ve never shown you one in their final stage, have I?”

“A Special?”

“Would you like to see Fifteen?”

Robertson’s eyes widened. He swallowed. He had seen Specials before, of course. And they freaked him out like little else did. But he had never seen one after the degeneration they induced in their victims had spread inside their own body, and he could not suppress a feeling of curiosity.

“Sure, why not? What’s the worst that can happen anyway?” he asked, trying to keep a sense of levity in his voice to hide his innate fear, a fear that Doctor MacKenzie, keen psychiatrist that she was, could undoubtedly see plainly etched about his face.

“Oh, for you, not much. Though Fifteen can get dangerously violent, even for a Special.” The way she said it—or more importantly, what she decided not to say—reminded Robertson that she was a woman and that she was not immune to a Special’s effect, and he wondered if that was the source of the thrill of excitement that came through in her voice. “Follow me,” she said.

Doctor MacKenzie indicated a door in the far end of the room, which opened up when she and Robertson walked in front of it. Robertson remained quiet as he followed the tall doctor, trying not to stare at her ass and at her legs,, concentrating on looking through the various doors that they passed. Most of them led to examination rooms and various laboratories tended by men in white. He knew the full roster of the Advanced Medical Team here in the sub-basement of at the Institute, so he was not surprised by the lack of feminine presence. That lack was not an oversight. Allowing women near Specials was tempting fate.

They walked through a reinforced plate glass door attached to a booth. Inside, a guard nodded upon seeing her, and called in another guard who lined up behind them.

As Robertson followed Doctor MacKenzie into the Specials housing facility, he glanced at the guard who remained three paces behind them the whole time.

Doctor MacKenzie answered his unspoken question. “I can’t enter the housing facility alone without a guard with me. It’s been protocol since I’ve been here. The joy of being the one female on staff. The likelihood that one of our guests manages to get to me is negligible, but Davenham deemed me too important to allow even that small chance to mess up his plans. Considering that he was thinking of not even allowing me to meet our guests face to face, this is a reasonable compromise.”

Doctor MacKenzie turned to the guard. “Jack here has strict orders to shoot me on the spot if I start acting outside prescribed parameters. Isn’t that right, Jack?”

The guard remained impassible, and nodded. “Yes ma’am. In the head.”

Doctor MacKenzie laughed, as if the two had shared a joke. Robertson, though he was used to the strict discipline that reigned inside the Corporation, suddenly still felt a little ill at ease.

But he was distracted from that line of thought as soon as he turned the corner of the hallway they were walking down and a cavernous room opened up in front of him. The dwarfing expanse encompassed three floors stacked around an open atrium in the center of which stood a raised control platform with more guards.

It instantly made Robertson think of a modern high-security prison, and the analogy was not wrong, for this was where the Specials that the Corporation’s Investigation and Enforcement Division recovered from the field were brought in for study by Doctor MacKenzie and her team. One goal of the study was to elucidate the Specials’ physiology and to develop technologies for stopping them and helping their victims. The latter explained why the research laboratory was housed within the Institute, one wing of which was dedicated to Specials’ victims. Doctor MacKenzie and her team also studied the victims, supplemented the research conducted by the physicians above them, who were in the dark about the true origin of the illness they were documenting.

A second goal of the study led by the medical team was to investigate ways in which the Specials could be used to further the interests of the Corporation. Which made sense to Robertson, who knew that the Specials were connected in some form or another to the Serum that the Corporation had been using since its creation twenty years earlier. That connection was a mystery that intrigued Robertson to no end. He would not have been surprised to learn that someone within the Corporation knew the exact answer to that question—perhaps Doctor Mackenzie, in fact—but the strong confidentiality restrictions within ADCorp would prevent that sort of knowledge spreading about.

All that Robertson knew was that Specials had first appeared from out of nowhere about eight years earlier, without any warning or explanation where they came from. They were rare—at least, those whose power developed enough that it could be controlled—but not so rare as to be dismissible as inconsequential aberrations. They caused real damage, and the fact that there was a class of people that could affect peoples’ mind was the sort of discovery that would not only cause widespread panic if it ever became public knowledge, but could be used by criminal organizations or even unscrupulous governments to wreak havoc in a population. The Corporation had seen that risk immediately, and took measures to round up Specials before authorities learned of them. The responsibility of these measures fell to Enforcement Division, which had been rebranded Investigation and Enforcement Division.

Robertson looked around, fascinated. Doctor MacKenzie remained on the side, watching him, as if she were a proud parent showing off her prized children. And she had reason to be proud. The state-of-the-art facility looked impressive.

“The cells are transparent,” he said, with a tinge of wonder in his voice.

The cells seemed indeed made up entirely of glass—reinforced, Robertson hoped—aside from the joints which looked to be stainless steel. One could see all the way through the cells into the neighboring ones, giving the impression that the prisoners were suspended in mid-air, like insects buzzing about the cavernous space.

“It’s a specially-designed reinforced plate glass, which the Corporation develops through an affiliate down in Texas,” Doctor MacKenzie replied, watching over the panorama. “It’s impressively strong. And it lets us see the Specials at all times. No blind spots. And no privacy—but then again there isn’t any supervisory authority to deal with little things such as human rights here. Besides,” she said, a smirk on her face, “it’s not like they’re quite human anymore.”

As if to emphasize her point, the Specials trapped in their cells, who had been fairly quiet until now, started acting up and raising a ruckus, screaming and jumping about and some of them even launching themselves against the walls of their cells. Robertson was reminded of displays of animal behavior at the zoo, with animals that had been kept in isolation too long.

In the midst of the noise, a loud piercing keening scream emerged, amplified by the shape of the room into a wail that reverberated on every surface. It made Robertson’s blood turn to ice.

“And that’s Fifteen,” said MacKenzie. “Shall we?” She pointed towards a staircase, also made of reinforced plate glass, to one side of the room.

As they climbed, followed by the impassive guard MacKenzie had called Jack, Robertson was looking left and right, staring in the eyes of more Specials than he had ever seen before.

“Funny story,” said MacKenzie, breaking Robertson out of his reverie. “As you heard, the room amplifies sounds—it’s actually by design, so that we can hear as well as see whenever something happens—but once in a while we get a screamer like Fifteen, and try as we might we have been unable to prevent some of those screams to reach up top. It appears that some residents have come to believe that the place is haunted, and that the screams they hear are from ghosts of the past.”

Robertson, whom the screams were starting to frazzle rather thoroughly, could well imagine that. And, upon reflexion, since the patients of Blue Ward where victims of Specials, those screams for them were in fact from ghosts of the past. He wondered if MacKenzie appreciated the irony.

He did not have the chance of asking her, though, for she walked him down a row of cells on the second floor. It took all of his discipline to wrestle his lizard brain into accepting that despite the fact that they were transparent, those cells were indeed secure, and that the seemingly crazed animals behind them could not harm him.

The Specials were going wild, excited by the presence of Doctor MacKenzie in their midst, and some showed their excitement by shouting and banging on the walls and others by sitting down on the floor and rocking back and forth foaming at the mouth. Many had whipped their dicks out and were stroking themselves maniacally, staring at the doctor the whole time. Whether because Doctor MacKenzie was a woman—and Specials, he knew, were primed to react to women like predators to prey—or because she was the symbol of authority in this prison of theirs, Robertson did not know.

Most of the Specials, once Doctor MacKenzie had passed them, turned their attention to Robertson, and they turned aggressive. They threw themselves at the glass walls and started banging on them, hard, enough to scare Robertson into the middle of the hallway as far as the cells lining the passage as he could. Those Specials banged with their fists and their feet, some so hard they started to bleed but rather than quiet them the sight of blood seemed merely to drive them to further frenzy. They were screaming too, long wails broken with sobs and throat-wrenching growls.

Doctor MacKenzie seemed entirely unfazed by the whole display. “So how much do you know about Specials, Gary?”

“Not much, I’m afraid. I’ve always been much more on the… organizational side of things.” And this visit was not enticing him to change that anytime soon.

“What you see here, obviously, are the final stages of the progression of the affliction that leads to Specials being, well, special.” Doctor MacKenzie acted very much like a guide at the zoo, and Robertson figured that he was getting a variant of the new-recruit tour. “At this stage, they still retain all of their abilities, so they are as dangerous as ever. A single touch and they can overrun a woman’s mind and start to destroy their nervous system—”

“And that’s what leads to the Syndrome,” continued Robertson.

Doctor MacKenzie flashed him a look of annoyance—clearly, she did not like being interrupted when she lectured. “Correct. But even though they retain their special abilities, whatever it was that caused those abilities to surface in the first place has eaten through enough of their own nervous system that they are for all intents and purposes nonfunctional.”

And easier to spot and catch, thought Robertson, who remembered water-cooler exchanges with Control, head of Investigation and Enforcement Division. Though it also makes them more visible, increasing the chance that the public learns about them. He warily eyed the caged animals slamming themselves against their cell walls to get at him and MacKenzie.

“At this terminal stage, the differences between the three main evolution paths that Specials can follow are exacerbated, and you can see the results. The most common result is externalized psychosis—blood and sex lust, all rolled into one. The urge to kill males and rape females becomes overpowering, as you can clearly see.”

She stopped in front of a cell with a Special whose features were distorted by a crazed expression, who was pressing hard against the glass of his cell and clawing at the smooth surface, trying to approach the female he was seeing.

Doctor MacKenzie stepped up to the glass, getting as close as she could without actually touching it, and the Special went berserk and started madly humping the glass, driving his groin painfully into the unyielding material, while variously slamming his head against the glass and licking the glass, over and over again.

The doctor merely remained where she was, taunting the Special, a hint of a smile on her face, a strange light in her eyes. Robertson could sense the tension in the doctor’s body, but it was not one born out of fear.

“At this point,” Doctor MacKenzie said, her voice neutral, “if this Special could get out and get his hands on me, it’s not even clear he would bother turning me. And if he did, it might very well be just to completely wipe my mind and leave me a drooling, babbling sack of meat that he would take over and over again until it killed me.”

Robertson shivered, and did not bother asking what the Special would do if he could get his hands on him.

After the Special had almost slammed himself unconscious, Doctor MacKenzie stepped away from the glass and continued walking. Her actions had agitated the Specials around them further. She did not seem to notice, or if she did she did not care. “Less common are the Specials whose natural megalomania blossoms into full-fledged paralyzing paranoia. They will not attack you, at least not directly. They’re the quiet ones that you see here and there.” She pointed to one as they passed him—the man was crouched in a corner of the room, his arms folded in front of his head, watching them suspiciously from between his forearms.

“They’re the sneaky ones. They won’t attack you, but they’ll take any of the women they’ve managed to affect and have them capture and chop up men into tiny little bits. The women they’ll grab and bring to their god as a sexual offering to assuage his hunger. Though of course because he’s so out-of-his-mind sure that you’re plotting to take him down, he’ll scramble your mind to so much jello that he could stab you with a knife and you’d explode in the most incredible orgasm you’ve ever experienced.”

She paused for a few seconds to let her words sink in. “And then, rarest of all, you have these.” And she stopped in front of a cell from which the unearthly wailing that they had heard back in the video room deafened even the uproar of the other Specials around then. “This is Fifteen.”

The man was crouched in the middle of the cell, clearly unaware of his surroundings, naked, wailing bloody murder with his face turned up to the sky. He had soiled himself, Robertson saw with a wave of nausea, but the man did not seem to care. In his hands, which were spread out, he clenched large clumps of hair red with blood. That same blood was dripping from his head, from where he had ripped the hair out. He was wailing and screaming and the horrid sound resonated through the whole facility.

MacKenzie gave Robertson enough time to take in the sight in front of him. “Internalized psychosis,” she said, deadpan. “Think of the Specials from before, but turn all that rage and all that pain inward. And this is what you get.” She had to scream to be heard over the modulations of the Special, who started to scratch his chest, and not for the first time from the deep scars that could be seen there. His groin was a mess of scarified flesh. “If you’re a woman and one of these gets his hands on you in this state, the old reflexes will kick in and he’ll try to penetrate you despite having ripped off his own sexual organs, but he’ll also transpose his rage and get you to mutilate yourself, starting with your erogenous zones. It is quite a sight.”

“Can’t you get him to shut up? Tranquilize him or something?” The constant screaming was getting to him, and he was starting to get a headache. He could not understand how Doctor MacKenzie could remain so calm. Even Jack seemed uncharacteristically twitchy.

MacKenzie merely shrugged at his suggestion. “It keeps the other Specials from concentrating—those that still can. And it gives us some data about their reactions to constant aural stimulation.”

Something was bothering Robertson. He forced himself to watch the Special for several more seconds, because he felt that this was a test that MacKenzie was putting him through, and he tolerated the sight in front of him moderately well until he noticed that the Special was missing an eye and that the wound seemed fresh and that there was nowhere in the transparent cell where that organ might be hiding. He closed his eyes and willed his stomach to settle down.

When he felt okay enough to look at Doctor MacKenzie, it was to see she was looking back at him.

“I… I have a question,” he said, bothered by the shakiness in his voice.

“Go right ahead.”

“You keep talking about the effects of these Specials—” he bit back the qualifier freaks that agents in the field frequently used and that now that he was seeing what he was seeing he started to understand better, “as if you know exactly how they affect women they come into contact.”

“That’s right,” said Doctor MacKenzie, knowing full well what Robertson was asking. “We experiment. Data, you understand.”

“Experiment?”

“Do you want to see?”

“See?”

Doctor MacKenzie smiled. “Come,” she said, nodding towards the end of the cell block with her head.

Robertson followed, happy to leave the self-mutilating shrieking madman. Jack the guard closed step behind them, silent as ever.

They took another staircase at the end of the block, heading back down, then down a row of cells that housed much quieter Specials, some of them with furniture in their cells.

“These Specials are not as far gone—they can still control and behave themselves.”

All of them had their eyes on Doctor MacKenzie though, whose heeled boots struck the floor with a rhythm that was like music. It was not difficult to see what they were imagining as she passed by, their eyes reflecting frustration, anger, and lust.

She stopped in front of a cell where a man was pacing. He turned to stare at her, silent, but defiant. “Hello CrashMaster,” she said to the Special.

The man sneered, but did not move. Robertson studied him. He looked to be in his late twenties, and wore baggy jeans and a black tee shirt with some comic book character on it. His hair was black, straight, and longer than it should have been—it made him look tired. He had a ring through one nostril.

“CrashMaster here is our newest arrival. Fresh off the boat, if you will,” Doctor MacKenzie said. “He’s been classified as megalomaniac, and he has a thing for redheads.” She turned to Robertson. “Turns out he’s the one that turned Allison Scaglia upstairs.”

Robertson did not know what to make of the information.

Doctor MacKenzie smiled. “Given that we can’t let her go around with knowledge of our surveillance apparatus in her head, I was thinking, as a gesture of good will towards our newest guest, that he might like to be reunited with one of his former lovers. I hear that they have quiet a history together, too.”

Robertson make an effort to keep his face from betraying anything. He had gotten the feeling that Doctor MacKenzie took the discovery of her team’s surveillance network as a personal affront, but he had not suspected how angry the doctor really was.

“But that’s later. Right now, you wanted to see the sort of experiments we run?”

Before Robertson could answer, Doctor MacKenzie had gestured toward a technician standing at the end of the cell block, before a large door built into an opaque wall. The technician nodded and knocked on the door, which opened and out came a guard holding a girl by the arm.

The girl was skinny, and had long red hair that caught the light. She might have been beautiful at some point, but the dark bags beneath her eyes and the sickly pallor of her skin suggested that she had seen better days. She must not have been older than twenty, if that. Her eyes were darting here and there, but she did not struggle in the guard’s grip. She wore a pale green tee shirt that had seen better days, and a pair of jeans shorts over black fishnet pantyhose which ran into those skater shoes that Robertson saw on every other kid these days, including his.

Robertson looked askance at Doctor MacKenzie while she watched the guard and the technician lead the girl to one end of the cell housing CrashMaster. The Special had spotted the girl, and he seemed to have forgotten everything but the presence of the redhead, so focused he looked.

“Homeless shelter in the city,” stated MacKenzie, answering Robertson’s unspoken question. “We have a few contacts that help us find what we need. Homeless women, runaway girls, drug addicts, prostitutes. Women that the system forgets or abandons. Women that no one will miss, that no one will look for.”

“So you just feed them to the wolves?”

“We run experiments. Collect data. And after a while, we arrange to have them admitted upstairs, where they are better treated than they were out there in the first place.”

Robertson fought back the look of disbelief he wanted to give the doctor. He had no jurisdiction over her. She headed her own division, formed after the Specials were discovered, and reported to Davenham directly. If she was doing this, Davenham had to know, and if Davenham knew and let her do it, he must approve of it. Which meant that he Robertson had no voice in the matter.

The guard led the girl to a door in the back of the cell, which Robertson could see was like an airlock, with one door on the outside and one door leading inside to the cell proper, the latter remote-controlled from the outer door. The guard opened that outer door, guided the girl through, and closed and locked the door behind her. She stared back at him, uncomprehendingly, and Robertson wondered whether she was under the influence.

The Special’s had never left her during her trek.

The guard keyed in the code to unlock the inner door and it opened. The girl looked at it and shivered. Her eyes went from it to the Special staring at her and then to the guard behind the outer door and then to us. Her confusion gave way to fear, her survival instincts finally kicking in.

The Special stared at her for a long time, a smile on his face, savoring the moment, the knowledge that the girl was his for the taking, unless his captors decided to take her away.

He walked toward the inner door, opening it, and as soon as he opened it Robertson could hear the girl pleading. “Please,” she cried, banging on the outer door, reinforced plate glass lined with steel like everything else in the cell. “Please!”

“Hello pretty little bird,” said the Special, looking her up and down. He sounded young. And crazy. “We love your hair. Really love your hair.”

“Please don’t hurt me,” pleaded the girl.

“We don’t intend to, little bird. We intend to make you feel good. Really good. The sort of good that comes from serving a member of a superior race, serving them to the best of your womanly abilities.”

He took a step toward her, and she pressed herself back against the wall, crying. She did not know what was about to happen, but she feared it. “Please…” she sobbed.

“We really love your hair, little bird. Red, red like fire, red like blood, red like a pussy that’s been ripped open and pounded over and over again because that’s what your Master wants…” His voice trailed off.

“Please!”

The Special called CrashMaster extended a hand to the girl’s face and she flinched, turning her head away. He cupped her cheek, wet with her tears.

Robertson watched, fascinated, not knowing what to expect, not knowing what he would see.

The girl merely shivered when the Special touched her. Her eyes closed.

The Special grinned, as he caressed the girl’s face. “There, Red, isn’t that better? The touch of your Master cures all. We were missing a servant in this hell hole, and you will fill the role nicely. For your Master has needs, Red, and you will take care of them. Look at us,” he ordered her, and the girl opened her eyes and looked at him. Her eyes were vacant, red rimmed, trembling. “Call us Master,” the Special said.

“M… Master,” said the girl, her voice breaking, her body shaking.

“That’s right, Red. Your Master.” He smiled, and ran the tip of his fingers down her face to her lips. “You know, we have this theory that all redheads are crazy cocksuckers. Is that true?” Before she could answer, he pressed a thumb between her lips and slid it into her mouth. “Suck, Red. Show us what a good cocksucker you are.”

And she did. Robertson watched, amazed, a girl that ten seconds earlier had been crying and pleading start to suck on a man’s thumb as if it meant life and death. Her eyes were open, but all of her focus was clearly on the digit in the mouth, her lips sliding back and forth, her cheeks caving in.

As she did that, the Special pawed her breasts through her tee shirt with his other hand, fondling and squeezing without eliciting a single protest from the girl. Robertson could even swear that he saw her hips jerk in time with the Special’s touch, as if his groping turned her on.

The Special smiled. “Very good, Red, very good. You will make a fine servant to your Master. Now come. Take off that shirt, and come inside.”

Without hesitation, the girl pulled her tee shirt over her head, exposing a pair of round perky breasts with hardened nipples. The Special looked at her voraciously for a second before walking back into his cell.

As the girl took a step to follow him, he raised his hand. “Stop. Get down, and crawl. Face to the floor.”

And she did. Without a moment’s hesitation, she dropped to her knees and then bent down, one of her cheeks pressed to the ground. Her position forced her ass high up, and the Special leered at it with undisguised lust for a moment before going through the inner door of the cell and sitting down on a lone chair.

Robertson watched the girl follow the Special, crawling on all four, her cheek never leaving the floor, her movement clumsy and slow. When she went through the inner door, it closed and locked behind her. She did not react.

“Amazing,” Robertson said, shaking his head. He had read about it in confidential reports, of course, and he had heard the rumors around the Corporation. But seeing it like that, live—it was unlike anything he could have imagined.

“Isn’t it?” Doctor MacKenzie answered without taking her eyes off the girl that was crawling on all four before them oblivious to anything but the Special that had roasted her mind. “The process is nearly instantaneous, as near as we can tell, and utterly and entirely mysterious. Though we do know it travels up and down neural pathways. And that it is irresistible.”

Something in Doctor MacKenzie’s voice grabbed Robertson’s attention, and he turned to see the beautiful doctor staring at the scene before them with an undecipherable expression on her face. Her eyes never left the girl, following every single one of her movements as she crawled on the floor the way she had been told.

By the time the girl had made her way to the chair in which the Special sat, he had taken off his pants, and his cock stood tall and erect. He stopped her by pressing his foot to her head. “Look at us, Red.”

She looked up, her eyes glowing with—adoration? lust? Robertson could not tell. The Special left his foot near her face, and said, simply, “Suck.”

Without hesitation, the girl, naked from the waist up, sucked on CrashMaster’s toes, lovingly, lavishly, one after the other, first one foot, then the other. The Special had leaned back in his chair, his eyes looking up at the ceiling of the cell, where one could see the Special housed in the cell above on all four on his cell floor staring down at the events below and salivating like a starving animal.

“Lick up our legs, Red. Lick until you reach our cock and then you are going to take it down your throat and fuck yourself with it until you almost pass out, over and over again. Show us your devotion, Red.”

Robertson, torn between discomfort and growing arousal, watched the girl lick the Special’s legs thoroughly, her small tongue lapping up the skin leaving no inch of it untouched, her breasts swaying gently with every single one of her movements. The Special leaned back with his arms behind his head, enjoying her worship of him. Megalomaniac, Robertson remember MacKenzie saying. He believes he’s a good. And paranoia hasn’t hit yet. Robertson reflected that with all that power, a Special fancying himself a god was hardly surprising. Even Robertson, with only a fraction of that power at his disposal and no real liberty to use it, sometimes felt like he was a chieftain over a small kingdom. He wondered what it would be like to be a Special. And then he remembered the crazed animals all around him.

The girl was between CrashMaster’s legs, running her tongue over his balls, and he pressed on her head so that she could lick thoroughly further down, his face breaking into a satisfied smile. He leaned back, putting his arms back behind his head, and after nearly a minute of the girl tonguing his ass, he told her to take his cock into her mouth. “Suck us, Red. Show us that you are worthy of being our servant. Show us how you worship your Master’s cock.”

And the girl did just that. Following his earlier instructions, she ran her tongue up the long thin cock to then slip the tip into her mouth and sink down upon it, as far down as she could go, taking nearly three-quarters of it into her mouth before her throat protested and gagged violently, but even that did not stop her and she tried to press the remaining quarter inside as well, her face straining from the effort, her eyes watering.

The Special merely watched her, leaning back in a relaxed position, as she chocked herself on his shaft and fought hard to swallow his whole flesh, failing but never giving up. After nearly two minutes, during which time her face grew redder and redder, she weakly slipped her mouth off, gulping in great mouthfuls of air as she heaved.

“Again,” said CrashMaster, and the girl repeated her efforts, her face now wet with tears, her eyes wide, drool dripping down her chin to splash on the glass floor. She gagged harder, and took in more of him this time, struggling against pain to bring satisfaction to her Master the way he had told her to, the way he had ordered her to.

Robertson watched the whole thing until the end—until the girl, after ten minutes of swallowing the Special’s cock and nearly chocking out every time, eventually took the whole shaft into her throat and pressed her lips and nose into his crotch. He was enthralled, even as he realized he should look away and adopt a more dispassionate attitude.

The Special, meanwhile, as he enjoyed the girl that had been brought to him work harder than she had ever worked in her life to bring him off and prove to him that she was the servant he deserved, spent the second half of his blow job staring straight at Doctor MacKenzie, his eyes filled with hate and lust and unholy desires. Doctor MacKenzie stared right back at him, collecting data.

Robertson could not help notice that she looked a little bit flushed, however.