The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

AMATEUR NIGHT

Codes: mc, md, mf, nc

Disclaimers (if you scroll past, you’ve still read ‘em—don’t blame me):

  • This author is not the same trilby who dwells on AOL; thus, Trilby on AOL should not be held responsible for anything that follows.
  • This work is copyright the author, © 2000. Kindly do not repost or otherwise use without permission and credit.
  • This is adult fiction with nonconsensual sex, mind control, and other immoral and illegal acts both explicit and implied. In real life this would all be very bad. All characters, events, and places are fictional and any resemblance to actual persons, events or places is coincidental, etc. All characters are of legal age in all jurisdictions, not that it’s done them much good so far. References like “boy”, “girl”, or “child” are rhetorical, not technical.
  • If you’re underage, stop reading and get out. (The average fashion magazine these days is probably enough.) If it’s just flat illegal there, ditto (and I’m very sorry.) If you find this sort of thing offensive in general, ditto (and why are you here?)
  • It’s more about mind control than sex. I’m a fetishist: point isn’t using MC to get sex, it’s sex being something interesting to do with MC. So if you only want short zap/long fuckfest . . . see ya. Also, I consider this literature, i.e. with redeeming artistic content, i.e. not “obscene” in the legal definition. (Argue that if you will, but it’s my story, so to speak, and I’m sticking to it.)
  • I disparage no lifestyle. If characters are forced into one, it’s the force that degrades, not the lifestyle.
* * *

Inspirations: A number of stories inspired this one, and more directly than usual: one is The Flying Pen’s “The Eraser.” There’s also something of scifiscribbler’s stories, particularly “The Breed,” and perhaps a very distorted echo of Aerosol Kid’s Akiko. I owe a technical sequence here to fused moments from EyeofSerpent’s “Zenith Night” and Sara H’s “Harmonic Conversion,” as well.

* * *

1.

The girl sucking off Decker did something new with her tongue. More by habitual courtesy than for any other reason, he grunted in acknowledgement. He was too preoccupied to enjoy it, really.

He looked out the window of the suite, seeing the skyline beyond in the slanting late-afternoon light. The auction had gone well, but then they always did. He worked with each slave intensely before she reached market and they were all thoroughly tame—especially the “wild” ones the buyers wanted to think they were going to break.

Took its toll, after a while.

He looked down at Tabitha’s lustrous winter-wheat cascade of hair between his legs, enjoying its delicate movement. The brain under that mane belonged to him completely, and sometimes he liked to have her tell him so, but the point was that this blowjob wasn’t wasted. He could stop her now and pick it up later and she’d have the same enthusiasm.

It was always good for her.

Morbidly, Decker wondered how the other 99% lived, what life was like for the guy who had to ask for it. Pay a hooker (and who knew where it had been?) Inveigle the wife, beg the girlfriend, maybe fork over a lot of cash and time and attention—and then face the fishwich when she demanded payback.

Maybe they appreciated it more when they could get it, the guys who didn’ t have the Control.

Maybe they were just losers, Decker thought. Payback might be a bitch, but there were no bitches in Decker’s world.

He flicked a thought at Tabitha, and she smoothly slid her mouth off his cock, licking off the precome she’d coaxed out already and cleaning it with delicate tongue strokes. And they think we don’t like cats. She replaced him in his pants and redid his fly, settling back on her heels and looking up at him with her usual bright expression.

“I think your friends are back,” he said.

In her head he heard not my friends they hate Master i hate them must make them obey or die but she only nodded. He’d taught her that truth but didn’ t need to hear it recited all the time.

“They’re still using that pop bimbo’s music to make their thoughts hard to read.” It was one of the memories he’d locked away in Tabitha, reviewed when he’d taken and turned her. The girls she’d been with had let that teacher of theirs hypnotize them to help them focus and to learn tricks like this annoyingly effective crap with Normandy Swords, or whatever her sprightly little name was. Part of the little commando thing they’d surprised his outfit with when he’d swept down on their tony little private school. Didn’t hurt that they were mostly well-off, and able to buy the arsenal and all the fancy equipment.

Little Amazons, sworn to each other. He’d laughed, but they were more than their gear, after all, and they hadn’t done badly, for amateurs. Not back then, and not in the times they’d come at him since.

He’d worked on Tabitha for months and she could remember that time now without the slightest trace of affection for her ex-friends.

Now he let the sharp mind that lived to serve him process that. He added, “There’s a traditionalist, though. Someone likes those British girls instead. I get a different signal from her.”

Tabitha smiled. “Teri, for sure. She always had to be unique. Everyone else just went with Eva’s suggestion.” Eva, the teacher, was dead now, but Decker had been surprised at what she’d done with a clutch of schoolgirls. They’d fought him well. Her star pupil, a girl named Carol, led them now, and she was no mean adversary either.

Decker admired anyone who took it all seriously. It depressed him that only these fucking schoolgirls, victims in any proper universe, got the idea. He accepted the fact that he’d created them, he and people like him who’d done so much and frightened so many with mind control in recent years. But these women had risen to it.

He looked at Tabitha, remembered her facing him on the helipad after she’d held him and his people off with neat three-round bursts, as her friends made their escape from the school in one of his choppers with thirty of his livestock drugged on board. He never knew if she would have been able to fire the last round (she’d been counting them, for god’s sake) into her own head, because he reached into her mind and stopped her. But he’d felt the faint pressure as her mind tried, and he’d only felt girls fight that hard to escape—not to finish killing themselves.

In the receding beat of the rotors, telling Duke not to let anyone try to shoot it down, he looked into his new captive and saw not the slightest trace of fantasy-submission or slutness of any variety. Tabitha was looking at spending the rest of her life as a conditioned sex slave with disgust and terror and not even thinking she’d be taught to enjoy it. Ballsy enough to risk it anyway, so her friends could rescue the others and get away.

Decker had looked at her as she stood there, looking sexy as hell in her improvised commando gear, sexier with the pale face and wide eyes of her terror, and realized she was not even daring to hope he’d kill her. It wasn ‘t often he found that much courage with that much realism. This girl had grown up several lifetimes right now.

It almost made him sad.

But he took her free will and selfhood instead, and all that warrior spirit was his, now. Tabitha was a devoted guard as well as his 24/7 concubine, and she was a smarter sounding board for plans than most of the goon squad he’d acquired over the years.

He’d never had anyone smart he could trust. And he’d never found a woman he hadn’t considered a bimbo in training even before he took her. But Tabitha . . .

“You covered your tracks, Master.” She spoke thoughtfully from her knees, drifting into a pose her programming knew he liked. “But the clients tonight have been all over the ‘Net about it, and they must have put it together.”

He nodded, remembering how she’d looked this morning as he left the suite, sitting naked and crosslegged on the bed with the laptop, ready to spend the day surfing on his agendas with time for exercise breaks. He’d been so taken with her absorption when he came back for a nooner that he’d let her be, staring at her utterly focused rapture and leaving. She’d never known he’d been there.

But she’d been working hard. “I looked at what they were saying about price and hinting about quality. There was the usual talk about whether you ‘d bring another sister act.”

Decker nodded, groaning inwardly. Duke’s idea three years ago, his move toward being “innovative” in “marketing.” White slavery was an old business, and it liked old values—decent product prepped right. Gimmicks were for amateurs. Which Duke was, with anything other than an Uzi or a cattle prod.

“Just thinking outta the box, Cap,” he’d said the first time they saw a newsgroup immortalizing Decker’s alias, after Duke’s little concept with the twins who just loved each other had gone over big. A fuck-video staple, come to glorious life as Decker’s new signature.

Decker had left his eyes on the screen, seeing that much of his ease of movement lost.

“Think about being in a box, compadre,” he told Duke. “Next time you have an idea.”

Duke had been very quiet after that. But the damage was done—and frustratingly hard to gauge.

“I think they’re going to try to rescue someone, Master.” In the present, Tabitha was giving him her mind, as lithe and strong as her body and as utterly at his disposal. He listened.

“Two of the descriptions in the catalogue fit Jill and Ruthie. They’re not—you sold Jill to the doctor in Caracas and Ruthie’s still healing from the implants.” Pausing, she wondered how, and how quickly, her former comrades would figure that out. “But they’ll try to get to the girls on the list.”

She frowned. “Wish we could have gotten to Jacqui when she was in that clinic. It’d be nice to have a remote slave inside with them to get you data.”

He shrugged. “With that noise in their heads I can hear them coming a mile away. Jammers are great for security but they suck for surprise.” As always when he said that, he caught a fairly detailed image in Tabby’s mind of a lumbering green aircraft: Daddy had flown for the Air Force before Mommy remarried someone wealthier, and Tabitha actually knew all about jammers.

Probing curiously, Decker found no nostalgia there, either.

“Carol knows that, Master.” Tabitha looked even more pensive. “She’ll come up with something, though.” She smiled. “Maybe she’ll reprogram them all to play the elevator music here in the hotel.”

Decker grinned at her. “She’s not that ruthless, is she?”

Tabitha grinned back and shook her head. “No one’s that ruthless, Master.”

He wondered. When he’d taken Tabitha he’d been dealing with the immediacy of her. The unseen Carol, up in the chopper as it lifted, piqued his interest later. As he went through his new slave’s thoughts, he’d seen something beyond even Tabitha in this other girl, who’d assigned her to that suicide post. Tabitha had been the champion who volunteered to stay and be lost—but Carol was her steelhearted liege lady who accepted and blessed her friend’s sacrifice, for the greater good, and may well have been making herself look out from the helicopter at what she’d done. Until taught otherwise, Tabitha had worshipped her.

Maybe she really was that ruthless.

Tabitha closed her eyes suddenly and sighed. He looked out the window again. “I know. I’m just not wanting it right now.”

“Yes, Master.” So wonderful. Even needing his cock on her tongue that badly, her voice and mind were empty of petulance. She knew her place.

She knelt and waited.

Decker got up to change for dinner. There were a couple of new buyers who still didn’t quite understand the scope of what applied mind control brought to the white-slave trade, and the established clients who vouched for them needed to show off their access to him.

He looked back at her. She was as fulfilled just staying there on her knees in the gathering dark as she would be deep-throating him or riding him in bed.

“Suck your thumb,” he told her, and saw her obey with graceful haste. He reached in and triggered a memory, and heard her moan as she fell into the fantasy, and he watched her writhe for a while, thinking she’d earned at least the fantasy of having him in her mouth as he started to change.

2.

Decker liked this hotel not least because it had a decent kitchen, and he could entertain without leaving. The dining room had private booths toward the center of the room, and he was shown to the one he usually liked, seeing the little signs that showed Duke and Duke’s minions on the staff had checked it for bugs, bombs, and anything else.

By his side, Tabitha was exquisite in a satin jumpsuit just loose enough to be chic, and looked like an unapproachably sleek young woman instead of simply an unaffordably fuckable one. She trailed him to the dining room, and he liked how her poise was as disorienting as her winsome good looks. He couldn’t tell how much of it was “original” Tabitha who’d held the helipad alone, and how much the new and improved Tabitha, tamed and focused.

Tabitha’s ex-schoolmate and now pupil Jordan, about to graduate from her own extensive training, followed them, looking in her minidress both approachable and eminently fuckable.

They charmed the buyers, who weren’t used to slaves who spoke better than they did and seemed to think more clearly.

The richer one, Karlsen, stared at them, smiling but watching them in an open way he probably wouldn’t have looked at a twenty-dollar hooker back when that was what he could afford. Tabitha played up to him quietly, letting him watch, and consistently played Jordan to him.

His junior partner, Bellows, looked irritated. He was looking for bimbos, not princesses, and while he could clearly already see Jordan in whatever setting he usually put girls, he realized a whore with a vibe like Tabitha might actually put off johns. The faction that wouldn’t mind at all nailing a princess to the mattress was an unpredictable minority, and most of them couldn’t afford this kind of quality, anyway. Bellows was going for the soft-in-the-middle crowd that had money but no balls, and while a girl like Jordan would suit them, Tabitha would blow their minds before she got a chance to blow anything else.

Tabitha didn’t look like she’d be a demanding sort of girl. Decker watched and enjoyed as her programming, even as she fought to keep focused on marketing Jordan, made her own slave-awareness resonate to Karlsen’s unconscious cues and turned her behavior into a harem slave with geisha training. Freed of his vicinity or under command by Decker, she’d be back to normal, but for now she was submissively under Karlsen’s spell and falling deeper, and he was only just starting to get it.

Tabitha wouldn’t demand her man have balls. He’d just end up feeling they weren’t big enough.

This was business. Decker meditated on a mushroom until it told his palate what he wanted to know, then swallowed, took wine, and settled back.

“Tabitha?”

She turned elegantly, managing to keep part of her attention fixed on Karlsen. “Yes, Mr Decker?”

“Strip to the waist.”

“Yes, Mr Decker.” Smiling winningly at the buyers, she undid the collar and undulated out of the top half of the jumpsuit, bending and stretching quickly but gracefully and then neatly arranging the cloth around her waist, sitting pertly with her breasts firm in front of her. Decker had placed her in the booth to keep her as a private show, and had no worries. Tabitha would have obeyed the same “strip” command at high mass in a cathedral without blinking, so she just resumed her gentle flattery of Karlsen. Jordan hadn’t been told to do anything.

Karlsen smiled more avidly, directing his remarks more often to her chest as though her breasts had stopped by late to join him for drinks. Tabitha moved imperceptibly, enough to make them amiable.

Bellows looked nervous at the display, but he looked at Tabitha’s chest, too. Then he blinked, realizing what he’d seen and how naturally she’d done it.

“Tabitha? Take Jordan’s top off, too.” Jordan held still as Tabitha reached up and undid her, freeing another pair of breasts innocent of any support. As she did it they made indefinable soft sounds, helpful and girlish and almost too quiet to hear, and Decker heard both men’s breathing change.

Too polite and canny to smile, he recalled seeing the girls practice for this. They’d done it for two hours under hypnosis. Tabitha had used the pendant Jordan had been conditioned to, programmed her, and then put herself under as Decker had trained her. Then they stripped, over and over. It had been erotic, then strange, then funny, to watch the frozen segment of foreplay repeated endlessly, perfectly.

All for this moment, and it had captured the buyers. The girls dreamily gazed at each others’ chests and then turned back to beam at Karlsen and Bellows, who couldn’t help but feel flattered. They wanted to see the two slaves get it on, and imagined the slaves did too but were more interested in two such studly men.

“Now, Tabitha.”

Tabitha blinked and breathed, “Yes, Master!” and turned to Jordan. She snapped her fingers and Jordan stopped in mid-word, staring through Bellows’ head with a perfect deer/headlights look. Bellows was almost shaking.

“Well, Jordan.” Her tone was warmly reproving. “You’ve been teasing our guest. But you’re not a tease, are you?”

Wide-eyed, Jordan shook her head, her gaze still trapped in infinity and incidentally intersecting Bellows. Decker caught Karlsen’s glance, and they shared a smile it wasn’t necessary to show their distracted colleague.

“What are you, Jordan?”

“I’m a prostitute,” Jordan declared with quiet determination, sounding even younger than the ex-schoolgirl she was.

Looking her over as though inspecting a sister before her date, Tabitha hefted each breast. “You’re paid for tonight.”

Sighing happily, Jordan beamed at them and slid under the table, and Decker nodded as Bellows looked down in confusion and then up, grinning nervously, as Jordan found her target and went at it.

Karlsen nodded at him, and Bellows was clearly too new at all this to see how much of a disadvantage he’d fallen to. Looking at Tabitha, who smiled down at the table with quiet pride at her protegee beneath it, Karlsen shook his head, aware he was meant to want her, and wanting her, but knowing she was Decker’s.

They tried to make conversation, but Jordan’s concentration on her task precluded Bellows’ on anything much, and Karlsen was having a hard time keeping up with the way Tabitha’s breasts swayed gently as she kept speaking calmly—even though her nipples were pushing out of her aureoles like desperate little antennae. That, too, was mind control, he was realizing as Decker watched him. Not just the other girl’s utterly focused fellatio to the just-met master, but this one’s ability to function highly aroused because she’d been told to.

Decker knew he’d make an offer for Tabitha later, even knowing he’d be turned down. If only to prove his good taste. He hoped he’d make it in front of her.

“Tabbycat?” he said.

The trigger hit her as it usually did, and she swayed a bit more, almost gasping and barely able to keep her eyelids above her pupils. “Yes,

Master?” she breathed, fighting to keep her head up, her gaze on him.

“Sleep until I wake you.”

“Yes, Masssterrrrr—” She trailed off, head up but eyes falling closed as he allowed her to lose the fight. She sat with one hand in her lap and the other resting lightly on the tablecloth by her wineglass, palm-up. He reached down and gently turned it over and it stayed as he had placed it.

Karlsen caught the gesture and knew what it was for, and it did him no good.

Decker finished his mushrooms without haste, dabbed his mouth and emptied his glass. Bellows was showing enough sense to mute his grunting as Jordan kept him on the edge, something else she’d trained for hours at a time to do and be very good at. He was starting to look worried, and a bit at a loss as to what to do about it.

Leaving him to melt in Jordan’s mouth, Decker turned to Karlsen. “I think we know where that particular merchandise is probably going.

“But now that you have an idea about the method, would you find it worthwhile to inspect a few more from the herd?”

Karlsen smiled and nodded. Decker could see that he would get over this quickly, distracted as he was by his greater passion for the profit that Jordan and a covey of girls just as skilled—and utterly obedient—as she was would generate for whoever owned them. His brain was already visibly turning over.

Bellows’ brain was clearly occupied, too.

“Let me get my secretary on the line, then.” Decker tapped Tabitha on her nearer nipple, suppressing his reaction to her eager intake of breath. “Tabbycat. Wake now.”

She was bright-eyed and erect again, ready to serve. “I’ll need you to play close attention,” he told her, and she nodded earnestly, biz-school from eyes to neck and harem girl southward from there.

“That’s a total-recall trigger,” he explained. “Secretarial mode now. She ‘ll remember everything we say, and the body language with it. Like a tape recorder with something extra.”

Karlsen, still mesmerized by her tits, was yet able to stop the first and less intelligent response before saying it.

“Not the appliance I was thinking of. But OK. Let’s talk.”

3.

Decker heard the maddening little voice in their heads before he saw the first silent alarm. As he looked at the floorplan on the screen to see where the girls were coming, the nightmarish conceit occurred to him that Normandy Swords was the voice in their heads, that the pop diva was in fact a wily controller from way back and was sending legions of mindless, subliminally enslaved fans against him.

He smiled. That would have been fun.

Tabitha stared into space, standing by the door. She’d called it correctly, earlier, when they were planning the evening. She’d known one of the girls had learned mountaineering and trained the others, and the best of her second-degree pupils were the ones coming down now from the roof level. They’d gotten there by helicopter—one had settled over an open section of the roof without landing while they’d been at dinner and departed in seconds, too quickly to challenge, and he supposed the girls had piled out with their gear in a well-drilled offload. Now, after waiting for dark, they’d emerged from hiding up there and started down to him.

He sincerely hoped their knots were tight. It was a long way to fall and a hard street to land on.

So far they’d set off the motion detectors on the ledge as their bodies blocked the brisk airflow. The south side tends to unexpected gusts, ladies. Watch yourselves. I want you all.

He waited, giving them time to choose an entrance. He presumed they knew the floorplan, had enough access to the hotel’s systems to deduce which suites he held on this floor, and could figure out the best place among those to keep some of his inventory. Tabitha, who seemed to be getting turned on at the thought of helping him take her friends, had suggested more precise bait, and came up with some quite clever not-quite-clues to hint which rooms the girls who might be Ruthie and Jill were waiting in. But before he could even point out the problem she’d seen it: “We can’t make it too easy for them, Master. Because Carol could smell that.”

Decker wanted to meet Carol. An old part of him secretly wanted to meet her before he entered her mind for that once-for-all ravishing, but it was asking too much to have the advantage as thoroughly as when he’d captured Tabitha at the helipad.

No. Tabitha had surrendered. Never be complacent. If memory softens, realtime sight may slip, too.

Tabitha stood still and willing, now. He looked into her thoughts and found quiet bliss: a dream of kneeling naked by his feet in a bright, crowded throne room, owned before all.

They were alone in the suite. He’d given Jordan to Bellows on the spot as a sweetener, and he knew the contact who’d set up the meeting at dinner had teased Bellows with what a girl who’d been in Decker’s hands would do for her master. Could do, even. Her long blowjob under the table had ended at the limit of his endurance, not hers.

Decker knew he’d impressed Karlsen, too, and that Karlsen respected the fact that Bellows had lost a power exchange he hadn’t even appreciated he was in.

So many irons in the fire. A slaver’s work was never done. Decker watched the alarm indicators trip over with deft speed, as the girls found their way to each of the possible entries and paused. He waited like an audience, appreciating their skill. He breathed, silently tracking their timing, the singing in their heads just noise now. He couldn’t read past that noise, but he knew the fear they must feel now, about to go in. Did they also know the exhilaration?

He hoped so. They’d earned that, at least.

They were taking a while, and he decided it wasn’t funk. Not with these girls. A technical problem with something they had. He closed his eyes and pictured the malfunctioning gadget, the silent curse, the thing set quietly out of the way while someone pulled out something old-fashioned, the prybar or the knife, to use instead of the broken tech-toy.

He remembered they were women, and saw the tool lifted to soft lips in a smooth face, and kissed for luck.

Decker admired them as lesser Tabithas, wondered if he could make a palace guard of them. They were, in the end, still just amateurs, but they were good: the lack that distinguished and handicapped an amateur wasn’t skill but focus. He knew they’d lose that, at the proper time.

The entry alarms came on like a chandelier on the computer screen as the girls invaded his rented domain simultaneously. He imagined the taut, black-clad bodies floating gracefully in the windows, deploying into the studied rooms like dancers hitting their marks.

He saw the yellow indicators come on as the defense systems reacted, after the delay to let everyone get in and get far enough from the way out to make the trip out too, too hard. He pictured the sentries outside the windows and doors looking in with horror as their sisters were caught. He pictured one or two leaning too close, looking too long, and—caught themselves—slowly, dreamily entering to join the victims and wait for him.

A touch of his mind and Tabitha’s eyes were bright and focused. “They’re in, Master?”

“Right on time, and there are a lot of them.”

She looked eager. “Maybe Carol’s with them.” She saw his skepticism, or perhaps felt it. “Not the main group, Master, but here, somewhere.”

He tried to see Carol sitting in a room elsewhere in the hotel, or on a lonely perch on the roof, waiting it out.

No. It didn’t feel right.

Locking the computer, he walked around the desk to the door. Tabitha stood poised, still lovely in the jumpsuit, her handbag hefted with the gun discreetly inside, and she followed him out and down the hall like a wingman.

Decker chose the second of the prepared suites and glanced each way to see the corridor empty as he opened the door and slipped in. Tabitha closed the door quickly after him.

This hotel suite was a tableau from Hieronymus Bosch. Multicolored strobes flickered through patterns too fast to track and too compelling not to, while an insistent, melodic whining crawled like an amorous snake through the blunt limbs of a dark bass throb.

Among motionless nude women with blank faces, the slaves he already owned waiting at attention, figures in dark clothing that gleamed with metal knelt or writhed or tried shakily to keep their feet, their screaming inaudible in the room’s sound. Decker looked for a moment at his slaves, their minds already melted and used to being reshaped. The lights and the noise were not telling their dimmed awareness anything they didn’t already know: that they were owned, obedient, endlessly horny was already the sun and moon of their lives.

Without selves to lose. they were immune.

Behind him, he knew Tabitha was alert and excited, her mind immunized by his personal training, avidly watching her old comrades being broken before her eyes by her master’s subliminals.

He watched the intruders slacken. He sent two of the slaves to resecure the windows they’d broken through, and the slaves stepped absently around their twitching would-be rescuers to obey the imperative in their minds. Nothing else happened. One girl, sitting open-mouthed and drooling under one of the windows, must have been outside watching their back, and made the mistake of peering in to see what the noise was.

Her mouth was inches from the pussy of the naked slave closing the window she’d fallen in through, and both women were oblivious. Decker smiled to see it.

He surveyed the minds of the new girls as they collapsed to the floor or stopped moving more than spasmodically. He sent one of the slaves to deactivate the brainwashing system for this room. No one had held out—not surprising at this setting. He was pleased to find several of them had climaxed at the feeling of their minds being pried open and stunned from inside, and reached into the mind of each girl in that susceptible group, reviving the memory and welding it forever to his voice: “Obey.” In the silence after the stimulators were shut off, he listened to the delightful harmony of their weak but ardent cries, and the whimpers of the ones not yet conquered.

He sifted. Carol? Where is Carol?

None of them knew.

He smiled and passed that thought to Tabitha, and he knew she smiled too. Yes, Master. She’s good. He felt something in her then which he’d learned to associate with a smile that turned her pretty face into that of an utterly corrupted angel. But then, so were they. She licked her lips loudly enough for him to hear.

Decker considered. He reached into one of the weaker girls, her mind already learning his touch, making her mew aloud with pleasure, and searched. There was Carol, looking at them.

“I can’t tell you,” she was saying. Someone asked the inevitable question, and she said, “Well—no. Not knowing won’t protect you at all.” She laughed and they laughed with her. There was nothing more, no hints. The only plan they’d spoken of was the one that had just ended in the beginning of slavery for them all, right here.

A strange thought came then, and he passed it to Tabitha: this was Carol ‘s plan, her way of applying to work for him, perhaps. Giving him her friends.

No, Master. Tabitha’s conviction was deep, as close as her thoughts came to the absolute certainty of her slavery to him. She’d never think of that. He felt Tabitha’s brief, hot confusion as she wished in her twisted retrospect that she had, and betrayed her friends to him before.

A diversion, then? For what? There wasn’t anything here but the slave inventory to interfere with.

Something. One of the girls had a memory fragment, and he focused on it. She moaned in pain, and he stopped himself and soothed her until she lay there purring. It was nothing, and drew no recognition from Tabitha when he passed it back: a chessboard at endgame, a well-protected White king, a second Black queen standing at the far end, a manicured hand over it.

A voice, talking, repeating. The girl’s mind blotted it out. Someone—Carol?—had hypnotized her and taught her to forget it. There was a plan, and Carol had protected it. Why was the chess image important? Why was the hostile king—Decker?—playing White? Schoolgirl political correctness?

He thought about Carol, 20 going on 70, molding her friends’ minds to reach her goals. He thought about her friends, letting her do it, willing hypnotic subjects.

He thought about a newly-crowned queen in the eighth rank, after pawns were given up, and turned to look deeply into Tabitha’s eyes as she stood there behind him, her purse heavy with the gun he made her carry.

4.

It was still in her purse and she hadn’t moved.

Her mind pulsed. She’d figured it out, from just his posture and the logic of what they both knew. She spoke aloud over the soft sounds of the conquered girls on the floor.

“Master, she didn’t program me to let you take me. I’m not a Trojan horse or a pawn about to change. I’m your willing obedient slave.

“But if you wish I can die now.” He felt her mind open itself, wait. Tremble and still itself.

He stared at her, looked into her. “No, Tabitha. I know you.” He smiled at her relief and let her see it. “But is that how she might really think?”

Mentally and physically she shook her head. “I don’t know, Master. The Carol I knew might come up with an idea like that, as an idea, but she wouldn’t think she was a good enough hypnotist to pull it off.”

In her head, he saw that Tabitha wasn’t sure about that, but Tabitha’s opinion of powerful hypnotists had, of course, forever been altered. He saw something else: Tabitha couldn’t see Carol choosing someone else to do a job like that.

Neither could he, but he tried to keep his mind open. He led Tabitha out after activating the next set of commands in the slaves in the room. They went to the closets and drawers to get the bindings and drugs to begin preparing deeper enslavement for the women who’d come to rescue them from mind-slavery.

Decker paused and took out the cell phone. A cryptic exchange with Duke’s man assured him that some other intrusions at ground level had been repelled, so he was free to continue his playful work with all these volunteers. The attack was over.

In the hall on the way to the next suite of quivering new postulants, already anticipating the maddened whispers of obedience in their manhandled psyches, he passed a hotel employee, neat in her skirt, in the blazer of the concierge staff. Young, perhaps a management trainee. Already schooled to ignore the antics of wealthy guests, perhaps not even wanting to know what happened behind those doors.

Wait. Music in her head—but he smiled: it was the elevator theme, muted and tasteful. Probably drove the poor girl insane as she fetched and carried. He thought of playing with her, but with his new catch flopping on the floor of two more suites here . . .

Still. She might be a useful foil for something he wanted to try. The hotel turned a blind eye to what he did with junior staff, as long as he wasn’t carrying them off like towels. Also, with the blown minds he’d be dealing with, touching and using someone whose thoughts weren’t etched by the flaring lights and invasive sound would be like a chaser to drink in relief.

Tabitha went to fetch her.

Decker peered into the first room, seeing a few still weakly struggling—if she could give a girl that much resistance, maybe Carol did have talents as a trainer he could exploit once she worshipped him. Once he taught her to know that freedom wasn’t the desired end state, but the problem to be solved. He commanded the slaves to close the windows and went to do the same at the third suite.

Master. The concierge girl. She’s—

His inhibition against using her gun was below words and instant, but he felt Tabitha already minded that way.

Yes, Master. I’ll handle it. He paused, seeing through her mind. The girl faced Tabitha in the quiet hallway, perhaps aware that he held every room on this floor, that she was either alone or worse here. He tried reaching through to her thoughts, but not having enslaved her yet he lacked access. He wondered if she knew how badly her friends were faring, that some of them were already at the point of crawling to him for the privilege of going after her if they knew.

Maybe Tabitha should tell her that.

He saw recognition in her eyes as she caught Tabitha’s. They must have pictures of Tabitha, consider her some horrible fusion of martyr and archdemon. He rifled Tabitha’s mind and found no equivalent knowledge of this girl: a new recruit since her taking, then, not mourning Tabitha as a lost friend but fearing her even more.

The music: deliberate, masking her thoughts and then masking the mask. Smooth, powerful, effective hypnosis.

Carol was here.

Decker accepted that the new brain-noise could be a planned element: deep hypnosis for the girl in another location, before they started, and an all-purpose command to hear and replay whatever she heard, to blend in. But he made an intuitive leap that it had been a tactical improvisation. A Carol move, right here.

He licked his lips. Colder and smarter even than Tabitha. He was going to love the mindfuck.

The “concierge” would be helpful. Hold her, he thought. In Tabitha’s mind he saw her tense to run.

It was a pleasure to feel his slave respond. Tabitha pulled her perfume spray from the purse, sending a stream of it into the girl’s face and stepping back for good measure as though to dodge the droplets. The girl froze and gaped and he felt Tabitha use her corrupted-angel smile. It was so convincingly malign that Decker himself almost wondered for a second what might be in the vial.

“You might as well relax,” Tabitha told her victim with frightening calm. “That topical hypnotic will be shutting down your volitional centers in about—how much are you? about 100, 110?—forty seconds. Then Master will be here.”

The girl’s eyes widened and then Decker did feel her mind, the sheer terror so high-volume he was getting a directional on it. His eyes involuntarily tracked left as though her mental shriek had been audible.

Decker almost laughed out loud at her suggestibility, wondering how docile she’d be just on the suggestion that she’d been dosed with a will-destroying drug. She obviously believed it.

She sprinted away from Tabitha, and Tabitha silently begged orders. He thought of the floorplan. Follow her fast. Locked rooms and an electrical closet that way. He started walking quickly down the hall to where they were.

Yes, Master. Tabitha swept down to the turning, and he felt her sudden tension between caution and his command. He chose for her.

Careful, Tabby. He pursed his lips. Gun out, but only if she’s armed.

Yes, Master. Thank you. She knew she was worth more to him than a hysterical captive.

He disengaged from her thoughts and concentrated on getting through the corridors, wondering if any of Carol’s other soldiers had infiltrated in hotel uniforms, but the floor seemed deserted. If he saw anyone they’d be on the carpet under a SLEEP command right then.

He found the turn and looked for whatever empty room the girl had fled to. He found Tabitha at the electrical closet instead, in front of its open door. Her face was white and she shook, and when he looked into her mind he saw that only his control was keeping her quiet and upright. Part of her was begging to be allowed to phase out, to be released from her enhanced slave awareness and clarity, but Decker saw that Tabitha was fighting that, staying a slave and as ready as she could be to serve him.

A worthy girl, even enslaved.

Her mind had shown it to him already but Decker stepped beside her and looked.

The girl in the concierge’s uniform lay against the plywood back wall, her face tear-streaked and almost composed but starting to contort with her last pain. Her hand still gripped the pocketknife. Blood . . .

She’d cut deep and completely severed her carotid artery, and she’d already bled out. Her eyes stared past the circuit breaker box above her.

Decker looked at her. She’d thought she had forty seconds of free will left, and this was what she’d done with it.

He wondered whether Tabitha remembered the last moments of her own freedom, when she’d tried to shoot herself, but he found no trace of that in his slave’s thoughts.

Even before Tabitha gasped, he felt someone else come up behind them. He turned.

Carol was here.

5.

He looked at her eyes first, even before the gun. Neither eyes nor gun wavered, until she cut her gaze over. The closet door stood out into the hall between her and the dead girl, but she could see the splayed legs, the stain still scarlet around them and wide. The way the droplets had flown and landed.

She took it in and looked back along the gun in her left hand. He paid attention: it was an old .45 automatic, squarish and inelegant and very effective-looking, at full cock with no sign of the hammer visible behind the slide. Maybe her father’s, or just bought somewhere. He saw her grimly practicing for hours, weeks, every day for a year.

Why wasn’t she shooting?

With the gun on him he honestly didn’t know if slamming a command into her brain would just spasm her, tense that hand, and slam the big soft lead slug through his own.

He listened to her mind.

He heard—surf. Carol had programmed herself with the ocean to mask her thoughts.

Decker looked at her. Not the beauty Tabitha was, but the sort of girl the eye kept drifting across, briefly but repeatedly until it found itself watching her. Her dark hair was short and he saw no makeup, but the color came from her deep brown eyes, striking even here in the hotel-corridor lighting, and her lips had their own hue past violet. She was in loose clothes, and might even be a bit overweight. Decker blinked. Hard to say.

She’d just sent all her friends, her troops, into what she must have known would be a trap, sprung his snares, and somehow gotten past Duke and the rest of his people. Or had they gotten past her? Had she already been holed up here in the hotel since before they’d even arrived—waiting?

All to distract him, so she could get close enough to shoot him dead.

How ruthless was Carol? He probed gently for guilt, like a wire-inlet, the tiniest chink through which he could reach into to her mind and slowly, slowly disable her from shooting, running, disobeying, thinking . . .

Just the waves, rolling ashore.

He got a visual, too. This mental shore wasn’t a tropical beach, but a rocky coastline under a gunmetal winter sky. Part of him was wondering whether this girl was some reincarnated enemy of his from an old war.

No. This was what some people turned into when they were afraid enough.

He waited. They all stood there.

Why wasn’t she shooting?

Ahh.

Carol, the steelhearted queen, had never killed anyone, up close or otherwise. Had never looked into the eye she was going to shoot through, felt the breath she was about to stop forever.

Ready to die, he had little doubt, and admired her.

But—not ready to kill.

Carol’s eyes drifted aside, to Tabitha, who stood calmly now, knowing her Master was in control. Carol looked at her friend, and he saw her pupils dilate. He waited for the . . .

Tears. There.

He reached into her.

The ocean rolled and hissed around him, and he found Carol’s will accessible but obscured. He froze her trigger finger, but her arm stayed up and the gun stayed on him. Tabitha was docile, and he’d have to break concentration to command her to take the other girl, which he couldn’t afford just now. Well enough. He shouldn’t have to depend on his slave for help with this.

Carol fought him, her whole being resisting him. Her right hand was in her pocket, gripping something, and he wondered what she had in there. In a few moments he could simply know.

He pressed, trying to force her to relax, and then just increase his hold until she surrendered. They were like wrestlers, locked together until the weaker failed or someone slipped.

Decker decided to trip her. He sent the image of the chessboard, the new Black queen, and let her wonder why.

She faltered.

He pounced.

Relax.

She fought. Her body started to shake.

Relax.

She reached for the ocean, and for a moment its size, and power, and blank empty infinity seemed to overbalance him.

Relax.

Carol sighed and her eyelids drooped before she hauled them up. He reached into the cold dark ocean and found her bright warmth.

Relax.

There was music in her head now. He wondered if it was what she’d tried before choosing surf sounds. He started to recognize it, and looked into her eyes more deeply, wondering. What the fuck? . . . Frankie Goes to Hollywood?

. . . “Relax”?

He smiled, slowly feeling his ability to multitask return as Carol weakened. Maybe this song was something she’d thought of once in a fit of perversity—what never to sing to the mind controller—and tried not to think of again.

Maybe her subconscious was trying to defect.

Decker was pleased to sense no effort to turn the gun inward onto herself.

Lower the gun. She fought, but she was in a daze now, and she was just pushing effort blindly.

Relax.

Relax, her mind answered, and he heard the beat of the song in it. Her arm began to bend, to sink. Her will was bending.

Relax. Decker stepped aside, and the gun didn’t follow, though her eyes, glazing and frantic, tried to.

She was crying now, and groaning quietly behind closed lips. She was just resisting, perhaps no longer even sure why.

She was trying to pull her hand from her right pocket, and he saw another gun-shape there. He searched her mind, looking for a disconnected thought like must get other gun, but there was no way to look for it. Her mind was like a conquered city in mid-sack, burning and chaotic, with that compulsive dance track playing over it all.

Relax. Relax. Relax.

It was hard to tell where the music stopped, his command began, and her mind had started to whisper its own obedience.

With less of a load, he was free to send a command to Tabitha. Good girl. She’ll be mine soon.

His slave sighed happily in his mind, grateful to be able to move again, but gladder for her Master’s gain.

The other gun, he sent to Carol. She repeated it blankly in her captive thoughts, against the beat of Relax. Take out the other gun.

Take out . . . the other gun, her mind chanted in cadence with the song, and he felt the first warm moist flood of affirmative submission. Her hand started to move. In her mind, he saw the hand reach down to the Black queen—and replace it with a pawn. All backward; pawns were queened, not queens reduced. Had she foreseen her own defeat? Erased it from everyone else?

Her hand cleared the pocket, gripping whatever it was very tightly.

Relax.

Another square automatic, but not a design he . . .

Saw the wire. Saw something shift under the loose clothing. Not overweight.

Relax. She obeyed, blissful at last with a joy that stunned him. Relax. “Yes . . .”

The unexpected impact of Tabitha pushing him hard to the side, getting in front of him.

He heard the click of the dead-man switch opening but not the bomb when it

6.

His organization had held together.

Duke had shown his wisdom in the end, deputizing the cleverest and then just looming over them to keep them honest. He’d been the one to come to the hospital every day.

When Decker had snarled at them about a funeral for Tabitha and they stayed away, afraid of what he’d do with his mind under painkillers, it was Duke who’d promised, and it was Duke who’d brought the urn to him. Duke had said something awkward and dense, and he’d been glad Duke was there.

Then Decker was home, still waking up each day surprised that he existed below the waist, and unable to verify it unless he used his hands. The paralysis was complete, and the girls only gave him massages now.

He made them wear tight vinyl and chains for a while and love it, but that did no good. Neither did making them hate it.

Some of them were from Carol’s group, though after a while not many of them. When he’d gotten out of the hospital, he’d worked on their minds, sometimes around the clock. None of the ones in that series were salable. Not even the freaks would buy them. Duke had to have most of them put to sleep.

The second time he had a pair fight each other to the death, Duke had gotten him very drunk. He hadn’t done it again.

In his den, rearranged now for the wheelchair, he kept the urn. Each day a girl came to clean it and kneel before it. One day, a girl stopped as she worked, and leaned down to kiss it. Decker stared, and then he made them all do that.

Then, seeing it reduced to an effect, he made them stop.

He thought about Carol. He thought about the way her mind had felt, the ecstasy when she’d finally—relaxed. It had lodged in his own mind when hers had stopped, that eerie joy, and he was circling the question whenever there was nothing else to think about. Often.

Had she finally yielded to him, obeying, forgetting about the explosives she’d strapped to herself?

Or . . . was she triumphant because her insane plan had worked, and she’d pitted herself against his mind deliberately to use her own crumbling will—as the detonator?

How ruthless was Carol, exactly?

Decker would never know.

He couldn’t think about Tabitha, and so he gnawed away at the quandary and hated Carol for that instead.

Sometimes, he thought Which was it, you fucking cold-blooded—?

But there were no bitches in Decker’s world.

END