The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

Vanessa was getting grumpy. Jake said he would take them through an escape panel here. He was taking long enough to get here though. She didn’t much care when they left so much as she didn’t want to be left behind with all the fruitcakes.

Normally she’d have brought one of her crotch toys with her. Jake said he didn’t want more than a couple people to know he was going to disappear on them. He claimed those who knew there was an escape plan at all he wanted to take with him. She assumed he meant Jonathan and Melody, but Jonathan was no where to be seen today.

To amuse herself she started to look around for a panel hiding the way out. She even climbed in the closet to look. After a while she tried to see if the large self standing wardrobe could be moved. Maybe it was under the bed? After spending a while looking, she concluded any secret panels were very well hidden.

She peeked out the door. The bedroom was at the top of a set of stairs with a landing where there were two doors and an opening to a busted elevator. The other door led to Jacob’s private bath. A large private bath with all the amenities including a bar near the tub. She’d been there more than a few times.

Could it be the secret way out was through there? No, he’d specifically told her the bedroom was where they would leave from. She should have brought a pet up here to keep her occupied while waiting. She had the usual itch for attention between her thighs.

Jake had a mini-fridge in his bedroom closet. There were a couple bottles of juice, and a lemonade drink of some kind, and water. She grabbed some lemonade. It seemed reasonable. There weren’t any books by the side of his bed. Boredom was getting to her. Her usual impulsive itch made it seem worse.

She heard a noise outside the room. Finally, she thought. Finally they could move along to somewhere else and set up shop in a new place. She got back up and walked to the door. The person she saw as she opened the door was turned to look in the large bath. It wasn’t someone she recognized.

As she did with all people who came into the club, she put a probe out to see who it was and what their shields were like if they were a telepath.

The dinning hall was partially lit. Someone had turned the lights down. Nathan didn’t care one way or the other. There was enough light for him to work his way through tables and chairs. There was only one door on the side of the room he hadn’t been through yet.

This must be the entry to the rooms Bart hadn’t checked. Opening the door he found a short corridor of about a dozen or so feet, and a stairway at the other end. There was an elevator to his right but that was out of service.

He pried open the doors enough to see the cables must have snapped at some point. Both the elevator and the counterweights were visible in the pit beneath the doors. He could walk out on top of it from here. A useless effort though unless one was adept at climbing inside an elevator shaft. He pulled the doors a bit further apart. There was a thick layer of dust on top of the elevator itself. The layers of gray dust displayed no hint of being disturbed in years.

He let the doors close again. Walking to the stairs he saw there was a bit of effort ahead to climb the steps. It seemed to him he’d climbed stairs a lot lately. He trudged up the steps to a landing where there were a couple doors. He turned towards the door on his right first.

Just as he reached for the handle he heard the other door opening. There was a sudden twitch in his pocket where Hubert was. As he turned around to see what was going on, Hubert scrambled out of the hidey hole to climb up to Nathan’s shoulder.

At the other door stood a rather shocked looking woman. She had on a t-shirt that did nothing to conceal her boobs, a pair of shorts, running shoes, and a very shocked expression. Then Hubert twitched against his neck. He knew what that was about.

Vanessa stood there stunned. Her mental shield had held, but the stroke from the animal the man had was harsh. She had failed to actually reach the man with her probe before being hit with a thunderous sledge hammer like mental blow.

The pocket sloth was an entirely new experience to her. Animals weren’t telepathic. Most of the animals she’d ever probed with telepathy only had little thoughts about food, warmth, and sleep. She’d really never gotten anywhere with touching their tiny little minds.

So she decided she needed to counter the animal and tried to slam the little fur-ball with a brutal telepathic blow of her own. Which then?

Vanessa staggered backwards. Nathan took a step towards her. Hubert clung to the lapel of Nathan’s shirt. She dropped to one knee, holding her head in her hands.

“Don’t do that again. Hubert can’t tell if he’s just disabling or killing people,” Nathan said. “You’re coming with me.”

He gripped her arm and tugged her to her feet, but she wasn’t done yet. She tried to kick Nathan in the nuts. He saw it coming and turned so her knee hit nothing but thigh. The muscle there was sturdy enough to take a harder kick than she’d tried.

Spinning her around by her arm, he pushed her up against the wall.

“Can’t take a hint, can you?” He said as he pulled her other arm behind her back as well.

He wasn’t carrying handcuffs so keeping her arms pinned was not quite going to work easily. Why hadn’t he brought them, he thought. She tried to push off the wall. He pushed her against the wall harder, her head turning to the side with her cheek pressed against it. Vanessa hadn’t been treated this way before. Her rage was still rising.

“Fuck you!” she snarled the best she could under the circumstances.

“Don’t you get it?” Nathan said. “You might as well cooperate. Otherwise it can become much worse for you.”

She tried to flail but was thwarted by his hold on her. In her mind, none of this was right. She wasn’t supposed to be pushed around by others, even the other telepaths didn’t lay hands on her. Fury was flowing through her body.

Nathan was no slacker though. For all his easy going nature he still worked out with marine friends regularly. He was getting irritated. Little Hubert could feel the irritation and scurried back and forth between Nathan’s shoulders.

“Do you really want to die here today,” he asked her.

Suddenly she stopped resisting. It hadn’t occurred to her he could kill her. Was he a cop? He couldn’t be a cop. Cops didn’t have little monkeys with a telepathic punch. Where had he gotten the monkey from anyway? How could a little monkey slap her around telepathically?

Some very disturbing thoughts came with all those questions. First being she had no intention of dying today. The more frightening one was he wasn’t a cop but knew about telepaths. And he had a protection mechanism. The obscure nature of a telepathic punch from the monkey implied something eerily secretive and hidden, much as the telepaths of the club were until now.

The entire thing seemed like men in black and black helicopter conspiracy stuff to her all of a sudden. For the first time since her childhood, Vanessa was scared. Fear was replacing her rage and ire at being manhandled. She did not like this. Not one bit.

“Now. Are you going to come quietly?” he asked, “or do I have to shoot you so you’re not a problem?”

“? I’ll come quietly,” she ended up whispering into the wall.

“Good,” he slowly drew back but kept her arms tightly in one of his fists behind her back. “Just so you know, I’m not the only one present capable of getting to you, so if you get any ideas, you need be aware you will only get killed if you try to run.”

“I understand,” came her meek response.

At least the itch between her legs was completely gone now. A minor consolation to being hauled off by a scary dude she couldn’t control.

“Once the cops come in we won’t be in a position to clear anything else out,” said Bart, “I hope we’ve taken care of all the memory editing we need to do. Three to four dozen people including those who were telepaths is a lot to do.”

“Trust me,” Edward said, “Most of them are going to be better off remembering nothing of being turned into human chattel. I don’t know how you deal inside yourself having seen from their memories what happened with them. I’m likely to have nightmares.”

Edward reached for his cell phone and thought better of it. He’d have to wait until he was not in the building if he wanted to avoid being tracked. The phone was turned off to permit the sneaking in. He didn’t want to have his location pop up in someone’s database. Not this location anyway.

They split up to check the different floors in the office area. There just wasn’t much there other than a couple refrigerators for cold drinks, desks, empty closets. The business offices were unused for some time. There were filing cabinets in a couple rooms with papers from when the place had been a hotel. Perhaps even pretending to be a hotel while being a brothel.

The part where he stuck his head into any of the restrooms really bugged him. No one had bothered to clean them in a while. They reminded him of emergency pit stops at gas stations. Only without the graffiti. They stank, they were a mess, and just plain looked left to decay on their own.

When he met up with Bart again, he was so done with being in this cesspool.

“I gotta get out of here. I’m starting to feel depressed by being in such a rotten place. This building has it’s own personality and I think it’s nasty.”

“It’s just another of the buildings in the district that probably should have been torn down,” Bart responded. “The number of empty factories in this city is pretty astounding.”

“Like mine? My building isn’t empty. It’s just turned to a newer and better purpose.”

“No, that’s not what I’m talking about.” They were heading back to the main hall.

“What do you mean?”

“Take the building across the street we used to watch this place from for example. That thing appears to have structural failures underway.” Bart pointed at one of the beams off to one side helping hold up the balcony above. “There are exposed supports in the building in there starting to buckle. There’s rust on a lot of the steel there that simply shouldn’t be there. I doubt the city would even consider giving anyone an occupancy permit now.”

“You think other buildings around here have the same problem?”

“Yes, some do. Some don’t. Some it’s just the number of broken windows or skylights that have shattered over time. You know someone’s been throwing rocks in some places.”

“It wasn’t me!”

“Yeah, yeah, I know. You know what I mean. Drunks. Kids. Groups out for a good time who see the unbroken glass and start throwing rocks for fun.”

“I guess.” Edward saw Nathan entering from the dinning room with a young woman. She looked very unhappy about the way her arms were held behind her back. “What did you find?”

“This one got frisky,” answered Nathan, “Hubert spanked her a couple times. Then I had to do the same physically.”

“Do you have a place in your agency to store used telepaths?” Edward asked. “I mean, you know, to store the ones you capture and have no use for?”

Nathan laughed. “No, so one of you two want to do the honors? It’s not like she’s willing to risk Hubert getting upset again.”

Vanessa felt oddly small all of a sudden. These three men were talking about her as if she was an object, a thing. She hadn’t ever experienced what her chattel had been through. It never bothered her one bit how others felt. She only cared what she went through and felt. She was starting to feel terror creep in.

“I suppose she might have some minor value. Maybe,” said Bart.

“I can look if you want,” said Edward. His reluctance was mostly from being overwhelmed by other people’s memories. Most of them here had been unpleasant.

“Go ahead,” Bart looked at her. “I’m right here if you need me.”

Vanessa knew she was about to be probed but was not turning off her barriers for them. Not intentionally she wouldn’t. While it never bothered her to do it to other people, losing control of her own mind was not something she would embrace. She looked at Edward fearfully.

“Relax. Unlike your club here, I don’t hurt people if I can avoid it,” Edward said. “Which seems counter-intuitive from your experience, obviously. Being someone who probably did hurt others.”

The words had no sting to Vanessa. She still felt she was entitled to do as she pleased and these men were not entitled to do anything to her. Her physical situation might be helpless, but mentally she believed she could best him. If the little animal stayed out of this.

What she could feel was her own mental walls being faintly examined. His touch was subtler than the club members tended to be. She knew he was prying but not how. To try to stop him she tried to use her own mental blast to sheer off his touch. This always worked with other telepaths here in the club in her experience.

It did not work against Edward. Her attempt passed through nothing. She found no thread to slice through as her will pushed out like a rapier to stop him. It was as if he’d vanished. Even the light touch on her protection was not evident. Since she hadn’t stopped him with her counter thrust, she had no idea why his touch had vanished.

So she tried to reach out a probe at Edward. The monkey didn’t interfere. She worried that could happen but when it didn’t, she gleefully tried to find Edward’s mind to try prying it open. Instead her probe slid right past where he should be without encountering anything. Nothing, not even a shield or barrier. He didn’t even bother to stop her probe it appeared.

She didn’t feel anything. She would expect his probing into her would feel like worms crawling around inside. She did feel the fear seeping away. A certain level of contentedness grew within her. She started to smile. He wasn’t affecting her the way he thought he could, she was sure of it.

So she tried pushing another probe towards him. She wanted to be more careful with it this time but her probe wasn’t happening. There was no panic in her but she noticed her ability wasn’t responding. She was curious. It never faded on her before.

Looking around, she noticed the man who brought her down here had the adorable furry monkey on his shoulder. She wondered if she could pet it. The monkey yawned, she yawned. Edward helped her as she slowly slid down to the floor. The monkey was so cute.

Her eyelids started to become heavy. Slowly they started to shutter on her.

Bart and Nathan looked on as she settled into a more or less fetal position. Edward sighed. He’d collected as much information from her as they would need.

“At least two others got away. The guy named Jacob who was in charge and some woman named Melody. They aren’t among the ones we’ve cleared here.”

“How did they get out?” Nathan asked.

“She didn’t know. She was waiting for them. She’d been told the three of them were going to leave together. At some point I’d like to sit down with your Hubert and see if he can communicate. He has quite the punch.”

“Oh great. They turned invisible and just walked out,” said Bart.

“I’m convinced the rumbling sound we heard was demolition of a tunnel,” Nathan said, “I just couldn’t find any passages we could identify. No internal signs of the destruction.”

“As far as I’m concerned, the city can blow this entire building up,” said Edward. “I think it’s time for us to book.”

“To what?” said Nathan was confused.

“Never mind. It’s time to leave. What do you say Bart?”

“Yes. I suspect Nathan gets to stay though.”

“Oh sure, you guys get all the fun. No paperwork for you.”

“We did the heavy lifting. More, Edward did the heavy lifting. It would have taken me four times as long to do this without him.”

“Should we go out the back door?” Edward asked.

“Over the roof is a better idea,” said Bart. “At least the officers up there already know what we look like.”

Edward groaned. More stairs. Like Nathan, he was so done with stairs for the day. More of them, just now, not his idea of fun. At least the worst of it was over. Though having a couple more fugitives to hunt down seemed like it would be a pain too.

“With us tonight on location is Peter Kovitz,” the anchorman said.

“Hello Mark, I’m standing down here in the Hardin District where police have cordoned off a large area because of a shooting this afternoon. We’ve been given to understand there was one person wounded, a woman. After long hours of a tense hostage situation, it looks like the police are relaxing a bit. The presence they have has thinned out a bit, and the officers have started reducing the total area that had been behind the barriers

I’ve learned there was a man who came out with a gun this evening and started shooting but was gunned down himself in a hail of bullets from law enforcement. The official version so far from the command center, there was a tip explosives were set up with the hostages inside. We have few details about what has been going on inside but a number of hostages have been freed it appears. At least a dozen women and a few men have been taken to the makeshift field tent for medical attention which as you can see over my shoulder, is a large tent they set up in the street. We have not gotten any details from inside there yet.”

“What do we know about this neighborhood Peter? Isn’t this area mostly old buildings hardly in use lately?” asked the anchorman in the split screen.

“What we know is there are some businesses down here but about a third of the buildings are empty or abandoned, many of which are scheduled for demolition. The building of interest appears to date back to the late nineteenth century when industrialization was booming here close to the river. From what I’ve learned of the history of the place it was built originally as a hotel for sailors and transients.”

“So it’s an old hotel?” Mark asked from his part of the screen, as if he was the uninformed public. Peter knew what questions had been set up because he provided them.

“It was for a time. The business failed, then it became a brothel, popular with a lot of politicians at the time. That was brought down by the big scandal with Mayor Auger in the sixties, then an effort was made to turn it back into a hotel again. That failed like the previous hotel, and a small group of investors managed to open it as a private club and bar. That club was the infamous Fire Eaters club which was not overly popular, but weathered a lot of changes in city administration. The Fire Eaters was originally a private sexual kinky location. They too felt the pinch of economics and were all set to go under when a new investor picked up the property and did some renovations. I haven’t been able to trace the company behind the buy out yet. It appears to be a corporation named The Albert Moll Foundation which leads to yet another corporation in Maryland.“

“So no one really knows who owns the building now?” co-anchor Wendy Chipman asked from out of camera.

“No Wendy, no one seems to have any idea. What we do know is the other businesses in the area are shocked. Many of the people I’ve spoken to tell me the members using the place were all nice to her. Mrs Cameron told me she remembers meeting a few of them.”

Camera switches to a view of an older woman with gray hair, glasses, rain in the background, “I knew this nice man named, uh, Jacob who was always around. He was very nice, uh, he dressed conservatively I guess. I met a few others, uh, none of them seemed like the kind of fringe crazies we had in the days the bondage club operated. I don’t know why they kept the same name. It’s a surprise to all the people in my office, uh, we don’t know why it happened.” Camera cuts back to reporter.

“I talked to a few other people. Some believe crime had dropped in the area because of people from the club, so they were shocked. The police have moved a few of their people into the building now, so we expect they are looking for booby traps and explosives.”

“Have the police given any indication when they will be making a statement to the public yet?”

“No. Unofficially I’ve been told they got the shooter and there is a concern about explosives. There are unconfirmed reports of a roar or reverberating explosion like noise shortly after the man came out who was shot. That may be the reason for concern about bombs and explosives.”

“We’re all following this very closely here Peter.”

“Updates as anything breaks, back to you Mark,” the field reporter signed off.

“Stay safe there Mark.”

The TV turned off. Elaine held the remote and looked at Prudence.

“If anything happened to him, someone would have let us know by now.”

“If anything happens to him I’ll kill him,” said Prudence.

“Don’t talk like that,” Lexi said. “He’s fine. He’ll come back. I know he will.”

Samuel walked in as they were talking. Every one of them turned to look at him. He’d gone to check on the wounded woman in the ER. The focus was so decidedly on him the moment of silence seemed excessively long.

“What? I don’t have him. I’m sure he’ll be back soon.” Samuel waggled his eyebrows. “On top of that, your person of interest in the ER is one of the ‘not the good guys club’.”

Elaine’s jaw dropped.

“What?” she said.

“She’s one of the psionic people from the club. You got it right about the man being her grandfather, but he wasn’t in control of their relationship. She was.”

The other women all sat forward with the same look of shock.

“So.” Ellie stared at him. “So, what did you do? Where is she? Can you take her powers away from her?”

“Yes, is she on the loose still?” added Lexi.

“I assure you, she cannot harm you ladies. She seems quite upset with me, scared maybe. But no, I couldn’t take the chance someone in the ER would be hurt if I started getting into a contest of wills with her down there. So, yeah,” he almost mumbled, “she’s still on the loose.”

“But how? Why?” Elaine couldn’t understand. The woman was someone who was often being beaten.

“She’s masochistic. A masochist who likes to be in charge. So she gets exactly what she wants. She isn’t like you or me. So not only is her brain wired differently from yours, it’s wired differently from mine too.”

“I get masochism, but,” Prudence sat there trying to grasp this.

“Yes, I know. It sounds off to be in charge while being beaten. But there is a phrase in those communities doing stuff like this who don’t have psi. They call it topping from the bottom. It’s more common than you’d think.”

“But,” Elaine was still stuck on it. “Um. Power exchange? Isn’t that what they’re all about?”

“You want me to make sense of this for you, you’re talking to the wrong guy. I grasp what’s going on but I can’t pretend to put myself objectively in their position to understand it. It’s against the family’s ethics to try to snoop normal minds to understand it, officially.”

“So you never read anyone’s mind?” Lexi asked.

“I’m not a saint, Lexi. Not at all. I do pretty well at avoiding it though the vast majority of the time.”

“We’re going off topic,” said Elaine. “What do we do about this woman if you can’t, er, fix her while she’s here?”

“Nothing. It’ll have to wait. Polly is my priority. Keeping you ladies safe is my second priority. After that things get a little blurry. I can’t risk innocents just to stop her here and now.”

“I get that,” said Prudence, “but you know it’s really disturbing. Like having a crazy person with a bomb in a crowded theater.”

“I am not thrilled either. How about I see if Polly is awake, so you guys can see her?”

“Oh! Yes. I’d like that a lot,” Lexi said, eyes lighting up.

“It would be very nice,” said Elaine.

The five of them wandered out into the hall. The woman at the nurse’s station looked at them but said nothing. Samuel led them to Polly’s room. He held a hand up to get them to pause. Lexi looked back at the nurse who was now pointedly looking the other way entirely. This caused Lexi to emit a small giggle.

He looked in and pushed the door open, waving them all inside.

The late model sedan Jake drove was quiet enough inside to hear Melody tapping her fingers against the armrest. The quiet between them was mutual at the moment, both of them trying not to say anything to rile the other. He was furious at losing the place he considered home for so long. She was livid she’d allowed herself to be lulled into a sense of safety there.

There had to be some agreement on what they would do next, even if it was splitting up and going their own ways. At the same time, she wasn’t sure she wanted to split up from the only man she knew who acted like he was respecting her boundaries, even if he didn’t actually respect them. Finally she spoke.

“What did you have in mind to do next?” she asked. “I don’t feel safe even having gotten out of there and away from the cops.”

“I want to get the person who was killing my people. Those murders were all meant to bring the cops to my door and I want to nail the bastard,” he said.

He still displayed anger but controlled it well enough not to direct it at someone he thought of as an ally. She had the impression he might think of the members as being his property even if not pressed into service mentally.

“Miss Abernathy was hot on the trail of our shooter. I’m thinking if she didn’t get caught up in the mess at the club, she’d head someplace safe. We can look for her. Look for Jonathan, work together on finding a way to get back what’s mine.”

She noticed his furious attitude but he was sensible enough to pull himself and her out of the web the police were casting in the area of the club. She also recognized he wasn’t directing the anger at her. It was odd he acted so secure even in the face of the loss of most of the club’s members.

“I’ve a thought,” she said. “didn’t Abernathy have a Gothic style house? I wouldn’t call it a mansion but it was large and he had servants.”

“She had servants,” he responded. “We just didn’t know she was the telepath in their relationship. I feel so stupid for not seeing it. It is a whole new level of weird ways our kind use the talent.”

“You’re not getting philosophic about the ability now, are you?”

“No. I’ve seen how you use it too, remember. I know about myself and have suspicions about Jonathan enjoying the thralls too. Every time I think I get a handle on how others use telepathy, I find something new I haven’t seen before.”

“Is that it? You see the rest of us as experiments?”

“You know what I like to do, and it’s not gentle on my thralls. Yet you don’t hate me personally the way you do pretty much all other men. So what about you? Are we experiments to you?”

Melody sat up a moment, offended but not quite sure why. She didn’t hate men, did she? Her view was they were toys and she didn’t have to put up with their urges even if she used those same urges against them. They were just objects.

“You’re not a man. You’re something different from the toys I play with,” she said.

His brow rose as he looked at her, swallowing his immediate response, a sudden urge to prove to her he was indeed a man. It took a few extra heartbeats to realize she meant it as a distinction from the people she commonly used.

“You have an unusual idea of what a man is. Have you ever bedded one? I don’t think I’ve known you to do so.”

“What does that mean? Why should I ever let some male stick his,” she made a disgusted face, ”thing in me? That’s just obscene.“

“Well, yes. There is that,” he couldn’t help it, he laughed a bit. “So, you’re totally asexual? I didn’t know that. I hope I have not offended you Melody. But. I am a man, which implies something more than just having a thing. You do know you can just say penis, right? Or cock if you prefer.”

“I,” she paused. She hadn’t meant to set him off. He did make that lewd comment about her experience. She was quiet and looked out the passenger side window a minute before speaking again. “I believe you have the right word, asexual. Is that so awful?”

“Not at all. You have been a friend, well, a friendly acquaintance if nothing else, for some time now. You’ve been invaluable in helping with keeping order at the club. I hope we can continue our association because I think there are benefits to having strong allies.”

“Thank you, I think.”

“I’m driving us to Old Man Abernathy’s place. I think your idea she would go there is a very smart one. After that, I can try to figure out what has become of Jonathan. Maybe I should go to his house and see if Barbara is still there. If she is, he’s around some place. I dislike having a long time associate to be missing.”

“You have known him a long time, haven’t you?”

“The city he and I met a while back is where we first talked about setting up a group of like talented people. He was on board the same agenda at the time. I’m not sure exactly what he’s been doing when he’s not at the club now. And my home has been taken away from me. Which angers me.”

“I saw. Are you sure it’s not better to go our separate ways until the heat lets up?”

“I believe we are stronger together than apart.” He did not like the direction her question led. It was not in his interest to misplace associates who were valuable.

“As you like, but if things go so badly south again, there may be no other option.”

“I am aware,” he said, “there’s plenty of time should necessity dictate.”

The quiet in the car settled back in place as they headed towards one of the quieter suburbs.

When Jonathan pulled the car into the driveway there was a white panel van driving away from his house. He knew the van usually involved one of his distant contacts sending him new subjects. He shook his head at himself. Maybe Simon had not gotten through to them to put things on hold.

More likely, they disliked having inventory while waiting for a new delivery site. His new documents would put him in Alberta, so it was unlikely he’d be able to set up new contracts with the new location just yet.

Barbara greeted him at the door, delighted with his return as if a celebration was in order. She obediently took up a place two steps behind him to his left as he entered the hall. Their luggage had been placed near the door. It wasn’t a lot. There was enough for most of the critical items he’d need and still no more than would look like a vacation trip. It amused him to see she had two more bags for herself packed than she’d packed for him.

“Where is Simon?” He asked her. “Apparently he took a delivery for me while I was out.”

“Master, there were two men with him he took to the your work rooms,” she answered, “if this means delays, may I arrange for your dinner to be prepared?”

He stopped and looked at her. The changes in her mind were such that she had to try to find ways to please him every moment possible. So the dinner suggestion was a real effort to make him happy. He knew he wanted to get out as soon as possible to avoid possible problems.

“I am a bit hungry. A full dinner though would just add more delays. Taking you away with me is a high priority.”

He handed her the bundle with their new documentation showing they were Mr. and Mrs. Armistead of Red Deer, Canada. He’d never heard of Red Deer before, but it was sizable enough for him to wedge them into without standing out too much. With only a few really large cities in Alberta to choose from, it had seemed like a fair compromise between the largest and the smallest options.

“This is who we will be now. So the papers we have for Hurricane need to be gathered up and destroyed. This needs to be in our baggage, your purse, my wallet,” he handed her his wallet, “and any of the other material we take with us. Oh, and I have something new for your identity. Hold out your hand.”

She lifted her right arm and started to reach for him. He shook his head. “Other hand,” he said.

Quizzically he reached her left arm out to him. A hand fished something out of his pocket, a small envelope in a typical color, like a brown grocery bag. He emptied the contents into her hand. Two rings fell out into her palm. She gasped.

“You wear them on the ring finger,” he said. She looked at the moderate stone on the engagement ring, then at the gold wedding band.

“But we’re not...”

“Don’t let it bother you. It is a part of the new identities we’re taking. I doubt they’ll be looking at married couples and I do want you with me.”

“Thank you Master,” she gave him a coy look, “is there anything I can do to please you right now?”

“See if you can scrounge up a couple sandwiches. A beer too. I’m going to check on what Simon has downstairs. I doubt anything worthwhile turned up. I may want to deal with it or instead go right away. I don’t know yet.”

“Yes Master.”

He turned his heels to her and headed to the stairs. The white room was empty so Simon must be placing the subjects into the rooms he had set aside for preparation. He stepped down the hall looking for his servant.

“Sir,” he heard Simon speak from a door as he approached. “I’m in here.”

“How did we end up with two more subjects, Simon?”

“I’m sorry Sir, the vendor insisted we had to take delivery of their current stock and will pause delivery until afterwards.”

“Okay, I’ll deal with it. Where’s the other one?”

“Across the hall Sir. I’ve given them both the usual sedative.”

He did a quick scan of the young man on the lounge here. There was nothing special there. Another disposable body. Maybe he’d just make this one a bodyguard. He didn’t really have time to play when it came to relocating if there was nothing new to do with it.

“We won’t be experimenting with this one Simon. I think if the other one is like this we’re going to add them as servants. Though you and they will have to pack things up for me and Barbara before joining me in new digs.”

“As you wish, Sir.”

“Didn’t you have a wife once Simon?” He asked in amusement at the way his programming had made the man so obsequious. He enjoyed tweaking him.

“Yes, Sir. Sir decided he wanted to use her and my daughter, then sent them off to other people after a few months. Sir knew I don’t need any family other than Sir.” Simon continued to keep his serious butler demeanor to go with the uniform black suit he wore.

“Good man Simon,” Jonathan said. He really shouldn’t bother. Simon couldn’t see it as taunting or disrespect. Simon could only see he was a good Master who ran his life for him. Memories of the woman and daughter who had been the family Simon once had floated through him with a certain peculiar nostalgic pleasure.

Entering the other room didn’t particularly thrill him but he did want to check out the other young man who would soon be a servant. The guy looked like another just from college not quite jock but built well enough. He let out a sigh as he looked at the man. More wasted effort, likely as not.

He scanned the lump of man flesh and sighed. Another awkwardly empty headed athlete. How was he going to find something useful in these subjects? Maybe he shouldn’t bother but he was sure there was a way to accomplish the migration. This was another waste of his time.

Opening the door to the hall though, he fell a small tweak of telepathic energies. Standing in shock where he was he turned his head. The younger man on the table was still asleep. Jonathan started a more detailed scan.

Soon he discovered his subject possessed a nascent telepathic ability. The man had the ability but it hadn’t activated. Curious. Trying to do more exploration around in the skull of the guy provided him the information there was some kind of function related to telepathy he never identified in himself.

Sitting in an armchair in the room, he tried doing some internal searching of himself for the same element in his own mind performing the telepathic function. Every time he thought he got close to spotting it inside his own head the effort slipped away to nowhere. He returned to examining his subject.

There was decidedly a bit of telepathic energy coming from the one spot in the unconscious mind he was exploring. He wanted to isolate it and see if he could attach his own thoughts to the unformed mental function. Where did all the telepathic energy he had come from? Where was it coming from for this guy? What wasn’t he seeing?

“Simon,” he stood and went to the door.

“Sir?”

“Get this one to the White Room,” he said. “I’m going to let Barbara know there will be more delays and eat something.”

He climbed the stairs again while Simon started to move things around. Barbara was waiting for him with his sandwiches and a drink.

“Should I be calling you husband now?” she asked him.

“Silly wench,” he sat where she’d put his food. “You know how to address me in private.”

“Yes Master.”

“I hate the constant delays but I have one more subject down stairs I need to examine before we leave. So you may entertain yourself up here until I’m done.”

He ate, she watched him adoringly. Jonathan decided he had to modify her a bit, it seemed a bit excessive tonight. She would probably work out while he was busy. She’d been set to keep herself in good shape for his pleasures. He had to consider his own attitude. He could play or he could work on accomplishing a goal he’d set himself.

Conflict raced through his head as he considered just putting everything off to tomorrow. His eyes caressed her elegant legs as she walked to the counter. She started putting bread and chips away. That bottom of hers was enticing as always. Wistfully, he smiled at how he would like to?

It wouldn’t do if he wanted to get out of town soon. The work he’d started might not have worked out well so far, but he’d make this last gasp effort before leaving town. Then if it didn’t work out, he could start over in Alberta.

He scolded himself for the distraction. As daunting as his effort had been to date, eventually he hoped to find a way to do the migration he wanted as many times as he wanted. Standing up, he started back downstairs.

What had become of Jacob, he wondered. Jonathan shuddered to think about being caught up in a standoff with any serious number of police. He was sure it was something he didn’t need to know. Simon stood waiting outside the White Room with a pillow. A pillow.

“What’s the pillow for?” he asked.

“Sir may want to rest his head on it. You look tired Sir.”

“Well I don’t want to go to sleep in there. Get rid of it.”

“Yes Sir.”

Jonathan went in, looking over at his subject again. There was an IV already inserted for automatically injecting the subject with a counter-agent of the sedative in case of success. He was pretty sure it was barely necessary but picked up the remote for setting it off. Looking back at the man, he tilted his head while looking at the guy. Young enough to be very spry, even compared to Jonathan’s relative youthfulness in his late thirties.

He looked away long enough to pat the cloth Simon laid out for him to rest on, pulling the edges to remove a few wrinkle folds. He pic Sitting down and stretching out on the comfortable lounger was enticing, he had to admit. There was no sleeping for him before in this room and he did not intend to start now. He looked up at the ceiling, seeing the whorls of the spackle patterns above that was so common in newly built housing. The room was relatively newly built, but the house wasn’t. Those absurd and not uniform patters seemed to create a substantial amount of dust.

Folding his hands across his belly he took a deep breath. A great deal of stress and anxiety had built up because of the recent events he experienced. Finding a calm space in his mind was going to be difficult. Performing the task ahead was not something he ever wanted to mess up by rushing. This time though, he was trying to be especially careful. It was a first, trying with someone with latent telepathic ability. He had never encountered anyone who had a quiescent ability they had not developed.

Closing his eyes, his own very active ability flowed over to the other young man.

The initial steps were to clear out everything giving the subject any identity at all. He started to disconnect and delete the most recent little events in his target’s mind. A trip to the store, a recent date, most familiar music. It was a process, deleting a personality, but the intention Jonathan had in mind required a blank mind.

Some memories are so prevalent re-emergence could happen. A book he’d read could be displaced and removed only to come back from some corner of the mind having to do with how the book smelled, or where he was when reading it. One of this man’s most prevalent little memories was a woman with jet black hair he’d worked with. It wasn’t the usual kind of fantasy being erased, it was something more abiding than simply a lecherous thought. Those were an issue too. Fantasies of what he wanted to have happened merged with some of the things which really happened.

Erasing all these little events took time. In a way he was removing everything making his target anything more than a newborn bundle. He wanted nothing of the original man to remain at all. He was putting an even greater emphasis on taking all those pieces, habits, and feelings. Even his ability to recognize object permanence was something to be removed in this exercise.

When he’d finished obliterating everything making his subject a member of humanity, he started with his next step. The human mind may only represent only three pounds of tissue, but there was enormous capacity within that tissue. Once again he verified the tiny slip of telepathic ability, unused and as yet to awaken was present. On finishing this, the ability would have to be awakened. There was no rush though.

Methodically he began with his own speech center, various parts of the autonomic requirements for function, copying from the only source who could possibly matter to him, his own mind. Bit by bit he started to build the individual in the other mind from the parts of his own.

With effort he was painting a model from his own experiences, his own past. Every moment of his childhood, his adolescence, the period during which he struggled with puberty, each day as he’d experienced them. Normally he wouldn’t have the details of all these memories right at hand, memory for him was far from eidetic experience of someone with a remarkable memory. In his steps to understanding the way memory tended to work, he’d learned there was no such thing as photographic memory in reality.

When he let himself sink deeply into the state using his ability to work like this, it was available though. He had determined if he could find even the most minuscule of detail in another person’s mind, then he should be able to self examine for such detail within himself. Each tiny memory, each thought and smell, physical touch and sound, all of them were being drawn to the surface to plant in the otherwise empty mind he was molding.

His concentration on placing every tiny bit into the other mind had him reliving both some of his best and worst moments. Times from before his ability started when he was flustered more often than not around girls, even his own mother. Visiting these past events was akin to reliving it in every sense including bringing out the emotion of each of those things.

One of the most difficult to relive was the two men who cornered him when he had just come from the bank. He remembered how he’d run frantically to get away. The grain of the concrete sidewalk was something he could visualize perfectly because in his attempt to run as fast as he could, he had been looking down. A lot. When they got him stuck behind the church the fear was a torrent of helpless desperation. That’s how he felt as the telepathy kicked in for the very first time. He let out a mental scream. To him he was just letting his terror out. They fell to the ground immediately, both of them. Their robbery failed, his telepathy seized their nervous system, causing a complete systemic failure in all their organs at once. They died and suddenly, he was triumphant. He was powerful. Moving such memories in such detail to the other mind was only part of the exercise he was engaged in.

He started to attach what felt like his very life, little lines of existence, his being from his mind, into the other. He detached them from his own as soon as he felt the connections had been secured. With each increment, he detached what he felt was more of himself from his own mind and connected it to the other.

It had been his plan all along to be able to migrate from body to body. His conclusion was if this could work, he was essentially immortal and could do anything, anything he wanted any time or place he wanted. He was trying to move his personal awareness into the other mind to live there.

He didn’t want his own body to cease to function. If retreat was necessary, he wanted the option. Incrementally though his mind was shifting. He slowly moved from pushing himself into the other mind to instead absorbing into the new shell with him. Movement of his awareness was wakening the telepathy within the target mind. This was the goal.

He attached the last piece of existence he could find in his old mind to draw it into the new one. Before he pulled the last thread of control from there, he pressed the release button to counteract the sedative.