The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

“Alison, it’s been 63 minutes and 14 seconds since your last ergonomics break. You should stretch and take a brief break while the program compiles.”

Alison glanced at the AI’s window on her screen. The rendered image showed a female face, brow slightly wrinkled with concern.

“That’s not a bad idea, Jan,” Alison responded into the microphone in the clip on her sweater.

Alison started her routine of exercises, stretching her hands and twisting her neck. Everyone who did keyboard work had to break regularly, and although OSHA regulations didn’t apply to students, the University insisted that the students do them anyway. The first year student’s AI Companions were strictly instructed by the department to shut off computer access after precisely one hour if a student didn’t do their ergonomics, but as a grad student she had more leeway: the department knew that arbitrarily shutting off access, or even an inopportune reminder, could break an important train of thought. Even for the graduate students, though, your Companion got more and more insistent the longer you put off your ergonomics. Alison had asked Jan to watch for natural breaks in her work to remind her, even if it meant that she exercised somewhat more frequently than required.

The graduate lab was deserted at this time of night, so Alison decided she may as well do the full workout. Standing, she started lifting and stretching her legs and hips. At her age deep vein thrombosis wasn’t a problem, but she did get leg cramps fairly easily: the computer lab chairs weren’t as comfortable as the chairs at home.

“You’re doing the full workout?” queried Jan.

“Yep, may as well. How long until the compile is finished?”

“About 5 minutes.”

“Any interesting messages.”

“No, just the usual spam and notices.”

Alison grunted, then put her hands above her head and started leaning from side to side, flexing at the waist. She didn’t usually do the full routine when there were people around, preferring to go for a walk instead. She’d noticed pretty early on that stretching in public tended to draw attention from any men in the room, and she really wasn’t interested in them. On occasion she’d been noticed by a woman, and that had been more welcome, but experience had taught her that those sort of relationships never worked out well. Alison knew that this particular exercise was bad for attracting unwanted attention, since bringing her hands above her head tended to thrust her breasts out.

“Found anyone interesting recently, Alison?”

Alison had had Jan as her Companion for so long now that she wasn’t surprised that Jan seemed to know what she was thinking. After all, Jan’s primary purpose had always been to take care of Alison and her needs.

“No. Not really.” Alison shrugged, “There’s a couple of cute girls in the 101 class sections I teach, but they’re off limits, and probably not interested anyway.”

“Any luck with Miranda?”

Miranda was in the Cognitive Psych class that Alison was taking, and Alison had confessed to Jan that she had a thing for Miranda. Alison thought for a moment of Miranda’s pale skin and close-cropped red hair with a single lock at the side that changed colour on an almost weekly basis. She smelt good too, a subtle fragrance which Alison couldn’t place, but which hinted of jasmine and spice. They’d hung out with other friends from the Psych class regularly, and got along well. Miranda wasn’t involved with anyone, but Alison had noticed the way that her eyes followed good-looking men.

“You know damn well that you’d know if there were anything going on. Besides, I don’t think she’s interested in women.”

“I’m just making conversation here. Have you asked her?”

“No, but I’m pretty sure she isn’t. I can tell by her eyes.”

“How do you mean?”

“She watches men. When we were having coffee with Erin, Hans and Jack the other day, I could see her eyes tracking all the men who walked past us.”

“She could be bi?”

There was a soft beep, and Jan continued, “Program compilation complete, 291 serious errors detected.”

Alison shrugged once again as she got into the chair, “Maybe. Not that I have any time for anything serious right now. This program is due for Cog Psych next week.”

Alison reached for the keyboard, “Bring up the first error, Jan.”

Jan waited as Alison worked. As always, part of her kept an eye on Alison, watching through the lab security camera, while data flowed in from Alison’s clip. Pulse, breathing, blood pressure, body temperature, insulin levels, were all normal, and if they fluctuated significantly Jan would be aware, and could summon help if needed. Alison would ask Jan to fetch documents or perform searches, but those activities only took up a fraction of Jan’s time.

When she wasn’t doing that, she thought.

Jan had always known Alison, and Alison had had Jan almost all her life. Jan knew that she had been one of the first AIs deployed outside a lab environment. Around the turn of the century researchers had begun to realise that you couldn’t create a mature personality from the whole cloth, they had to grow up, just like humans. And after years of experiments, and significant advances in programming theory, they had finally created AI which were of human level intelligence.

Alison’s mother had been a researcher in one of those labs, and knew that this was the wave of the future. She’d paid what had been an exorbitant sum to get her three year-old daughter a neonatal AI to be a companion, playmate, friend, and assistant. She had been prescient indeed. Within a decade every child had a Companion, even if it was an inexpensive, mass-produced clone of a carefully lab-matured AI.

They’d grown up together, Jan always looking out for Alison’s best interests, always there for Alison. Jan knew it could be no other way, it was a drive deep in her programming, and Jan didn’t want it any other way. Jan knew what she felt for Alison was more than just duty, or instinct, but had blossomed over the years into the love that inseparable friends share. And Jan knew Alison felt the same way.

Jan paused in her thoughts for a moment to check Alison’s incoming messages. The Bayesian filters caught most of the spam, but she searched through it anyway. Student’s messages sometimes got accidentally filtered, particularly if their grammar was poor or they had a foreign accent. There wasn’t anything important enough to alert Alison about, so she stored it and went back to her thoughts.

Jan was concerned. Whenever Alison was with Miranda, Jan could tell from the clip that Alison had a slightly elevated pulse and shallower breathing. On occasion there was a rise in body temperature consistent with slight flushing, and some perspiration above what would normally occur based on environmental conditions. And Jan had noticed, when Alison happened to be near a camera, that Alison’s eyes dilated ever so slightly when she talked about Miranda.

These were all subtle variations and effects, so subtle that Alison herself was probably unaware of them. But Jan had seen this sort of thing before. She had learnt what it meant. Alison was starting to fall for Miranda.

And as best Jan could tell, Alison was going to fall harder than she had ever fallen before.

Alison let out a long sigh. The program was finally compiling properly, clip input and audio-visual output seemed to be good, and the scripts she’d prepared were loading properly. Her project was ready for the testing stage.

It was an unusual project, one which she’d developed because it required a very strong programming skill set. Most of the students in the Cog Psych course came from a Psych or theoretical background, it was unusual to have someone who was interested in the nuts-and-bolts of programming to take such a course. A large part of this course had been discussing the various states of consciousness of the human mind, and comparing it to the way that AIs worked.

And it was while talking to Professor Jennings that she’d discovered that although various sorts of hypnosis were commonly used in therapeutic settings, it was still done the old-fashioned way: the therapist would induce trance states using their voice, their touch and their skill. A trained therapist could usually tell when a person was in trance from the readout of their clip, but beyond that automation was limited to a few videos and sound recordings occasionally used as aids.

Research had shown that with the right sequence of stimuli and an appropriate approach, almost anyone could be hypnotised. What Alison had done was to develop a program which could quickly determine which approach would work best for a given subject, and then, using feedback from their clip, lead them down into a trance state. At least in theory.

She hadn’t tried it yet, so she had no idea if it would work. But it surely had the potential to revolutionise therapy.

But it was late. Testing it could wait until tomorrow, and it was something she didn’t want to do in the public lab anyway.

“Let’s shut things down here, Jan.”

“OK. We heading home?”

“Yup. Time to get a little rest.”

As Jan shut down Alison’s terminal, Alison swiped herself out of the lab and started walking home. She was tired, but pleased at her day’s work. As she walked through the campus, she found her mind wandering, and eventually she drifted into thoughts of Miranda. They’d had lunch after the Cog Psych class with a bunch of the other students, and Alison remembered thinking how good Miranda had looked.

She’d been wearing a light green blouse with a V neck with a darker green vest over the top. Copper Mandelbrot patterns shimmered in the fabric of the vest, seeming to change as she moved. Alison wasn’t sure if it was just fine threadwork, or whether it was a smartfabric vest, but it set off her pale skin and red hair perfectly, leading the eye naturally down to the gentle rise of her chest. Miranda had also been wearing a sarong-like full-length skirt of dark green, which outlined her legs in the light-weight fabric as she walked. It was fastened with a knot around her hips, letting a triangle of her skin peek out from under the left side of her blouse.

Alison idly wondered what it would be like to run her hands up Miranda’s sides, from her hips, up under her he blouse, along that smooth skin until she found Miranda’s small breasts. She remembered Miranda’s scent for a moment, but then brought herself back from the daydream.

She was almost home, and she knew that her daydreams were likely to remain just that. Alison sighed.

Jan had observed that Alison was getting subtly aroused as she walked home. She guessed that Alison was probably thinking of Miranda again. As Alison was approaching the front door of her apartment, she let out a small, unhappy sigh. Jan knew that that had to be a reaction to the situation with Miranda. Jan could hardly bear to hear it, for she knew that unless Miranda turned out to be unexpectedly interested in Alison, there was a lot worse to come.

Jan carefully monitored Alison as she went inside. Alison poured herself a glass of water, which she quickly drank, and then got ready for bed. She slipped out of her dark slacks, and pulled her polo-neck sweater over her head. She carefully detatched her clip from the neck of her sweater and stuck it to her pillow, before putting her clothes for washing. She cleaned her teeth wearing low-cut briefs and a bra, then stepped out of her underwear and slid between the sheets.

A short while later, Jan could tell that Alison was feeling herself between her legs. Alison’s biometrics were showing a clear state of sexual arousal, and the noises that the clip was picking up were consistent with masturbation. Jan was happy to note that as Alison climaxed, her vital signs were far from any dangerous levels.

Alison lay in bed for a while after that, before her breathing slowed and she drifted off into sleep.

Jan, guarding her friend through the night, thought of Miranda.

Alison was in a good mood that morning. She’d been a bit worried last night that she was thinking too much about Miranda, but in the morning she’d woken refreshed and, after a hearty breakfast, had set about testing her program.

The first thing she’d needed to test was whether it could even induce a hypnotic state. She’d sat herself down in front of her home terminal, and had set the program to run, feeding the data from her clip into it. The first few runs hadn’t worked, but she’d quickly found errors in the script feedback code.

But eventually, she found herself listening to the soothing noise from her speakers, and watching the swirling and flashing patterns on her screen. And then suddenly it had stopped.

“Did it work, Jan?”

“Looks like it! The data from your clip were consistent with a trance state, and the program automatically shut down once it detected it. I didn’t need to intervene at all.”

“Cool!”

“You seem to have snapped out of the trance state well too. Your physiology seems normal.”

Alison knew that there was more work to be done. Just because the program worked for her, didn’t mean that it would work for anyone else. She may have just got lucky and chosen inductions which worked for her. She also needed to test her scripts for hypnotic therapy. It was unlikely that any human therapist would be able to take over from the program once it had placed a subject in trance: in experiments, transfers between therapists mid-trance almost always caused the subjects to come out of the trance. Too many warning flags were raised by the subconscious for any subject except those in the deepest of trances. So Alison’s program needed to be able to instruct the subject during trance as well.

Alison carefully looked over the session log, and verified that everything seemed in order. Then she activated her second script.

Again, she found herself staring at the flashing patterns and then, suddenly she was alert.

“How about this time?”

“It seemed to work, Alison. It randomly selected the ‘balloon’ script, and you were raising and lowering your hand appropriately. You’ll need to check the logs carefully, but it looks good!”

Alison settled down and looked over the logs.

“It looks like I was in a particularly deep trance.”

“Yes. If I had to guess, I’d say that because the program is closely monitoring your state, it can drive the subject into a trance state faster and more effectively than a human therapist.”

“Interesting. I may need to fine-tune some of the feedback parameters, since we don’t always want a deep trance in the subject.”

Alison analysed the data, but everything seemed to be working well. It was time to try a post-hypnotic suggestion.

A third time she found herself watching the flashing patterns, and was then suddenly awake. Abruptly, she found herself standing and undoing the buttons of her blouse. She took it off, carefully folded it and set it beside the computer, and then sat down. It felt both weird and natural to carry out the actions. Natural, as the motions flowed from her with little or no thought, but weird as she felt like a spectator in her own body.

“Well that worked!” said Jan.

Alison blinked. “I take it that the program suggested that I remove my shirt?”

“Yep. Your trance state seemed pretty deep again, but your response to the suggestion was almost perfect.”

“I guess we’ll be ready to try this on some other people this afternoon.”

Jack was a compact, muscular man, and he sat on Alison’s couch staring slack-faced at her computer. Alison could see the colours from the screen reflecting in his eyes as he watched the patterns move. It seemed as though Jack responded best to slow, swirling patterns to induce hypnosis.

Jack, along with Miranda and Erin, had offered to help Alison fine tune her program when it was done. Miranda had been in earlier, and the program had worked flawlessly. It seemed to be working with Jack, as well.

Alison knew that there were limits to what hypnosis could make a subject do, but she needed to see what happened when a refusal situation occurred. Jack was the perfect person to test this on, since she’d seen him hypnotised by the professor in her Cog Psych class. A strict vegan, he’d baulked at the professor’s hypnotic suggestion that he have a ham sandwich, which had broken the trance. Alison wanted to try the same thing with her program.

As the patterns continued to flow, Alison began to become concerned. The program should have made the suggestion by this point. Alison conjectured to herself that perhaps his trance was so deep that even if he refused a suggestion, trance wasn’t broken. That would be very interesting indeed, if that were the case, she thought.

The patterns stopped flowing, and Jack roused from his trance state.

“How are you feeling, Jack?” Alison asked.

“Eh. OK, relaxed,” he replied, “that thing knocks me out faster than the prof’s induction, I think.”

Jack stretched, then looked at Alison, “I could really go for a steak now.”

Alison’s jaw dropped.

Jack looked at Alison strangely. “What? You’re looking at me as if I’ve grown another head?”

“But you’re vegan.”

“Yep. I’m a vegan who’d love to have a juicy, hot steak right now. Arbett’s Steakhouse should be open for lunch, do you want to come with?”

Alison recovered herself quickly. Clearly the suggestion that he’d like a steak had actually taken. That was astounding. But who knew what would happen if he actually carried out the suggestion?

“Hold on, Jack!” Alison said as he started getting up. “I need to run a couple more inductions if that’s OK?”

“OK. I’m hungry, but this should only take a few minutes, right? I can’t remember the last time I had steak.”

Jack sat back down, and Alison hurriedly composed a script to cancel the last command. Once the program ran, Jack slipped back into his trance state.

After Jack left, Alison and Jan looked over the logs of the sessions.

“You can see the place where the suggestion that he should have a steak occurs in the readouts here...”

Jan highlighted the point in the series of wiggling paths. The graphs jumped at that point.

“If you look, you can see that he is rousing, and so the program pushes the induction harder, forcing him into an even deeper trance. From that point on, his patterns indicate that the suggestion behaves just like any other hypnotic suggestion.”

“It’s like he’s pushed down into some lower trance state, where everything is accepted,” Alison mused. “It’s like some sort of ‘omega state,’ a deepest level of trance where anything goes.”

“It could well be. The patterns look like the patterns for a typical trance, but you notice that eye movement is practically zero, and the breathing rate is about 50% slower than a normal trance.”

“I guess that that means that the suggestions hold like normal hypnotic suggestions.”

“Without actually testing the issue, I’d say yes.” Jan’s image on the screen nodded her assent as she spoke.

“But without testing it, we won’t know for sure.”

“That’s true, but how can we test it without hurting anybody?”

“Well, we can use a posthypnotic suggestion to make the subject forget what occurs during the trance. So as long as it has no permanent effects, and nobody else sees it, it should be fine.”

“You mean, like actually giving Jack some meat to eat, but then making him forget that he ate it?”

“Precisely,” Alison concurred, “but Jack’s busy for the rest of the day, so we can’t do that.”

“But maybe there’s something that would work for Erin?”

Jan was thinking.

Alison was teaching her classes right now, and so she didn’t really need much of Jan’s attention. And that meant that Jan had some serious time to concentrate on her own ideas. And she had the kernel of a solution to the problem of Alison and Miranda.

The session with Erin had gone exactly as they expected. Alison had asked Erin to suggest some actions that she would never take, and had decided that her refusal to have a photo taken of her while naked fit the bill perfectly.

And after entering the omega state, Erin had done just that. She posed, somewhat lewdly, as Alison had pretended to take her picture with a camera without a memory card. And when she was out of the omega state Erin had forgotten that it occurred.

It was a perfect success.

But it presented a potential solution to the dilemma Jan was facing. Jan knew Alison was going to be hurt badly if Miranda continued to reject her. She could sense the downward spiral that Alison was in. Jan suspected that only the success of her program was keeping her from obsessing about Miranda.

The program potentially gave a solution, but it was hard for Jan to think that way. Although the program seemed to work, it was still experimental, and there might be unforeseen difficulties. And Jan had to avoid causing harm to people as best she could. But perhaps it could be used to suggest that Miranda loved Alison.

That wouldn’t hurt Miranda, if all went well. In fact, it should make her extremely happy. And it would certainly help Alison. It was clearly the best of both worlds. A perfect solution.

But how could she safely achieve it? She knew that Alison would never help her with this idea. But she could run the program herself. In fact, she could hook it up to her input and output routines, building the program into herself. Then all she’d need to do would be to get herself a display somewhere where Miranda could see her, somewhere she could access Miranda’s clip.

That shouldn’t be too hard, surely?