The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

Near Shelby Township, Michigan

The hired vehicle braked to a stop in my driveway just after sunset. They called them “roadables,” apparently because they were capable of driving on the surface roads, but this one had spent most of the trip from what used to be Detroit Wayne airport to my house zipping along about 100 feet above the roadway. After it had left the main traffic arteries it had descended to about 50 feet and slowed, but it still flew until it reached the residential neighborhoods. There the roadable became like the earthbound vehicles I was familiar with from two decades earlier. It silently and efficiently navigated the streets, stopping once it reached my driveway. The door opened automatically and I got out. There was no driver to tip and I’d paid for the trip when it started, authorizing a money transfer directly from my bank account with a biometric scan.

I stepped away from the roadable and watched as it backed out of my driveway and drove away. This was how people got around in the new world. Most had their own roadables, or used public transit. I supposed that I’d get my own, but it would take some time to get used to being in a vehicle that did all the driving (and flying) for you.

I was somewhat surprised to see that my house had been well maintained for the twenty years that had passed since I left a few days earlier. My guess was that HGT had hired people to keep it in shape and update it to keep up with technological advances. Maybe they’d paid for it, or maybe I had. There was no question that I now had the money to pay for it.

I’d bought heavily into HGT stock through both the employee stock plan and on my own. I used to believe in Clifford Harrison and his vision for the world. During my missing twenty years, HGT had steadily released new products and technologies, many of which were based on Melendez’ original research on applications for his nano-proteins. Overweight? HGT had released a treatment for that about fifteen years ago. They could have used Melendez’ original nano-protein that took care of it in a single dose, but there’s much more money in keeping people coming back for a monthly “treatment” than there is in selling a one-time “cure.” It doesn’t take a genius to figure out which way HGT chose to go.

Somebody had understood a couple of pages of my equations well enough to create the field reversers that kept roadables, lifters, and most of the other contemporary flying craft in the air without need for aerodynamic lift. The license fees for that technology poured more money into HGT and sent the stock even higher. The regenerative turbines that provided the power to run vehicles and just about everything else these days were also a HGT creation, though it had nothing to do with my work. They could run on just about anything liquid or gaseous that would burn, and they did so very efficiently and with very low emissions of anything harmful back into the environment.

Over the twenty years that I’d been downstreamed in time, the world economy had grown, collapsed, and started growing again, but HGT stock had just continued to climb as the company released more and more things that quickly became essential to daily life. By virtue of his huge holdings in HGT, Clifford Harrison was now the richest man in the world. If you combined the fortunes of #2 through #25 on the list of richest people, you might equal Harrison’s net worth. I was #39 on the current list, again due to holding a large chunk of HGT stock from before the price had skyrocketed. The investments Harrison had made for each of the victims of his “conference” had netted me a little over $180 million, but the HGT stock was worth over a hundred times that much.

It all seemed tainted to me, like blood money. I’d created the tool to open Pandora’s Box and betrayed every person on the planet, including generations that wouldn’t be born. Worst of all, I’d betrayed Pamela. I’d give up the billions of dollars and everything else if I could somehow change what had happened. I shivered, partly chilled by the autumn evening, partly by my ruminations over what I’d done to humanity. Steeling myself, I walked to the door of my house. As seemed to be the case most places these days, locks had been replaced by biometric scanners. My hand was scanned and the front door clicked open.

The interior of the house was very much like I’d left it. As I walked through the house, I noticed that the electronics had been modernized. My old computer was still there, sitting next to one of those network terminals that everyone was using instead of computers in the current day. My kitchen had been updated with new ultra-efficient appliances. The television was gone and a 3D system sat in it’s place. My unseen house-sitter had done a good job of keeping my house current with technology. I half expected to see a gigantic pile of mail from the past twenty years sitting on my kitchen table, but then I remembered that the reintegration people who’d talked to us on the lifters had said that almost all communication was handled through the network terminals and a biometric scan constituted a legal “signature” for any document I cared to authenticate.

I found the note upstairs, on my pillow. My name was handwritten on the envelope, and it was one of those modern envelopes made of recycled polymers. I opened it and read Pamela’s note. She’d been upset when she wrote it; probably a mixture of sadness and anger. Basically it said that she’d waited for my promised calls from the conference and they hadn’t come. She’d waited for me to return to her, like I promised, and I hadn’t returned. She’d waited for me to show up to marry her, like I’d promised, and I hadn’t shown. “Honest Abe” had three strikes against him and she wasn’t going to let him hurt her any more. She was gone and she wasn’t coming back. I sat on the bed and wept for quite awhile.

I had to tell her what had happened. I didn’t blame her for leaving me after I’d betrayed her, but I had to let her know that it wasn’t her fault. The envelope was one of the new-style ones, and the note hadn’t been old and dried as if it had been around for years, so she must have written it fairly recently. I wondered how long that poor girl had waited for me. Maybe she’d sent me something on the terminal.

The network terminal worked best through my new 3D system, so that was how I used it. I literally had thousands of messages, all from the past month or so. None were from Pamela, though. Seven were from Cho, four of them in video format. She repeatedly expressed her hope that I was “one of those men who Clifford Harrison spoke about” and that I would be willing to father a child with her 22 year old daughter Melissa, who had inherited her mother’s gift for science. Melissa was featured in the videos, with fewer and fewer clothes in successive videos. She was a lovely young lady, but I was sickened that one of the most brilliant women on the planet had been reduced to trying to pimp out her daughter, all because of my actions twenty years earlier.

Was I “one of those men who Clifford Harrison spoke about?” I did a search on his name and was presented with a long list of results. Harrison certainly hadn’t been shy during the month he’d been out in the world while we were back in stasis. There were articles about his visits with several world leaders, including photos, and 3D vid of him giving a speech to the United Nations general assembly.I watched the vid and couldn’t believe what he was saying to them.

Harrison’s version of what happened in Morocco was that he’d discovered that a virus was sterilizing men so he’d worked out a way to use HGT technology to place nearly 1300 VOLUNTEERS who were attending his World Hope Renewal conference in stasis for twenty years. Rather than risk exposing any of his alleged volunteers to the “virus,” he’d come out of stasis to see if the virus was gone and the world was safe for repopulation while the rest of us went back into stasis, just in case it wasn’t. He took the “if you’re going to lie, lie big” theory of propaganda and played it to the hilt. He claimed that some of the men who’d gone back into stasis were expressing regrets about having missed the past twenty years, but most were completely willing to do their part in saving humanity from extinction.

Of course he was lauded as the savior of humanity. Some expressed horror that the saber-rattlers of two decades ago had tried to destroy what had actually been humanity’s last hope for survival. Harrison was in great demand as a guest at state dinners and other functions of the political and social elite.

The unfortunate thing is that people tend to believe what they hear first and loudest, and Harrison’s story had a month head start on the real truth. It had been repeated over and over in the media. If one of the “volunteers” he’d downstreamed spoke up with the real version of events, they’d be dismissed as one of the disgruntled ones who was feeling remorse over having “volunteered.” The truth might eventually out, but it would probably take generations, if it happened at all.

I looked again at the photos of Harrison with the various dignitaries. As predicted, the leaders of most countries were women. Of the seven different leaders he’d visited, six were women and the wife of the Russian premier was featured prominently in the photos of him with Harrison. All of the women were looking a Harrison with something that went beyond admiration. Was it desire? Devotion? Abject adoration?

I suspected that there would be more than one announcement that a national leader was pregnant in the near future. That made things all the more difficult for any of us who wanted to see him brought to justice. Not only did he have the opinion of the masses on his side, he’d also built a devoted following among the most powerful people in the world.

Disgusted, I closed the search results for Harrison and started trying to find Pamela. I searched every way I could think of, but I couldn’t find anything more recent than the week I’d left for the conference. I checked and found occasional mention of Antonov, and Mubanti over the past two decades, but absolutely nothing on Pamela McGuire. There should have been some mention of her getting married, joining a civic organization, donating to a charity, or something like that, but there wasn’t. She seemed to have dropped off the face of the Earth more effectively than those of us who had actually dropped off the face of the Earth and into another time stream.

I thought about it for awhile. There was no way anyone could disappear like that unless they wanted to and could pay dearly for someone to make them disappear. You can’t live on the planet and not have some records of you lying around somewhere. Pamela must have wanted to disappear very badly. Scrubbing all records of your existence from the network would require some very expert help. The only evidence that I had that she existed at all over the past twenty years was the letter she’d left me. That letter and the photograph in my wallet were all I had left of her.

The photograph…

I’d been stuck in the mindset of twenty years earlier, searching to match names and other text. Technology had improved in all areas, including searching. I took Pamela’s photo from my wallet and carefully scanned it into the network terminal. With a decent high-resolution image as a starting point, I started a search for people who looked like Pamela.

Her name was Pamela Kallenburg and she was the wife of Hugo Kallenburg. The search didn’t return any photos, but it did give me Pamela Bridget Kallenburg, age 44. The right first and middle names and the right age could be a coincidence, but what convinced me was that there was no information on where Pamela Kallenburg had come from or anything else about her beyond ten years earlier. It was as if she’d suddenly materialized ten years ago, already married to a rich, successful, fairly well known real estate developer who was eleven years her senior. There was plenty of information on Hugo Kallenburg, with the notable exception of anything about his wedding or anything at all about his wife until ten years ago. The story wasn’t told by what I found, but by what I couldn’t find. The life of Pamela and Hugo Kallenburg had been digitally sanitized. It had to be her.