The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

“…and now…” Cora’s voice said softly, “…you are awake.”

Mingzhu slowly opened her eyes. Gentle lighting from the soft plasma lamps flooded her vision, and she immediately squinted.

“Take your time,” advised Cora. “Your body is still adjusting.”

Mingzhu shut her eyes and grunted. Her mouth and throat were dry. She was lying flat on her back, and the air was warm and moist.

“One moment,” the computer said softly. There was a light whirring of a motor, and then a small object appeared at Mingzhu’s lips. “Suck,” instructed the synthesized voice.

The data scientist obediently grasped the straw with her lips. Immediately, she tasted cool, refreshing water.

“Very good,” Cora said approvingly. “I will count to five. As I count, your body fills with energy. Soon, you will be able to sit up and move about freely. Ready?”

“…nnngh…” Mingzhu moaned.

But as the computer counted, the young woman did feel her muscles restore with energy. Soon, she could wiggle her fingers and toes.

“…and five!” Cora proclaimed. “You are completely out of hypnosis and may rise when you are ready.”

There was a slight hissing as the cryotube opened, and Mingzhu felt cool, recycled air wash over her nude body.

The data scientist opened her eyes, groaned, and then flexed her legs. It still took a few minutes before she was ready to rise up, and disconnect herself from the monitoring systems.

“Easy there,” Cora advised her.

Mingzhu stole a second mouthful of water, then began to clumsily remove the biotubes and scanners connected to her body. Cryosleep, even when hypnotically induced, required a number of umbilical supports to monitor her lifesigns, as well as inject simple nutrients and remove waste products. Mingzhu thought the whole thing was gross. But a necessary part of deep space travel.

When completely disconnected, the young woman hopped out of her tube. Her shaky legs took a moment to adjust to the poor artificial gravity. The smooth metal deck of Anthemoessa’s Cryochamber, gently heated by the ship’s systems, was warm and pleasant beneath her feet.

“Careful,” Cora said hurriedly. “Remember, your finger and toenails continue to grow while in SAT.”

“Right,” croaked Mingzhu. Her hair was easily five inches longer too. No matter how many times she awoke from cryo, the effects of unaware time passage always weirded her out.

“Your shower is ready,” Cora informed her.

Mingzhu nodded, wheezing, “Thanks.”

She glanced about. Commander McCormick’s cryotube was empty, but Kiana and Reyansh were still in suspended animation. Through the cryotube’s frosted plexiglass, Mingzhu could see her friends’ blank, sleeping faces, but not their naked bodies. Cora woke the crew one-by-one, as the process of coming out of SAT was embarrassing and required a fair amount of privacy.

Still trembling, Mingzhu helped herself to another sip of water from the wall dispenser. “Update me, please?” she rasped.

“This is Day 374 of our mission,” Cora said smoothly. “Presently, we are .47 parsecs out from Earth, approximately 14.6 trillion kilometers. Real-time audio contact with SETF is no longer possible. This will be our third maintenance stop; the fusion drives have been throttled down until Kiana and Reyansh can complete their routine diagnostics. There is 102,394 terraquads of raw sensor data for your inspection.”

“Mmm,” Mingzhu yawned. “Okay.” She gingerly rubbed her eyes.

Three months before launch, Cora had been integrated into the Anthemoessa’s core systems, with camera and speakers installed in every compartment. This meant that you simply spoke aloud in any direction to talk with her. Mingzhu still hadn’t gotten used to that.

The beautiful data scientist yawned again, then shook her head. “I don’t remember anything from cryosleep. How’d I do?”

“You did just fine,” Cora assured her.

“Yeah? So how did I keep my subconscious mind occupied over the last half-light year?”

“Once under deep hypnosis, you decided to write a novel,” Cora said.

Mingzhu’s eyes popped. “A novel?”

“Yes,” Cora replied, sounding amused. “You dictated a stream-of-consciousness novel. The prose is really quite lovely.”

The young data scientist shook her head in bewilderment. “I’ll look forward to reading it,” she mumbled.

“The text is over seven hundred million words long,” Cora told her. “You composed on a fairly nonstop basis for over ninety days. Perhaps the space psychologists back on Earth would like to read it?”

“No, no,” Mingzhu said quickly. “Don’t you dare transmit anything. Just let me get dressed.”

“As you wish,” Cora murmured.

Limping slightly, Mingzhu moved into the cramped shower stall.

After showering, trimming nails and hair, dressing, and then getting a good cup of synthcoffee, Mingzhu got to work at a spare workstation in the ship’s lounge. The Anthemoessa’s primary systems were functioning perfectly. Cora was right; there was a massive amount of raw data in the sensor logs. Out of curiosity, Mingzhu started browsing.

A new pulsar had been detected, just outside scanner range. There had been a slight, unexpected shift in the galactic orbit of Antares, possibly indicating something large and unseen affecting the system… a black hole, perhaps? SETF Astrophysics would be positively riveted by that data. There was also a fair amount of scattered hydrogen detected from the dorsal scanner array, possibly indicating…

Mingzhu frowned. The data indices didn’t look right.

Suspicious, the young woman called up a few diagnostics, and sure enough, there was something up with the quantum file system. The error was slight, but it was certainly there. In fact…

A readout appeared on screen: “ECE: 0.0%”

Mingzhu sucked in a breath of exasperation. The data anomaly! The same damn data anomaly she’d spotted and reported to SETF SysMain, what, a year ago? It was here! Clearly, the bugs in the system had yet to be repaired.

“Hey, you!”

Distracted, Mingzhu looked up. Kiana, now dressed in one of the Anthemoessa’s recyclable uniforms, was approaching. The pretty Indian woman had huge bags under her eyes, but seemed delighted nonetheless. Like Mingzhu, Kiana now had a regulation, military-style buzzcut. Mingzhu grieved for her friend’s formerly beautiful long hair.

“Hey, Kay,” the Chinese data scientist smiled. “Sleep well?”

“Too well,” admitted Kiana, sliding into a formfit chair next to Mingzhu’s workstation. “Cora hypnotized me to believe I was watching an epic holovid. It was a tour of African jungles and rivers, back before the Great Devastation. There were monkeys and elephants.” The young engineer shook her head at the memory. “Wild. You?”

“Apparently, I wrote a godawful novel,” scowled Mingzhu, still unhappy with her diagnostics.

Kiana shifted a bit in her chair. “Is it me, or are the enviro controls a little off? It feels hot in here.”

“Cora probably blasted the heat when she reactivated life support,” Mingzhu said, still focused on her data readouts. “Hmmm…”

The intercom dinged. “Everyone to the Navigation Cabin,” Commander McCormick’s electrified voice intoned. “Immediately.”

Life in deep space was not at all what Mingzhu expected. The Anthemoessa only generated enough vital supplies (oxygen, food, and water) to support human life for three or four days at a time. Therefore, the crew spent the vast bulk of the voyage in cryo, deeply hypnotized and playing out whatever activity Cora gave their willing, subconscious minds.

But without regular maintenance, the Anthemoessa would fly off course or break down. Cora alone was not enough to guide the ship all the way to Lintukoto. So once enough vital supplies had been regenerated, Cora would rouse the crew, who would then check all systems. And only when Commander McCormick was satisfied that everything was shipshape, would the crew would return to the cryotubes and into Cora’s hypnotic slumber. Thus, traveling through deep space was months of experiencing a hypnosis-based fantasy that you couldn’t remember, interspersed with a few days of actual work on the ship.

It was, to put it mildly, a very, very odd way to live.

The habitation ring of the Anthemoessa was four decks tall, but only Deck Four could be occupied by humans. Decks Two and Three were dedicated for storage, and Deck One was the precious hydroponics biogarden. Cora had been programmed with extensive gardening databanks to ensure this vital component of the ship thrived.

But with only Deck Four for the crew, Mingzhu was learning how little room there actually was on the ship. The cramped rooms and corridors made for a slightly claustrophobic experience, and the artificial gravity made common movement challenging. Even after fifteen waking days in deep space, Mingzhu and Kiana still had to step slowly, gripping the handrails as they moved through the ship.

The Navigation Cabin was one of the biggest rooms on the Anthemoessa, but that wasn’t saying much. It was the only chamber on board where all twelve crew members could assemble at the same time. A large monitor table dominated the center of the room, with astronavigational displays on the wall screens.

When Mingzhu and Kiana entered, Commander McCormick and seven other crewmembers were seated around the table. Mingzhu was glad to see Reyansh was among them.

McCormick was studying a datapad, a frown on her beautiful face. Mingzhu had only met the commander just a month prior to launch, and she was still intimidated by the older woman’s military presence. McCormick, now age thirty, had been a fighter pilot prior to joining SETF. Her taut body was all muscle. She was a classic blonde, with pink lips, steely blue eyes, and delicate cheekbones. Even her buzzcut could not mar her unique beauty.

“Ladies,” McCormick nodded as Mingzhu and Kiana entered. “Let’s get started. We’ve got problems.”

The crew exchanged glances. Commander McCormick set her jaw, tapping an access code into a control panel. The monitor table lit up, displaying the Anthemoessa’s schematics.

“So Cora woke me about a day before the rest of you,” McCormick began, absently running a hand over her buzzcut hair. “I’ve been checking the ship’s systems. And while everything looked okay at first glance, we’ve developed some unwanted complications in the last twenty-four hours.” The commander frowned, rubbing her forehead. “Is everyone ready for bad news?”

Mingzhu cringed. In deep space, bad news could be life-threatening.

“The biggest damn problem,” McCormick said heavily, “is that Hanson and Jaduan haven’t come out of cryo SAT. Apparently Cora ran into a serious problem when trying to access their waking routines.”

The crew murmured in alarm. Hanson and Jaduan were the Anthemoessa’s computer engineers. They were the guys responsible for keeping Cora and all the ship’s subcomputers running smoothly.

“Both Hanson and Jaduan are still in SAT?” asked Kiana, dismayed.

“Yeah,” McCormick groused. “Cora and I have tried every manual trick in the book, but we can’t call up their wake-up files.”

Mingzhu flicked a quick glance about the table. The Anthemoessa crew had nine women, three men. With Hanson and Jaduan still in their cryotubes, that left Reyansh as the only awake male on board.

“I don’t get it,” Rhonda Tinana, the crew’s slender astrophysicist, said. “If Hanson and Jaduan are just sleeping—hypnotized—why don’t we pop their tubes and wake them the old-fashioned way?”

“No, no, no!” exclaimed Angelia Wu, the ship’s doctor. “The waking files are not just hypnosis instructions to come out of trance. They also contain detailed physiological information about how to chemically rouse those guys. Remember, Cryo SAT is a combination of deep hypnosis to keep the subconscious mind active, but also some complex drugs to keep one’s muscles from atrophying. If you yank them awake, their bodies might be okay. But they also not receive the proper counterdrugs.”

“Besides,” the doctor added, “Cora will need to set their hypnotic conditions just right so she can rehypnotize them again later. Otherwise, its possible that we might wake them and they can’t ever go back into cryo again.”

“Mingzhu,” Commander McCormick said, turning to the data scientist, “I need you to take a look at Cora’s systems. See if you can’t spot the problem.”

Irrationally feeling a touch of indignation, Mingzhu protested: “Commander… I’m a data scientist. Not Systems Maintenance. I know how to manipulate and search data, I don’t know Cora’s design in detail or—“

“You’re a computer expert,” snapped McCormick. “You’re also Hanson’s and Jaduan’s emergency backups. With them unavailable, you’re all I’ve got.” The ends of the commander’s mouth tightened. “I need you to find the issue, Ming. Okay?”

“Aye,” Mingzhu grudgingly acknowledged. “Cora, any idea what the problem is?”

“There appears to be corrupted access locks on their waking files,” the computer reported. “I am uncertain why the backups are not functioning.”

“Access locks…?” Mingzhu echoed, her brain racing. “But why—“

“Alright, alright, I’ll need you and Cora to work on that, after this meeting,” sighed McCormick. “What else… For some reason, our voice transmitter is down. We are sending the automated data streams back to Earth—thank God for that—but we can’t send them any personalized messages. Cora’s ruled out mechanical error.”

“No talking with Earth?” Rhonda said, alarmed.

Commander McCormick shook her head. “Nope.”

Expressions around the table grew longer.

“Finally, is it me, or is it hot on this ship?” McCormick complained. “Cora?”

“The measured temperature is 21.1 degrees Celsius,” the computer reported.

“That can’t be right,” growled McCormick, tugging at her uniform collar. “Someone, check up on that too, eh?”

Mingzhu secluded herself in Anthemoessa’s tiny computer lab, and began running every diagnostic she could think of. She worked for hours. But nothing cropped up out of the ordinary. Absolutely nothing unusual was detected.

The young data scientist swore. She was really hoping the problem—whatever it was—would be obvious and easy to repair. Then she could rouse Hanson and Jaduan and let them fix everything else on the damn ship. And she could go back to her data.

Once accepted as a member of the Anthemoessa crew, Mingzhu had taken the basic crash courses to familiarize herself with Cora and the ship’s systems. But she was a long, long way from becoming a true expert on Cora’s architecture. The thought that there might be a fatal flaw, somewhere deep in the design of the system… well, that was really scary.

Cora controlled everything on the ship. The feminine computer was responsible for running the fusion reactors, keeping the electricity and plasma running, recycling the air and water, maintaining the artificial gravity, tracking the food stores, everything. If anything at all within the great computer went haywire, then the Anthemoessa was almost certainly doomed. Cora had to run flawlessly.

Growing desperate, Mingzhu rechecked the file systems one last time. System Integrity was perfect. No flaws. No issues. Not so much as a single data bit out of alignment. And yet…

No. Nothing. If there was a corruption, Mingzhu couldn’t see it.

I need a break, the young woman thought wearily. She’d been holed up in the lab for, what, nine hours? That was too long.

Perhaps a trip to the ship’s tiny gym might help to clear her head. Going for a treadmill run would be challenging in artificial gravity… but the thought of exercise and clearing her mind sounded so good.

Sighing, Mingzhu rose from her formfit chair and moved into the corridor. It was late, and Cora had lowered the plasma lamps to simulate evening.

There were no windows in the Anthemoessa. While the ship’s architects would have loved to include viewports, the amount of undetectable radiation in deep space was simply too dangerous. So as a way of helping the crew, every room and the corridor on Anthemoessa was outfitted with long monitor screens. At the moment, Cora was projecting the exterior of space, with the stars gently tumbling by.

Mingzhu shuffled down the corridor, ignoring the star display. Her magnetic shoes did a fair job of securing her feet to the deck in the weak gravity, but nonetheless, it was still tricky to…

The young woman paused. Her ears detected something odd. For an instant, she thought she heard…

My mind’s playing tricks, Mingzhu thought, annoyed. Maybe I should-

No. There the sound was again. The sound…

…of a woman having sex.

Yes. There was no doubt. The woman’s muffled voice was barely audible above the regular whir of the oxygen pumps.

The woman, whomever she was, was gasping loudly, moaning in a tortured yet delighted rhythm, just starting to cry out, “Oh…! Oh…! Oh…!” in a wonderous appreciation. The cries were slowly becoming quicker and louder.

Scandalized, Mingzhu looked up and down the corridor. Was there anyone else besides her in this section of the ship?

Biting her lip, the young data scientist inched toward the sound of the lovemaking. Ten steps ahead and to her left, was the hatch for the Propulsion Monitoring room. The door was firmly closed.

But not soundproofed. Whoever was inside hadn’t completely sealed the room off from the rest of the ship. Warily, Mingzhu peered through the door’s small plexiglass window.

Inside, she saw Kiana, naked, bending over the engineering monitoring desk. All the computers were switched off, and Kiana was gripping the hardware for support. Her nude torso was spread over the desk, and her hips were high in the air. Kiana was angled so that Mingzhu could see her beautiful face, but her eyes were screwed tightly shut. As the Indian woman gasped in pleasure, her head thrashed about. A wide smile was on her lips.

Behind Kiana, her male lover was entering her over and over again, doggie style. Mingzhu could see his strong hands on Kiana’s naked hips, his sweaty torso flexing as he thrusted into her. The man was dark-skinned and thin, and like Kiana, completely naked.

Mingzhu couldn’t see his face… but the fellow could only be Reyansh. Who else could it be? There was no-one else on board who was awake and had a penis.

“Ohhhhhhh…!” Kiana wailed, her expression twisting in wonder as she orgasmed. Mingzhu watched as she pushed even harder against her male companion.

Aghast, Mingzhu shrank back. Kiana and Reyansh? She had no idea they were a couple! How long had this affair been going on? Why had they hidden this from Mingzhu?

SETF strictly forbade any interpersonal contact between crew members that wasn’t professional. Friendships were inevitable on long voyages like the Anthemoessa’s, of course, but romances or sexual affairs were absolutely forbidden. A crew has to work together seamlessly, and the psychologists had recommended vows of celibacy for everyone going on a flight. Kiana and Reyansh were risking disciplinary action, if McCormick found out.

Uncertain what to do, Mingzhu simply retreated back down the corridor.