The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

So Natalie, this over-worked White House grad-student special-assignment intern, had just told me she’d been responsible for society suddenly turning into a never-ending porn video while I was unconscious. Which made about as much sense as, I don’t know, Neville admitting he’d been Lord Voldemort all along, or something.

“Say what?” OK, so I’ll never win any investigative journalism awards.

“I didn’t expect everything to go this screwy—pun not intended—and I sure as hell didn’t intend to run the whole damn show! It was just....” She took a deep breath as she fwumped into her chair. “All through 2012, I had no idea who would win the election, but either way, I knew we’d still wind up with a gridlock-happy insult-slinging grandstanding posturing political clusterfuck. With the full encouragement of everyone willing to stir the pot—in other words, damn near everyone.”

“Yeah, that’s about right.”

“Yeah. Now my research—the research I tell everyone about—is on the confluence of emotions, moods, subconscious triggers, blah-blah-blah...sorry, I’m just used to saying ‘blah-blah-blah’ because everyone outside my immediate field fades out at that point anyway. Anyway, a bunch of us grad students were out together one night, and the conversation turned to politics.”

“Of course.”

“I know. Hard to avoid in DC, huh? So I was hanging out on the fringes of the group—keeping away from the inevitable arguments without looking anti-social—and someone said that everything would be so much better if everyone just got laid more often. Which was about the only point of agreement that evening.” She smiled. “Needless to say, alcohol was involved. So as the conversation got heated—again—I thought about my own work, and I wondered if maybe this would be a useful avenue of research.” I must have looked really skeptical because she shrugged. “Like I said, alcohol was involved.”

“You’re not talking about subliminals, are you? I thought—”

“No, at least not the traditional stuff. More along the line of digital steganographic, um...”

“Blah-blah-blah?”

“Yeah, that’ s pretty much the easiest way to describe it.” Just then, the coffee pot made a finished-brewing gurgle, so she headed to the table. “How do you take your coffee?”

“Uh...”

“Don’t worry, I’m not gonna poison you or anything—although I don’t blame you for thinking that! To be honest, I need you well, and I need you sane,” she added somewhat desperately.

“Um, OK, heavy on sugar and creamer if you could.” I hadn’t quite shaken my old coffee-drinking habits, Meg or no Meg.

“No problem!” She fixed two cups and brought them to me. “Here, you pick one, and I’ll drink the other, just to show I didn’t doctor ‘em.”

“But what if you’ve built up an immunity to iocane powder?”

Natalie actually laughed at that. “No, just caffeine, unfortunately!” I accepted one cup, and we both drank. “Anyway, I created a couple of parody videos—one left-leaning and one right-leaning—and I made normal and, uh, tweaked versions of each. And I played them for some of my friends and kept notes.”

“Doing it scientifically?”

“Welllll, no. Not really.” She scratched the back of her neck somewhat sheepishly. “’Scientifically’ would have meant a full-blown experiment in collaboration with my advisor under NIH or university auspices, complete with paperwork, presentations, meetings, proposals, reviews from the university ethics review board since I’d be conducting experiments involving humans, double-blind testing where neither scientist nor participant would know which version was which, yadda yadda yadda...which seemed like overkill for some wild-ass guess I hatched at a bar after a few drinks. Now granted, I jokingly called myself ‘Ben’ in my own thoughts a time or two...”

“Ben?”

“Benevolent Dictator for Life. You know, momentary delusions that I could do a better job of running the country than the vast Military-Industrial-Political-Mass-Media-Intarwebs...um...OK, I know I’m leaving someone out of the complex here...”

Damn, she was more cynical about politics than me. “Yeah...but I can’t think of anything else right now either.”

“...but that wasn’t a job any sane person would want, and back then, I still thought I was sane. Besides, even I figured this little project would wind up becoming Subliminals 2.0—maybe it would work, maybe it wouldn’t, and I’d wind up with inconclusive results. Nothing worth ruining my future career by making me look like a crackpot, which is exactly what subliminals would do, or anything that smelled even remotely of subliminals. So it was more something for my personal amusement in my spare time than an actual scientific experiment.”

“So what were these not-quite subliminal things?”

“Well, I tried to set things up so that news or politics would trigger unconscious arousal toward one’s partner, or the desire to partner up if one didn’t have a partner. I didn’t want everyone to become generally aroused toward everyone else; even as flaky and half-assed as this idea was, I didn’t want to break up any marriages with this thing.”

“I can see that...was that what you saw in the tests?”

“Well, it seemed to have some limited impact—not much, but it did seem to make political debates less strident. Just enough that I slipped the videos onto Facebook right at the start of the fall semester. What’s the worst it could do, I asked myself. Problem was, the videos went viral.”

“But wasn’t that what you wanted?”

“Well, I thought it was. Problem was, I didn’t test for the impact of repeated viewings—and really, I’m not sure how you can test Internet viral phenomena in the lab without actually, y’know, putting something on the Web and having it go viral. And the other problem was that I only showed the left-leaning video to left-leaning friends and the right-leaning video to right-leaning friends. When the videos hit the Real World, everyone watched ‘their’ video a million times, plus they watched the ‘enemy’ video a million times so they could get properly agitated by it! Gave the triggers a synergistic effect, I think.”

“And so?”

“And by Labor Day, everyone watched them and got horny except me...”

“Did you avoid the videos, or were you immune?”

“I took steps to make myself immune. Which reminds me I gotta do the same thing for you. I took those videos off Facebook, but the Internet being the Internet, who knows where those videos are lurking.”

“Wait, you gotta do the same thing for me?”

“Yeah, because it’s....” She took a huge, deep breath. “I told you a little bit ago I was wearing a ton of hats at NIH because everyone else was in perpetual heat, until I got transferred here. Well, the reason I don’t look 23 anymore is because I’ve been wearing a ton of hats here too. And these are fuckin’ scary hats to wear.”

“Like ‘Ben’ hats, you mean?”

She drained her coffee cup and shook her head. “None of them are Ben-level by themselves, although they’re plenty powerful. I mean, I’m damn near doing everyone’s job here, and I do mean everyone“—she pointed toward the vacant Oval Office—“but even accidentally taking over the Executive branch isn’t quite up to Benevolent Dictator levels. That’s why the Founding Fathers wrote checks and balances into the Constitution, right?” She looked at her now-empty cup. “See, this is why I usually just drink out of the pot. You want another cup too?”

I’d only had about a third of my cup. “No, I’m good.”

She walked back to the table to refill her cup. “Problem is, Congress and the courts are just as fucked up as the White House—and I’m not even sure if the pun’s intended or not, so take it however you want—so I’ve found myself trying to make their decisions as well. Writing legislation, analyzing legislation, congressional oversight, court cases, decisions on constitutionality, you name it.” Coffee cup full again, she walked back to her desk. “So I’m wearing executive hats, legislative hats, judicial hats—all of those hats that are supposed to be kept apart from each other. All of those hats, all three branches of government, on the same head? Goodbye checks and balances, hello Ben. And they’re all on my head. I’m not supposed to wear them, I’m not qualified to wear them, I’m not trained to wear them, but someone’s gotta wear them! Oh, and to make matters worse, those damn videos have gone all over the world, so I’ve had to pretty much manage foreign policy as well—for all sides, because they’re just as fucked up as us! I’m damn near running countries with languages I don’t even fucking know!” She dropped back into her chair, almost in tears. “Sorry,” she muttered as she rubbed her eyes. “I’m usually not like this. I’m just tired.”

I just made encouraging noises. Encouraging words would have been better, but I couldn’t think of any.

After pulling herself back together, she went on. “The reason I need you sane is.... I’m trying to do two things at once. Run the country—and with all the hats I’m wearing, that’s basically what I’m doing—and try to find a way to put things back to normal. Preferably normal-normal, not dysfunctional-normal. Before I really really screw up, and everything blows up in my face. Not because I’d get into trouble, although I know I would, and I’d deserve it, but because if everything does blow up and people find out what’s really been going on...I don’t know. Government collapse? Civil war? Hell, with all the foreign policy shit I’m doing, maybe world war? And I need help from someone who’s not running on hormones. Because This. Job. Is. Killing. Me.” She waved her coffee cup as Exhibit A. “Anyway, I know this ‘internship’ is way more than you bargained for, and I don’t know how much rehab you’re still doing after the accident, so I don’t know if you’re ready to handle something like this, medically speaking, and it’s probably cheesy to say that your country needs you, but...” She turned her bleary eyes to me. “Help?”

“Um, wow, uh...” I drained my own cup. “What would I...wait, you’ve been running things? Sorry I’m being slow, but all of the laws and compromises and everything...that’s you?”

“Yeah. Have I really been keeping things balanced? Right-wing versus left-wing and all of that?”

“As far as I could tell. At first I wondered if one side was taking advantage of the other, but I couldn’t see any bias.”

“You have no idea how relieved...OK. I’ve been so good at avoiding politics that I was completely unprepared when I started having to make real decisions around here. I wasn’t sure what I ought to be doing, except that I didn’t want to bend things too far to one side or the other.”

“Otherwise, if one side ever really started paying attention...”

“Right. They’d do exactly what you were doing—seeing who was getting the better end of the deal. And if anyone even thought someone was getting the better end of the deal...”

“Everything would blow up, and the past few decades would look like a Sunday school picnic in comparison.”

“Right. So, uh...do you think you’d be able to help?”

“What would I be doing? I mean, I’m no better prepared for this political shit than you were—although you’ve done a lot better job than I could have.”

“Thanks. Dunno. Probably have to figure that out as we go. Pretty much the same way I’ve been doing everything for the past few months.”

I looked at my empty coffee cup. “Can I get my own pot?”