The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

The Labyrinth

Chapter 7 — The Final Punishment

The klaxon blared, and Barbara rose with everyone else, her eyes still blinking away afterimages from the bright light that had knocked her out. Her body appreciated the rest, and she stretched with a satisfied yawn, but a moment of clarity brought her memories back to the fore. Was that really Beatriz? She looked like a robot, like the other guards. Did the inmates really run the asylum? Was that her fate? Would they break her down until there was nothing left, then put her in a black suit and have her guard the others? Was there even a “they” Or was it just a never-ending cycle of controlling and breaking, destroying and building?

Can’t be hell. Hell would be warmer. The thought sent a shiver down her spine.

Someone shoved the schoolgirl outfit in her hands, and she was putting it on before she was consciously aware of it. She would be walking for a while, and part of her brain was relieved that it would get to shut down for a little while, and the other wondered what they were blanking her out for.

“Oh, you couldn’t even get my ass properly raped in the shower. Fuck, what kind of prison is this? Oh, I know. One that can’t hold me in!” the blonde in long braids said in mocking frustration.

“Whatever, brat. Lemme guess, you haven’t been punished yet. You’ll see,” Barbara said, and it frightened her that she could say it with that much confidence when she didn’t even know how long she had been there. Was that the trick? Or one of the tricks? How long had she been out for, anyway? Months? A year? She couldn’t be sure anymore. She knew she was... somewhere, and that it might be the same somewhere it had been when she started out. She didn’t know what she was anymore, and who she was now was the one thing she knew she didn’t know. Too much of what she was seeing echoed her first days- weeks? there. As she fell into line, she stared at the young woman and the others like her, wondering what she had done, wondering what her fate was. She marched out when she was told to, walking up and down the endless spirals; she went blank as soon as she could to relieve herself of the misery, barely recognizing the new girls as they were subjected to the wild taunts. She remembered talking to a few at dinner, but she couldn’t remember what she said, only that she had been the stupid giggling Barbara with some and the sullen empty Barbara with others.

At least I’m sleeping well, she thought, and maybe it was some time later, and maybe it was the next day, or maybe she was remembering that she had thought that three weeks ago. She hadn’t had any of the strange nightmares with Oxana and Petra and Elena turning into Justine and Jolene and Kelly, so she thought she hadn’t had any more nightmares, but maybe that was part of the nightmare she was still having. Or is it because I don’t need to remember? Or am I starting to forget?

She thought the grind went on longer than usual, stretching into gray days of walking and going blank and eating and going blank and waking up and being put back to sleep, doing what she was told and nothing more. Now she was the friendly face in the cafeteria, cowed and flattened into trying to keep people from going as far as she had. Now she was the taunting veteran warning the newcomers of what lay in store for them. Now she was bait for the fresh meat as they were fed into the maw of hell. And she was no less scared than she had been when she started.

Then she was pulled aside for more punishment, and she walked where they told her to walk and stood where they told her to stand, staring at the floor and waiting to be told what was happening to her. “Hello, Barbara,” the curly-haired woman in the skirtsuit said with a flat, false smile. She reached into the locker and took out a shimmering silver gown that had Barbara dizzy just looking at it.

“Oh, you like your new dress? I’m so glad! Today’s your big day, after all!” the woman continued. Already Barbara’s eyes were glazing over and her mind was beginning to spin. She couldn’t look away from the dress. She had to have the dress. She reached for it, knowing that she was controlled into wanting it and not able to care. Barbara felt the familiar divide in her mind slam down, and the giggling idiot prom queen took over. The gown went on, and so did the shoes, and then the tiara with its evil whispers and the flowers making her giddy, and the bracelets that dazzled her dead eyes.

She could barely get out the door, and she realized that she was even more deeply under than usual. She could barely hear or see anything through the haze of control over her.

“Busy day today! Coming to my title match?” Gwen chirped as she jogged by.

Barbara giggled. “Like, duh, of course!” she squealed with her pasted on smile. All she could see, all she could hear, were happy little high school cliques, and that was perfect for the prom queen.

What are they planning? The thought echoed in the furthest reaches of Barbara’s brain, repeating over and over again even as her mouth greeted the teacher. “Like, so what are we supposed to be learning here?”

“Advanced algebra,” the teacher replied.

“Like, so shouldn’t you be showing us your bra?” Barbara asked, stripping the woman naked and putting her on the desk for the whole class to see, throwing up the bra and catching it to everyone’s applause.

“That was awesome!” Gwen enthused, slapping her five as they walked out of the classroom. Through the haze of control, Barbara could make out girlish hearts and Gwen’s name with different last names tried on. From her own experiences, she knew how sick the real Gwen had to be inside to see something like that- she had been a girl who watched men kill each other for fun, after all.

But Gwen had been the kind of girl who teased girls like Barbara in high school, the kind of girl that Barbara was being brainwashed into being, the kind of girl Barbara had hated so much that she had brainwashed three of them to death. Barbara’s attempt at sympathy evaporated, lost in the flowers and the whispers from her tiara.

“After class” was more work on the spirals, this time on the outside taunting the schoolgirls walking them. It was fun, but Barbara was alarmed at how easily she took to the exercise. Each victim that lost a little bit of her mind and went blank made Barbara squirm in her dress a little more and made her head a little lighter. She knew she was slipping, but she couldn’t care. At least other people were suffering with her, and at least she wasn’t down in the pits again. Not yet. Whatever they had in store for her, it couldn’t be much worse.

Some time later, when her head was in a dizzy mix of confusion and arousal, someone led her back into the jail cell, and the lights and sounds took her away again. She didn’t know how long she was in there, or if she had gone in and out multiple times. Someone came and led her to the theater, and she giggled more and more with every step.

As Barbara took her seat, Gwen came out in a sparkling green robe. Some of the newer inmates took it as the ultimate in repugnance that Gwen was still in her gang colors. But Barbara could only grin idiotically at her friend as Gwen took the robe off and revealed a green bikini that could hardly be classified as clothing. Her opponent was the champion; in fact, with the redhead’s flesh-tone one-piece, the belt looked like the only thing she was wearing. She got even more boos from the inmates who booed Gwen; some seemed brand new to the prison, while others looked like they might be veterans of the upper floors. Gee, I’m, like, so glad I didn’t hook up with one of them! Barbara thought.

The match got underway, and soon it looked more like a girl-girl show instead of a real wrestling match. Clothing flew everywhere, and both Gwen and the redhead were naked and filthy within minutes. Gwen’s prowess in the mud did more than impress Barbara; she was burning inside, squeezing her thighs together and hooting wildly. Even the Barbara in the corner was impressed. Her applause was honest when Gwen won the match by putting her opponent in a camel clutch with her breasts fully exposed.

Gwen showered off and claimed her prize, happily dropping to her knees for a man who pulled her hair and taunted her as she sucked him down. The other inmates couldn’t take any more. One by one, they left in disgust, and the Barbara in the corner eventually got it. Holy shit! She just debased herself in front of her gang! Hope she doesn’t end up dead. I like her.

But the Barbara in the corner was fading fast as the giggling idiot prom queen got ready for her big speech to the class. Someone handed her flowers, the sweet smell stronger than ever and making Barbara so mellow and sleepy that even the part of her exiled to the corner was getting loopy. She walked slowly up to the podium and started to give her speech, her words slowing and slurring more and more as she went on. The teleprompter said dirtier and dirtier things as it scrolled by, but Barbara couldn’t look away, couldn’t stop repeating the words, couldn’t stop feeling that the words were true deep inside.

The laughter and the mockery made her happy both outside and deep down inside. At last she was the center of attention. At last people were listening to her and giving her the respect she deserved. She mattered to them. As she returned to her cell, the mile-wide grin on her face didn’t leave for a second.

The road beyond this bridge is sometimes long and challenging, but has things more beautiful than here, so go on and discover what truly lies ahead.

Barbara read the sign, but it should have just said, Don’t jump, the river’s getting too clogged by the bodies. She didn’t care anymore anyway. Four hundred feet was more than enough to knock her out, and five miles of rapids and rocks would turn her into a human smoothie. There was no better place for it. She could get away from the bullies, away from the hate, away from the cruel tricks, away from what everyone had turned her into, just away.

“Well, you know you can’t go to the movies without eating popcorn,” she heard Kelly say as Barbara looked at the microchips behind the sparkling tiara. She couldn’t believe she had been tricked into giving such a revolting speech in front of the whole school with just some junior high electronics set. But she was the idiot who’d been tricked, the fat slob dumb enough to fall for the promise of attention and glory. It didn’t matter now. It never should have mattered.

“Wonderful day to die, dah-ling,” she heard, and she looked over to see a prostitute in her mid twenties tottering on high heels over the drop. She looked vaguely familiar, and Barbara laughed and cried at the same time.

“Sorry, it’s just that you look like one of the girls who drove me to this,” Barbara explained as she looked down.

“I get that often in America. Name’s Oxana. Easier choice for me. Dead either way- is how whores get fired in Russia, so I, how you say, quit,” the woman replied, and she tipped over the railing and into the gorge. Barbara tried to reach out, but found herself pulling back so she didn’t go over in turn. The name stuck for some reason that she didn’t understand- it was enough to give her new confidence, and she started walking back home.

“Oh, Barbie doll! Oh, Barbie, honey! There you are! I hope you don’t mind, but we aren’t done playing with you yet!” Justine’s taunting voice called out, and it cut Barbara to the core. She took off running the opposite direction, back towards the peaceful finality of the river valley- only to almost get run over by a maniac in a Corvette.

“You’re mine now?” she read out, puzzled, writing down the tag number as the car whizzed by. The blood-curdling screams from the other side sent her flying back to the scene.

“Barbie? You of all people? I guess we’re the ugly ones now,” Justine said, spread out on the pavement. Barbara shrugged and pulled out her phone, not sure what Justine meant but not so far gone that it didn’t occur to call for help. She started to dial, only to freeze like someone found her off switch, like the party with the brownies and everything was in slow motion.

“Like it? I made it myself. It’s so pretty, blue into red, red into green... there,” she heard herself say, and instead of getting help, she showed the blank screen to Justine as she faded away.

“It’s not your fault,” her father said. “It’s never your fault. Those girls were too much for themselves. Come here, princess. You’ll always be my princess, our prom queen. We’ll move if we have to, no matter what happened to her. You know how much she deserved it. Only regret I have is that we didn’t get Kelly and Jolene too. Where did they go, anyway? Probably to hide their friend’s little misdeeds. We’ll get through this together. Come into the car. I’ve got something that will make you forget all of those bitches.”

She leaped into his arms, but there were no tears, no emotion at all, just empty conversation and words that were just sounds. It was like none of it mattered. Her rivals, her enemies, weird doppelgangers- she didn’t care anymore. She just walked away hand in hand with her father, shielded from the bridge and what she was about to do there.

He led her to- not his truck, but that Corvette with the vanity plates, and she wanted to scream. Was her dad a murderer? What was going on? Before she could find the nerve to ask him the questions, he took out an iPod and handed it to her with an empty smile of pride. All she could hear were the words repeating over and over again in a loop, switching and changing but always the same.

“Murderer, whoremonger, demon, witch, kidnapper, Russian spy, Soviet traitor, flag burner, useless waste, whore, sinner, hated, hateful, bloodthirsty, monster...”

But all she could do was smile more and more as the words went into her subconscious and bounced. All of that was about some other Barbara, someone she didn’t know and couldn’t understand. She was the prom queen who made idiotic and sexually charged statements and ignored the laughter, whose teacher was an undressing doll and whose best friend was the captain of the mud wrestling team. She didn’t have to worry about vindictive cheerleaders who drove unpopular fat girls to the edge of oblivion or vicious controllers found past that point.

The woman who owned the car stared back at Barbara with scorn on her face. She looked like Barbara in every way, except for the blonde frosting on her hair, but when she spoke, it was all in Russian, and she wore an expression on her face that Barbara could only think of as evil. She held up a pink backpack and started pulling devices and gadgets out of it. It never seemed to empty, never seemed to get any lighter, and Barbara was terrified of her. She watched her father hand not-Barbara an airplane ticket and sped off to the airport, leaving both Barbaras on the road. As the headphones came off, she could think again, but what she saw stunned her.

Kelly was lying in the street, writhing in ecstasy, twisting her hair and trying to get some kind of release for the pleasure she had to be feeling. “Kelly?” Barbara asked, startled. She got no response, just moans and screams.

“Petra!” Barbara’s Russian doppelganger said with a sharp snap of her fingers. Kelly rose like a puppet on strings and took Barbara by the hand; when she did that, it was like the strings were on Barbara too. They went into the stall, the one Barbara recognized from the high school where she’d gotten her head dunked more than once. As Kelly plunged her tongue into Barbara’s slit, she felt herself drop to her knees on the toilet bowel, the tiara back on her head, her dress flowing on the floor. She was a girl on display on her golden pedestal, her Russian self staring back at her with a Russian man by her side. All Barbara could do was smile, smile as Kelly took off her dress, smile, as Kelly licked and teased her to pleasure that blanked her mind and numbed her soul.

There was nothing left to her. After all of it, after everything, there was nothing left to her. Numb and empty, she was a dead soul being eaten alive by a dead person... she lost the thread of her thoughts, of her words, trying to remember if the Russian whore that was tying her to the bedpost was the pretty young cheerleader she had seen on TV, if the words he was hearing were in her head or coming out of the radio, if the hateful words she was reading were in front of her or on the computer.

“Subliminal code, children! It is the answer to all your prayers. Now, you will kill with no body, no trace of who they ever were. Better, you will make things so that the families of those who all but destroyed you are thanking you with their time and money for what you have done. You are all smart with the computer, or you would not be here. We will teach you the language within the language, one that will make everyone who has dared hurt you...”

DEAD.

DEAD.

DEAD.

It was all Barbara could see on the screen in front of her, blinking in time with her heartbeat. She tried to look away, but wherever she looked, it was on every screen. DEAD. DEAD. DEAD. Such a simple word, such a small word, such a big word, but she couldn’t get her damaged brain around it. She would never be controlled again. She would never control again. She stared at nothing, lost and dazed, and too broken to even know she was confused.

Tap, tap, tap, tap, pause, flash. A light flashed into Barbara’s empty eyes. “Sleep,” a voice said.

Barbara didn’t even blink.

“Sleep,” the voice repeated, accent stronger, once familiar to Barbara but now just a funny sound.

The light moved across Barbara’s face, and Barbara kept staring forward. The Latina pulled Barbara out of bed and said, “Follow me.”

That was easy enough for Barbara to do, especially when the Latina had her by the hand, and they went up in the elevator together. A man in a white suit turned at the sound of high heels. “What’s your name, woman?” he asked Barbara with a smirk.

“Name? I... my name is... Barb... Barbie... Barbie-ra?” Barbara said in a daze.

“How long has she been unresponsive during night rounds, 8742?” the man asked.

“Five days,” the Latina replied.

“Perfect. Four years of punishment to achieve total breakage. 8742, bring me file 36985. Let me see what we have here... ah, yes, Willamette River incident, trafficking with the Yagudayevs, it’s all coming back to me now. Post-breakage sentence is examplehood. Only the Forgiver would dare do that with the Russians. Half of Leningrad was built over the bones of unwanted thralls. But that’s not my problem now. 8742, return to Fifth Circle rounds,” the man said.

8742 departed. Barbara looked around wildly, confused and scared. “W-here? I... what, I don’t?” Her words were thick and slow, and anyone who never knew her would have thought she had been born developmentally disabled.

“You’re no longer a threat,” the man spat. “I don’t care if you sound like Forrest Gump, controllers should never be returned to society, but the Fifth Circle doesn’t need another prom queen and the Forgiver ordered that you not be made into a guard. So congratulations, Barbara Greer. You’re free.”

All Barbara could do was beam back at him with wide, empty eyes.

On a side street in Seattle, a door opened. “Franklin Greer? Alex Thomas. I believe we spoke about your daughter,” Thomas said to the man at the door.

“We did,” Franklin confirmed. “Why are you here? Why are you doing this? I had no idea that computer camp was run by the Russian mob, no idea what she was doing for them. Go after them. I already left my wife and my life behind. Better that Carla thinks we failed as parents instead of raising a mass murderer.”

“I passed a high school on my way here. Somewhere in those halls right now, another girl is going through the same kind of misery that sent your daughter to that bridge. Somewhere in those halls, and in high schools across the country, teenage boys and girls are ready to go to whatever extreme it takes to make the torture stop. We’re here to make sure that they don’t turn to the same drastic means as your daughter. Someone has to be the cautionary example. You’re lucky to have her back at all, Mr. Greer. Normally the sentence is for life. The lucky ones left in the Labyrinth are the mindless guards. The rest of them are victims at the beck and call of the other inmates, witnessing an endless cycle of humiliation and helping humiliate others in turn. And I won’t discuss with a civilian what we do to mass controllers, incest controllers, pedophiles... the ones who pervert the fabric of our social order. You don’t want to know. As it is, we’ve left her in the state she was in at the exact moment she broke. You can choose your own cover story.”

“You take pride in breaking the victims of bullying?” Franklin shot back.

“I take pride in breaking controllers who bury their victims in plain sight and don’t allow them the dignity of resting in peace. I take pride in protecting my country and my society from those who would abuse and destroy it. ‘Daddy says it’s never my fault.’ You’re an enabler, Mr. Greer, and you may not have turned her into a monster, but you set her on the primrose path. I wish the Castle would allow for this more often, so people would think twice before they equipped children with lethal weapons. As broken as your daughter is, don’t make me show you what she did to those three cheerleaders and the girls in Portland. No high school bully deserves that. Just pretend they jumped off a bridge. I’ve taken up too much of your time, and I’m sure you want to see your daughter.”

Thomas went back to the car and brought Barbara out. “Dad-dy?” she asked, barely recognizing him.

“Yes, princess. You’re home now. No one will ever torture you again. Not the cheerleaders, not the Russians, not these people—” Franklin glared through the tears in his eyes at Thomas as he put his arm around Barbara and led her into the house.

“And most importantly of all, not Barbara Greer,” Thomas said softly, getting back into the car and returning to base, radio crackling with news of another case.