The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

Mistakes

Dae carefully palmed her tour-group ID badge, hiding it inside her purse, and pulling out what looked to be a regulation employee badge.

Only looked to be, unfortunately. Security was tight here, and employees were fined heavily for the loss of a badge, meaning that they looked after them very carefully. Likely it was revoked immediately as well, upon report. The best she’d been able to do was get a picture of a legitimate badge, and copy it, inserting her picture instead.

It would probably fool any human security, not that she planned on seeing any. The cameras she wasn’t as sure about: they could read the bar-codes on the badge, and compare it to her face and see she wasn’t the person she was supposed to be.

Likely though, that level of comparison was only run at entry and exit points. And, since she had come in with an approved tour, she was already past those. Her badge also wasn’t likely to open any further doors, but that shouldn’t be necessary at this point. She was inside the plant now.

If she had needed to Dae had brought resources to deal with problem doors.

But this had gone perfectly so far, and she wasn’t planning on using them: In fact, her plan was to loose them, just as soon as she was absolutely sure they weren’t needed. Then her story, when she was found, of being a tour-member who’d stepped away and gotten separated from the group on the factory floor would hold up better. The doors out all required exit codes, and Dae didn’t feel like trying to crack them. Better to get what she came for, dispose of her gear, and then wait like a lost idiot to be found.

Which meant she had to work fast: The security system should be able to pick up that someone had left the group by the time the tour finished. If she were found much after that, questions would be raised. The ID badge was just a precaution, and could backfire just as easily as save her: The factory was automated, and no one should be on the floor right now.

Such was the life of a corporate spy. Too bad she couldn’t just sleep her way to the info this time, though that always left the possibility that someone would figure out what had happened.

But it wasn’t likely the executives of the biggest programable-sex-doll company felt the need to sleep around on their wives, and the only two bachelors who might have known were living with each other.

Well, if everything went well, they would never even know their number-two rival had copied their programming. With Dae doing the copying.

There was only one sure place where the programming was located: in the machine in front of her, the last on the assembly line. The machine which wrote the programming into the android sex-dolls just before they were packed up and shipped out.

Dae could hear the voice of the tour guide now: “Running at full capacity, our secret process can program two Life-Dolls every three minutes. Right now we are running at half that, so you can see inside this half of the chamber. The programming is uploaded using the standard LifeSkills interface...” She’d mostly tuned it out, besides making sure she knew which machine it was.

A quick check showed there were no exterior access panels, besides the emergency power switch. No problem; she’d try inside.

There was a guide-wall between the two doors. Dolls ready for programing were on the other side, behind the wall from the walkway the tour used. Dae just hoped that this side wasn’t a complete Potemkin job, only set up for show to the tourists.

Waiting in the shadows for the cameras to pan away, she entered the programmer.

Inside she ignored the arms and manipulators that would make sure a doll was oriented correctly and focused on the access panels. Yes, over here there was one, she set down her purse and started to try to open it...

The touch was gentle enough that she didn’t notice it for a moment, in her concentration. The manipulators closed around her ankles and waist quickly and easily.

Her wrists were another matter. By then, she had realized what was going on: the programmer thought she was one of the dolls, and had activated. She fought to get free, but the machine was quick and efficient, catching her within a few moments. It stood her up, and pushed her hair away from her neck.

The LifeSkills interface was not a product of this company, but it was one of the reasons it was so successful: It had been introduced at least a decade ago as the standard interface for neural-integration computers. Life-Dolls were programed to be able to accept basic training chips for humans. In that way they could be made to cook, clean, or do basic handiwork tasks. Anything that required intelligence was beyond them, but the overlap was large enough for a substantial market.

Dae had a LifeSkills interface. Being able to upload skill-sets into her brain was a great help in her line of work.

The machine plugged in, and Dae could ‘feel’ the upload start. If she’d thought about it, this would have been a great way to get the programming: just prepare a memory space to save the program into and let it give it too her. As it was, she was annoyed. When the machine failed, it would probably report an error and someone would come and free her. This would blow her cover, and prevent her from getting the programming she was being well-paid for. She might even go to jail, for a while. She didn’t relish being caught.

She held the mental ‘door’ shut, and waited for it to finish. It took a long few seconds, with Dae held motionless above the floor, but she eventually felt it lighten up, then felt a light set of impulses across the neural interface. Probably the testing procedures. Once they failed it would only be a couple more minutes before she was ‘rescued’ from her predicament. Dae cursed her stupidity.

Then the interface came back on with a higher charge strength than Dae had ever felt. If anyone had been in the factory, they would have heard her scream over the background din from the other side of the floor...

Opportunity

Kevin got out of his truck and sighed. Why did the auto-factories always have to go loony on a weekend night? He spent weeks in his office, just waiting for a call, but then, Friday night, his beeper would ring and off he’d have to go. Never failed. And of course he had to go out, never mind the error. ‘Unit count error: Extra unit detected.’ indeed: Just ship the unit as far as he was concerned.

Of course, the fact that the count was messed up probably meant something else was messed up... Heh, if he was lucky he’d have to inspect every unit in the batch. There were perks to working with the Life-Doll corporation.

Not that he would be allowed to touch the product. Health concerns would get him fired if that got out.

One of these days he was going to save up enough to use his employee discount...

First stop was central control, so he could look over the logs. Let’s see, batch 356620-C, started at 4:00pm and running until 8:00pm. Great, right during closing. And, if he was reading the schedule correctly, there had been a tour group just as the building closed up.

Probably some tourist had leaned on a button they shouldn’t have. Kevin started a search to flag any unusual occurrences in the logs, and headed to the factory floor.

Time to check to make sure that the ‘product’ was still coming off the assembly line to specification.

Start at the tail end. Kevin walked over to the loading dock, where the batch should be boxed and ready for shipment. Waiting, in fact, for his verification. What he expected where the pallets of human-sized white boxes, the ‘Life-Doll’ logo discretely printed on them with a code that indicated height, coloration, and other options. Many Life-Dolls were made-to-order, but this batch only had a couple ‘specified’ models. The rest were semi-random from the stock options, and would be sold through the normal outlets. Kevin looked for the last box. If any were going to be bad, it would be that one.

There, next to the crating machine. He walked over and... Hmm. That was odd. Well, at least the count wasn’t off: there actually was an extra Doll, the crate just standing there waiting to be loaded onto the next pallet.

He opened it up. Standard issue ‘blonde bimbo’. (The marketing name was ‘Brenda’, if he recalled correctly.) He turned her on, stepped her out of the box, and connected his PDA, running the standard diagnostic. Everything came back green. He hit the button on the PDA that would cross-check her specs with the production record.

Unit 04-356620-C3AEG2, the last in the batch, was a standard ‘Brenda’ model. Just to double check, he flipped back one: The previous unit would have been a ‘Diane’, and the factory had auto-aborted at the error.

So, so far, all he could tell was that an extra Doll had gotten made somehow. Everything else appeared fine.

Kevin checked the serial number on the box, and inscribed on the Doll’s left foot. They all matched. They should: The serial number imprinted into a ROM chip early in production, and inscribed on the box (and on the doll, by a similar machine earlier in the chain) by a reader in the boxing machine. That way the box always matched the contents.

He unplugged the PDA, and put the Doll back into the boxing machine. Boxes were cheap, and the head office preferred throwing them away to resealing them (which might leave a damaged box).

He could open the previous box to check that it contained the right model, but Kevin decided to leave off. While they might not care too much about using extra boxes, they did require him to account for them, and he didn’t think he needed to open it yet. He told his PDA to ask for the results of his search from the main computer.

Well, the errors were right when he expected: Just as the tour group had left. Time to see what the idiots had done. Let’s see... Hmm. Programming Module 2 had activated from standby (where it was always placed during a tour, to prevent people from having to see the ‘naked’ Dolls), and processed one Doll, taking... 25 minutes!?

After that the boxing module reported boxing one Doll with no serial number, placing her on pallet 7. No other anomalies were reported.

Ok, choice time: he could go pull the extra box off, and check to see if there was anything inside, or he could go back and investigate what was wrong with Programming Module 2.

An empty box didn’t sound interesting, and having to rearrange the boxes to fit on the pallets was going to be work. Kevin thought he’d leave it for later. The interesting thing was in Programming Module 2. It would have full logs itself: It only reported the bare essentials to the central computer.

The Programming Modules were right next to the tour-path, since everyone wanted to see them. As if they could get anything interesting from looking at them: The important part of what they did was all software. But they looked suitably high-tech, with vaguely-defined arms reaching into them on the inside and smooth surfaces outside.

People did ask what the arms were for. The truth was quite simple: Unprogrammed Life-Dolls, once activated, often exhibited random movement. The arms were to hold them in place until the programing was complete, at which point they were no longer necessary. And no, Life-Dolls could not be deprogrammed in the field. Not completely.

Kevin had been required to give the tour a couple of times himself.

First stop was the wall-panel on the far side of Programming Module 1. That contained the main controls for both units, mostly to keep them away from the tour route. He put Module 2 in ‘maintenance’ mode, and walked over to enter.

This was always the tricky part: These modules did occasionally get damaged, and they couldn’t tell a human from a Doll. There were safeties to keep them from damaging anyone, and Kevin knew how to shut them down from the inside, but occasionally maintenance workers had to be ‘rescued’ from their clutches, much to the amusement of their co-workers. Switching to maintenance mode should have disabled any chance of that, but...

Kevin had never been trapped as such, and didn’t intend to. So he carefully looked over the interior as he entered. Two things stuck out at him: An access panel covering some of the safety circuits had been removed.

And there was a purse on the floor.

Carefully watching to make sure the system didn’t activate, Kevin dealt with the bigger problem first: the open access panel. He bent down to take a look, noticed a connector pulled loose, and reconnected it.

Now that he was sure the safeties were all working, he picked up the purse. It was open, with everything still inside, which surprised him: He wasn’t sure how it could have fallen inside without spilling like that. It contained a tour pass for ‘Dae Jetter’, and a wallet for the same, and...

Lock-picks and electronic gear, miniaturized. Spy gear. Under a loosened false bottom.

Kevin turned to the logs. Someone had specifically broken in here, and he needed to figure out if they had done any damage, or gotten away with anything.

But why leave their purse?

It didn’t make a whole lot of sense. And the logs, apart from the extra-long programming session, didn’t show anything out of the ordinary.

Sure that any effect was confined to that session, Kevin turned to reading through that log.

The most interesting thing in that was the sheer amount of time it took. The system reported finding a Doll in the chamber (position noted), bringing it to standard programming position, then attempting an upload of basic programming. The first upload failed, so a reformat was initiated, first a level one (which failed, no big surprise), then a level two, all the way up to level five. Then the upload was reattempted. Failure this time was not total, so the process was repeated. And again. And again. And again. For a full twenty-five minutes until the program tests reported an acceptable 95% success rate.

Kevin had seen the pattern before: The computing centers for the Dolls were complex, near AI-level, so as long as the system could find improvement in successive programming passes, it would continue trying. But usually it either succeeded or failed in five/ten passes, taking a few minutes at most. This Doll had gone through hundreds of passes.

He looked down at the purse in his hand. Could it?

Kevin went back to the start of the programming session, looking for the notation of the position where the Doll had been initially. He’d just skimmed past it before, but...

He read over the numbers, tried to visualize where that would be. Yes, that would be bent down, almost kneeling by the access panel that had been open. Not a position a Life-Doll, inactivated or unprogrammed, was likely to fall into.

And the safeties had been tampered with...

Suddenly Kevin decided he needed to see that Doll without a serial number.

Back in the loading dock, he blessed robots for their penchant for logging everything. He could just query the loaders for where the ‘blank’ box had been placed. It was on the corner of the pallet: If what he thought had happened had, that might be very lucky for a certain Dae Jetter.

Well, depending on how you looked at it.

He pulled the box off the pallet, and opened it.

Inside, she looked just like a ‘deactivated’ Life-Doll: Vacant, stare-ahead gaze, arms at the sides, perfectly still.

Well, not perfectly. Just as Kevin opened the box, he saw her blink. And, if you looked carefully, you could watch her breathe.

Other than that the only real indication she wasn’t a Doll was the fact that she was fully dressed. Life-Dolls were shipped nude.

Nervous and uncertain, Kevin reached to where the ‘switch’ would have been, inside her upper left arm.

She came active just any ‘real’ Life-Doll.

Kevin almost pulled out his PDA, to input commands through the touch-interface like he normally did, but this one wouldn’t be able to respond to that.

“Step forward, three paces.” She obeyed perfectly, moving smoothly and simply, with the Life-Doll gate. Out of the box, Kevin got a good look at her.

She couldn’t match the perfected figures of the Dolls, but she held her own. High cheekbones, a delicate chin, big eyes, brown hair with just a hint of red, and a dusky ‘Mediterranean’ skin tone...

“Undress.” It was a logical command to give. He needed to be absolutely sure she was human, after all, and that couldn’t be accomplished dressed as she was now, but...

Kevin knew that wasn’t the entire reason he gave it.

Regardless of his reasons, Dae obeyed. The command had been ‘undress’, not ‘strip’, so she simply removed her clothes in the most efficient manner possible. Long before she was done Kevin was sure this was Dae, the corporate spy, and that she hadn’t intended to be in this position.

Life-Dolls don’t bruise.

Hers were spectacular: Ankles, wrists, waist, even the sides of her head. Every place the restraints had held her in the programming chamber.

It must have taken some work to generate those. The restraints were padded to not damage the Dolls.

He circled around. She was... Well, not out of place, aside from the bruises. Dae obviously kept herself in shape. And those bruises had to hide pain: it was a testimony to the programming process that she held her position.

Kevin plugged in his diagnostic computer, ran the standard tests. 95%, just like the Programming Module’s logs. He scanned through what the remaining errors were.

Failure to report serial number, unit health status data incomplete, IR sensor failed to respond.

Well, considering she didn’t actually have those modules...

Extended diagnostics showed no unusual activity, though they reported greater-then-expected processing speed, capability, and storage space. The human brain was still better than any computer.

Hers, however, wasn’t doing anything that wasn’t in the programming.

Kevin thought over what he knew of the programming, and the LifeSkills interface as he knew it. He wasn’t really an expert in either, but he knew a bit.

The LifeSkills interface allowed full access to the mind, as long as the mind in question permitted it. If they held the ‘door’ shut, nothing would get through. Nothing could get through, supposedly.

For programming the Dolls, Life-Dolls Inc. had created a few of their own additions to the command spec. The most important, in this case, was the ‘reformat’ command: It basically was a direct overload of current, designed to overload the Doll’s current patterns with random data.

It had been tested on humans. Volunteers. It caused excruciating pain, but the no damage in and of itself. To prevent that pain was the primary reason of the safety circuits in the Programming Modules: They detected the slight signs of the ‘door’ being shut, which could only be done by an active brain. Any human could activate them, but no Life-Doll would ever be able to.

Putting that together, Kevin could see what must have happened: Dae had inadvertently disabled the safeties, and gotten mistaken for a Doll. A real maintenance worker, like Kevin, would have known the command to give at that point to disable the module, but Dae didn’t. So she closed her mental ‘door’. Programming failed, and the reformat cycle had begun.

Bombarded with pain, Dae had not been able to hold the door shut in the few seconds it took for the programming to upload again. Of course, as a human, the programming hadn’t taken complete control, so she failed the testing cycle, and the reformat began again. Every time she didn’t manage to hold the door entirely shut a little bit of programming would have gotten through, bringing a part of her mental reaction into line with those of a Life-Doll.

He had no idea what that would have felt like, to feel your mind being slowly rewritten in miniscule instants, lost in the haze of pure pain...

He wondered how long she had continued to hold out, resisting the overwrite of her mind.

He realized he could probably find out, by looking at the log.

There was nothing left of her human mind now. Kevin was sure of that.

The question was what to do with her. Shipping her out wasn’t an option, and turning her over to the police would be a PR disaster, even if it wasn’t the company’s fault.

Well, first things first. He checked what she’d been programmed with, and saw just the basics. Which were fine for a doll, but weren’t enough for to keep a human alive. She’d need the ‘mealtimes’ and ‘water sports’ packages at the very least. Neither were designed for exactly this, but... Well, they’d do.

And while he was doing that he could get the machines working again. There hadn’t been any actual errors, after all.

First though: He needed to re-fill the pallet with the loose Doll. He moved 04-356620-C3AEG2 into the position Dae had vacated, and had her follow him into the factory. She went back into Programming Module 2, set to do a full upload of all programming packages. Call it a system test.

He watched as it activated. She just stood there as the machine grabbed her, plugged in, and started uploading into her brain. Not a hint of resistance, or independent will.

He tore himself away, and went to re-activate the rest of the factory.

By the time he got back, the programmer was nearly finished with her. She wasn’t resisting anymore, so it had only taken a couple dozen rounds for the programming to take.

He’d set the machine to hold her when it was done. No reason to waste another box, after all.

Which still left what to do with her.

He ran through options in his head. It was night. It was the weekend. The bosses really didn’t like to be disturbed. The factory was working as expected.

There was no reason he couldn’t just take her home, was there?

At least for the night. It’d take at least that long to get the info to whoever needed it. And she had to go somewhere.

He looked at that fit and toned body. Ready and waiting for any command he could give it.

He couldn’t just leave her here, after all...

Evaluation

The executive looked over the several pages of reports in front of him. “So, what’s he done so far?”

The assistant stood and reported: “Kept her inside. Waited for orders. ‘Amused’ himself, testing out her features.”

“Any signs that he’s likely to leak?”

“None.”

“And what of her?”

“It’s all in the report, sir: Standard corporate spy. No one knew where she was, or when she was expected back.”

The executive leaned back. “I think he deserves a raise, don’t you? And as for miss spy... No need to move her, at the moment. As long as she’s being taken care of, that’s the important thing.”

“As you say, sir.”

“Keep an eye on him, for the time being. We may want to move him to the ‘special products’ division, eventually.”

“Of course.”

“Good. You’re dismissed.” The assistant bowed and left.

The executive pressed a button, allowing a wall panel to slide away. His personal Life-Doll waited behind, breathing slowly.